Western Europe

The political response to rising bank profits should focus more on debt distress than on deposit rates and taxation.

The domestic economy is flatlining while interest rates continue to rise, but the booming banking sector has helped overall UK corporate payouts keep pace with those elsewhere.

The investment firm founded by securitization experts in 2015 has grown to an $8 billion portfolio of 60 companies without managing any third-party funds and still sees big potential returns, notably in football clubs, from applying the discipline of structured finance to operating businesses.

Thames Water has become the highest profile example of a UK corporation that finds itself hamstrung by inflation-linked bonds issued at a time when persistent high inflation and economic stagnation seemed unlikely bedfellows.

Accessing funds via debt capital or private placement may seem like an onerous task, but a growing number of corporates see it as an opportunity to mitigate the impact of changes to bank-capital deployment.

Banks including NatWest and JPMorgan are struggling to put out reputational risk-management fires.

The NatWest chief executive’s resignation ends a solid if unexciting three-and-a-half years at the helm.

The increased corporate focus on environmental, social and governance issues is impacting treasury teams that can struggle to justify their initiatives.

The German lender has named Claudio de Sanctis as its new head of private bank and created a single, unified division – part of longstanding plans to generate more income from the business by rooting out inefficiencies and tapping into new global income streams.

All private banks are different: in how they project their brand, build business, serve clients and generate fees. But they all seem to have two things in common. They love lending to rich people with big art collections and chatting about ocean preservation.

At €1.9 billion, international investors would happily have bought all of Europe’s biggest IPO since Porsche – even on the illiquid Bucharest stock exchange.

The activist shareholder highlights concerns about a former poster child for private equity ownership of banks.

Regulators forced banks to skip dividends during Covid, but let them make up payouts later on. They should now do the same for AT1s or risk that market failing.

The global disclosure recommendations don’t stand a chance against mandated regional regulation.

Societe Generale’s recent African exits, and BNP Paribas’s talks with Orange Bank, highlight how closely Europe’s banks tend to follow each other. Differences are often more a question of strength than strategy.

High interest rates and low bank appetite for risk have created the perfect conditions for a renaissance in invoice factoring.

Bankers are hopeful that they may soon be able to issue new AT1 deals again as the secondary market recovers from the Credit Suisse write-down.

Extreme FX volatility is proving a challenge for some finance directors who are struggling to minimize the impact on their bottom line.

The standardized approach for counterparty credit risk has not yet proved to be the catalyst for greater use of clearing in the FX market that some expected.

Inflation is not beaten and rates may rise further. But high-grade bonds can still provide steady income and low risk, playing a new old role in investor portfolios.

If the UK is to become an international crypto hub, it must focus on bringing regulatory certainty to the industry and the banks that back it.

As interest rate volatility persists, corporates are taking a hard look at their trade finance options.

Leading firms join a new network of networks, but crypto natives see just another walled garden.

The banking sector appears to be quietly confident that the European Commission will row back on new regulation that, if enacted, could notably increase the cost of some trade-finance instruments.

The big transaction banks are becoming increasingly active in the B2B marketplace as they seek to cash in on corporate digital transformation.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has fuelled an abrupt end to venture-capital exuberance. There are vital implications for fintech and for the banking industry.

Pouncing on a firm with lots of corporate broking relationships at the low point for IPOs is a smart trade.

The acquisitive fintech group reckons it can accelerate the transition from legacy FX technology by making it easier for tech firms to get their products to market.

UBS will face pressure to spin off Credit Suisse’s Swiss bank and may yet lose more private-banking assets. Coping with this will make managing down illiquid and hard-to-value markets positions look easy.

Proceeds raised in the first three months of this year were 99% lower than the amount raised at the start of 2021.