Western Europe

A no-growth decade won’t stop bankers from chasing fees and trading profits. Mystic Maca looks even further ahead.

Swift hopes its know your customer (KYC) registry, now open to corporate partners, will succeed in ways in which others have failed, given the institution's not-for profit and cooperative position.

Leading exchanges have seen little return from their investment in electronic trading venues and face some tough decisions over how to increase revenues.

The year 2020 is going to be a big one in the world of failed trades.

The needle may slowly be moving, but if we continue at this pace sustainable finance will still be a niche rather than integrated into all finance by the end of the century.

It is an almost unchallenged truth that the next crisis will be triggered by over-leveraged corporate borrowers crumbling under the weight of cheap debt that they have taken on over the last decade. Right in the middle of this are the CLO buyers that have made much of that lending possible. But rather than taking fright at the prospect of a slew of triple-C credits in their pools, CLO managers are running straight towards it.

Small companies with short trading histories and thin credit files make up a growing part of the economy that established banks are not set up to serve.

Leonardo Del Vecchio’s arrival as the biggest shareholder in Mediobanca caught CEO Alberto Nagel off guard, stirring debate about Nagel’s handling of the bank’s stake in Generali. Nagel insists he can find an acquisition in wealth management that is good enough to justify selling. But is his and Mediobanca’s influence in the country on the wane?

Intesa Sanpaolo chief executive Carlo Messina bristles at the idea that Italian finance should be an underdog in Europe. His bank can prove otherwise and, he says, lower interest rates will only make its fee businesses shine more brightly. But in a stagnating economy with tech-savvy challengers gaining share and other Italian banks recovering, are acquisitions the only way for Intesa to grow and retain the favour of investors and clients?

When RBS floated Citizens Financial in 2014, it was the biggest bank IPO since the financial crisis and investors were sceptical of its prospects ‒ five years on and RoE and EPS have doubled, the stock trades at a premium, and the bank has shown it can compete with bigger US banks and non-banks alike. Chief executive Bruce Van Saun discusses what comes next.

As Italy’s biggest bank unveils a new plan and new targets, CEO Jean Pierre Mustier says negative rates and Basel III reforms mean “8% is the new 10%” for European banks’ returns on equity

The international exchange’s clearing offering for EUR/USD and GBP/USD cross-currency swap transactions marks another modest step towards wider use of central clearing in FX.

Year after year, research highlights the gap between what impact investment consumers want and what they are being offered by advisers, banks and pension funds. The UK’s new Impact Investing Institute hopes to bring everyone to the table to change this.

It appears that basic errors rather than deliberate attempts to game the system lay behind Citi’s large miscalculations of UK RWAs and CET1.

The Italian fashion house’s sustainability linked loan, arranged by Crédit Agricole, builds the catwalk for other retailers to follow suit.

The German bank’s transaction banking franchise will be central to the success of its new corporate banking division.

The senior management team at HSBC looks increasingly chaotic. It needs to fix that, before they can fix the bank.

Spanish bank profitability will sink even further as left-wing populists Podemos enter a coalition with the socialist party, making a private-sector future for Bankia ever more remote.

Origin’s simple, scalable technology solution to the inefficiencies of generating final legal documents for MTNs shows the path to success for fintechs in capital markets.

UBS’s country head refuses to comment on whether Banco do Brasil has been given a ‘call option on the bank’s Brazilian IB business’.

Finance minister Olaf Scholz has laid out Germany’s negotiating position for the completion of banking union, a pre-requisite for much-needed consolidation.

Implementation of FX transaction cost analysis (TCA) appears to have stalled, with the impracticality of conducting analysis across every available venue encouraging many parties to rely on venues or dealers to measure execution, despite concerns over transparency and impartiality.

A merger is still CEO Martin Zielke’s only real hope.

European bank shares have sunk to levels not seen since 2008, and even some of the region’s bank CEOs admit it is hard to make a compelling investment case for them. Euromoney speaks to the people at the top about their potential to re-emerge as global leaders.

European banks don’t have a continental market, right? Wrong. Even if they cannot do full-blown mergers, the cross-border consolidation of specific business lines offers a way of gaining some of the economies of scale that US and Chinese banks enjoy.

Third-quarter earnings show it is time for decisive action.

Corporates often perceive options as an expensive means of hedging FX risk compared with forwards, but a number of market developments have increased their attractiveness as a tool for reducing currency exposure.

Esma no longer feels it needs to impose EU-wide leverage limits on the FX contracts for difference (CFDs) market, but there is little evidence to suggest its efforts to protect retail traders have done anything other than push business offshore.

While the IMF highlights mispriced corporate debt as a systemic danger, so too is misvalued unlisted equity.

Frank Vang-Jensen, Nordea’s new CEO, is living up to his reputation as a cost axeman, but claims he can reverse the bank’s recent market-share losses at the same time.