The first tangible progress in Belt and Road infrastructure can be seen in Pakistan. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor has been valued at $62 billion of projects, from the seaport in Gwadar to the reconstruction of the Karakoram Highway across the Himalayas to the Chinese border.

To John Woods, chief investment officer for Credit Suisse Private Bank in Asia, Belt and Road is a megatrend: one of those overarching themes that play out over many decades. His job is to translate that into an investable form for high net-worth clients.

Euromoney is in the Socar Tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, about a mile from the Caspian Sea. Here, two members of the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) holding company’s executive team are describing a complex gas pipeline project reaching from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz gas field in the Caspian, through Azerbaijan and Georgia, the length of Turkey and ultimately across Greece, Albania, the Adriatic Sea and into Italy.

It falls to analysts like Alexious Lee, head of China industrial research at CLSA, to make sense of the vast scope and long-term themes of Belt and Road. Lee heads CLSA’s research coverage of Belt and Road and public-private partnerships, assisting clients seeking access to China for projects related to the new Silk Road.

BRI may be hard to define, but it is already working wonders in parts of a region crying out for good infrastructure. Global and regional lenders are happy to go along for the ride.

When infrastructure is developed on a scale like this, the ripples flow in every direction, including health. What does Belt and Road mean from that perspective?

To Gordon French, head of global banking and markets for Asia Pacific at HSBC, Belt and Road is “a supercharger.”

For UOB, the announcement of One Belt, One Road in 2013 was welcome vindication. Two years earlier, the Singapore bank had set up a foreign direct advisory unit based principally on Chinese overseas direct investment into southeast Asia. “The great beneficiary of our service over the last five years has been Chinese corporates,” says Sam Cheong, head of the unit. “This trend is just beginning.”

The former Soviet states of central Asia and the Caucasus are ideally placed to benefit from the Belt and Road Initiative, but realizing their full potential will require reform as well as infrastructure development.

A close neighbour with a large infrastructure deficit, southeast Asia is a natural target for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, but when do mutual benefits for China and the region become regional dominance for the Asian giant?

What does Belt and Road mean for a multilateral like the Asian Development Bank? Friend or foe? The ADB’s stated mandate is, among other things, to improve infrastructure across the Asia-Pacific region, so any assistance in that task is surely good. But does it move the goalposts of due diligence and so undermine the standards ADB seeks to set around environmental and social impact? Does the good outweigh the bad?

Chinese policymakers and firms are showing an increasing interest in central and eastern Europe – but will Beijing’s ambitious plans for infrastructure development put China on a collision course with the EU?

At the vanguard of the funding effort for the Belt and Road Initiative will be China’s state-owned commercial banks. All eyes are upon them and their lending practices. Will they be expected to pour funds into projects with a tenuous economic rationale in the interests of state policy? Or will they instead be able to assess BRI projects as they would any other enterprise, with a weighing up of risk and return and a commercial decision at the end of it?

China has plenty of engines to get Belt and Road underway: Export–Import Bank of China, the China Development Bank, the enormous state-owned lenders. But it needs a dedicated, wealthy, powerful and politically enabled body to be the driver of the whole enterprise, and that is the Silk Road Fund.

ICBC Standard Bank is an interesting institution. It is a legacy of ICBC’s landmark acquisition of a 20% stake in South Africa’s Standard Bank 10 years ago. In 2015, ICBC acquired a controlling stake in Standard Bank’s London-based global markets business. Today it stands as a financial markets and commodities bank serving ICBC clients’ global markets needs, with a separate business in the distribution of African risk. Still London-based, it focuses on global commodities, fixed income, currencies and equities.

If there is one message Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) chairman Jin Liqun wants you to take away about Belt and Road, it is that AIIB is not the same thing. It is not the Silk Road Fund either. Despite what is widely said in international discussions, these things are not synonymous.

The Belt and Road Initiative offers much to the disparate markets of the Middle East and Africa, but not all those countries seem so enthusiastic in return.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is so vast and ambitious it can be difficult to understand how it will all work in practice – what makes a BRI undertaking, how will they be funded, will they be trophy projects or on commercial terms, how are they originated? – so Euromoney spoke to 16 institutions all looking at BRI from their own different perspectives.

China Development Bank (CDB) is, along with China Eximbank, a policy bank under the jurisdiction of the government and the State Council. It dates from March 1994 and has a history of infrastructure funding that long pre-dates Belt and Road. Signature developments include the Three Gorges Dam and Shanghai Pudong International Airport. It will be absolutely vital to Belt and Road.

With infrastructure ambitions on this scale, it is inevitable that some of the capital will be misspent. As McKinsey Asia-Pacific chairman Kevin Sneader observed in a recent podcast: “There is a real risk that this becomes a source of funding that gets mis-deployed and doesn’t end up contributing to greater trade or greater economic collaboration, but just gets wasted on projects that really should never have been funded in the first place.”

Chinese fintechs have been redrawing the map of financial services for a while now, and Tencent has just added the latest amendment.

As Singapore reinforces its position as the leading FX trading centre in the Asia Pacific region, Euromoney looks at the prospects for other regional hubs.

View results of the China Retail Gold Survey here.

Its appetite for gold remains insatiable, making local market participants increasingly frustrated with their limited influence on global gold price-setting. That is set to change.

The differences between two landmark access programmes for China’s capital markets need to be understood.

Everyone has a complaint about how Hong Kong’s markets are run, whether it is cornerstones, regulation, secret orders, or simply poor performance. How does HKEx get the environment right when everyone has a different idea of what is wrong?

A-shares included at low weight; handful of large-caps with tiny weighting.

Why did CIMB sell half its international brokerage business to China Galaxy? It is a coincidence of interests: survival on one side, expansion on the other

HSBC’s Sino-foreign joint venture has been approved at last, almost two years after the project was announced. It is the first such venture to have foreign control but what exactly has HSBC won?

There will be a time when Chinese A-shares play a huge role in global emerging market (EM) portfolios, but Wednesday’s news does not mark that moment.