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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

Policy bank money is fine, to a point, but if China really wants an infrastructure plan to change the world, it is going to need private sector money to join the party. It is going to need names like Macquarie, historically thought of as an investment bank (which it still is), but today also one of the world’s largest infrastructure investors.

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’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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.”

There is some debate as to how many countries are part of the Belt and Road Initiative, which sprawls across the Middle East as far as eastern Europe and Egypt. ICBC Standard Bank’s Belt and Road indices track 65 countries (including China).

New banking law looks set to require BBVA to add capital; deal would transform Scotiabank in key Pacific Alliance market.

Deposit run sparks Russia’s largest-ever bank rescue; central bank criticized for allowing debt-fuelled expansion spree.

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

President Mauricio Macri’s success in Argentina’s primary elections suggests that his gradualist approach to reform might be the right strategy after all.

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.

A falling number of corporates are choosing to list on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Given the dire after-market performance of Aslan Pharmaceuticals, it is not hard to see why.

Pipeline of ECM deals grows as sentiment improves; government said to be planning ‘ambitious’ privatization programme.

Fintech and digital financial services are rushing in to help refugees and migrants access and transfer money, but their innovation isn’t just changing how humanitarian aid agencies operate – it’s also offering solutions for broader financial inclusion challenges.

Cutting-edge technologies are being harnessed to bring affordable financial services to hundreds of millions of people in emerging markets. They offer a glimpse into how financial services in the rest of the world may develop.

In the refugee camps of Jordan and Lebanon, life for the many of the 5 million Syrians displaced by civil war somehow goes on. A whole new financial ecosystem is needed to support the amazing resilience and initiative of many of these refugees, who have little prospect of going home. It presents a new challenge for NGOs and they need the help of investors, financial institutions and the private sector. Euromoney visited camps in Jordan and urban areas in Lebanon to talk to aid workers, government and non-government officials and the refugees themselves to find out what role the banking system can play in alleviating the greatest humanitarian challenge of this century.

Costa Rica’s ambitious commitment to reducing carbon emissions places it at the forefront of the fight against climate change. But its politicians worry that, with financial aid being focused elsewhere, it could effectively be punished for its early adopter status.

Pacific island states like Kiribati, the Cook Islands and Palau are among the most exposed in the world to climate change. It is not just rising sea levels that threaten to obliterate them, but also more extreme storms and tides, the acidification of the seas that provide their livelihood, and drought. Worse, their relative obscurity makes it hard for them to state their case, they lack the institutional capacity to approach multilateral funding sources and many of them are flat broke anyway. What can they do?

There is an abundance of funds seeking to channel money into climate finance projects in vulnerable countries, with the Green Climate Fund in the vanguard. But why is so little money reaching the countries that need it?

The future of climate change finance lies in its ability to attract private capital. It is a complex task, but the key to its success will be in keeping products offered to investors as simple as possible.