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LATEST ARTICLES
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While incumbent Italian banks have seen profits surge thanks to higher rates, the shrinking size and profitability of the non-performing loan market has hit illimity hard. Unperturbed, founder and chief executive Corrado Passera believes the original premise for an SME-focused neobank is more valid than ever.
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A small three-month issue from one of the bond market’s most frequent issuers shows the potential for on-chain delivery versus payment in central bank money. But the obstacles to widespread use of blockchains remain.
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Proponents of banking-as-a-service will be hoping that UniCredit’s decision to acquire Aion Bank and Vodeno marks a turning point in a sector that has experienced considerable volatility.
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New institutional investors are providing liquidity to longstanding Revolut employees and giving a valuation proof point to its stunning revenue and profit growth.
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National champion banks should worry that the latest surveys commissioned by the Competition and Markets Authority might prompt loss of more primary accounts.
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Bank of Cyprus’s decision to shift its listing back to Athens also shows how far Greece has recovered.
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Buying Axa IM would be BNP Paribas chief executive Jean-Laurent Bonnafé’s biggest acquisition. It has been a long time in the making.
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Alongside UniCredit’s recent acquisition of Polish financial technology company Vodeno, the US private equity takeover of VeloBank is another sign of renewed optimism in Poland.
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Revolut is strongly profitable while growing fast, diversifying revenues and finally being admitted to the banking club. Watch out.
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The role of Mediobanca adds to the similarities between BBVA’s hostile bid for Banco Sabadell and Intesa Sanpaolo’s takeover of UBI Banca in 2020. But there are stark differences of institutional character, politics and timing.
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Wholesale banking head Andrew Bester explains the renowned retail bank’s ambition to win new revenues building on its expertise in sustainable finance.
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Political instability in France, coupled with better EU-UK relations, could threaten Paris’ ability to rival London as a financial centre. But a focus on institutional clients among French and other EU banks is already helping London’s resilience – a trend that shows little sign of abating.
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UK pension schemes have made clear their opposition to reduced investors protections, while the FCA may come to regret pushing through its new listing regime.
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Banks are refining their single-dealer platforms to replicate the price comparison benefits of the multi-dealer model while accentuating the former’s unique features.
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After being knocked back by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kazakhstan’s economy rebounded last year, notching up over 5% growth on strong levels of consumer and public spending.
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It is hardly surprising that an Italian bank should excel at lending to small and medium-sized enterprises, which are the backbone of the industrial strategy of the country. SMEs are at the heart of UniCredit’s UniCredit per l’Italia strategy, which has seen a further €10 billion of support extended to individuals and corporates this year – including a special assistance package for Emilia Romagna in May in response to widespread flooding.
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Under the steady leadership of chief executive Kjerstin Braathen, Norway’s biggest bank continues to perform strongly and is far from relaxing its efforts just because of its size. DNB faces an surprising array of competition in such a small market, with more than 100 banks operating in the country, but its progress ensures it remains Norway’s best bank for another year.
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International banks inevitably capture a large share of international debt issuance from Poland, notably the sovereign and large commercial banks. But Trigon remains a national success story in investment banking as a purely Polish and private-sector player. It has a large local team that includes one of the country’s most extensive equity research capabilities.
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Most banks focus their corporate responsibility agendas on environmental, social and governance metrics and the drive to net zero, as well as on diversity and inclusion in terms of their customers and their own workforces. Banco Santander, western Europe’s best bank for corporate responsibility, has for many years looked beyond these core aspects of responsibility and found other ways to contribute to society.
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By far the biggest bank by assets in the country and boasting nine million account holders, ING is also the best bank in the Netherlands this year.
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Prime minister Donald Tusk’s defeat of the former ruling party PiS in elections last October brought hope for a less strained relationship between Poland and the EU. It also brought hope for more favourable policies towards banks, after the PiS government’s mortgage holidays and bank taxes.
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Barclays wins the award as the UK’s best investment bank. Even though some investors had to wait for the bank’s investor day in February 2024 to hear it once again reaffirm its commitment to the investment bank, staff in the UK had no doubt of this.
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For its mix of sustainable finance structuring expertise and innovation in retail banking, ING wins the award this year.
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Some analysts were quick to call it the deal of the century. The first takeover of a global systemically important bank that repeated management errors and regulatory failure had brought to the brink of collapse was a rescue by its domestic rival. It was a humiliation for Switzerland that, with customers pulling their money in vast quantities over several months, Credit Suisse was left to carry on to the very brink of insolvency.
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Presenting annual earnings in early February 2024, Frank Vang-Jensen had good reason to be delighted with the 2023 performance of the bank he leads as chief executive. After another year in which Nordea strengthened its profile in all four of its main markets, including performing strongly in its home country, the bank again wins the award for Finland’s best bank.
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Even its rivals in Spain admit to feeling the impact last year as CaixaBank moved on from integrating Bankia to concentrating more exclusively on developing its business organically. This is evident, for example, in the savings market, where its customer funds increased by 3.1% in 2023. In insurance, a vital part of the group’s activities, there was also healthy growth, with a 7% volume growth in general and life risk premiums.
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It is not normally thought of as one of the banks with a large stronghold on central and eastern Europe. Nevertheless, BNP Paribas still owns relatively large banks in what are, in effect after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the region’s two biggest markets in terms of banking: Poland and Turkey.
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Prospects for the Azerbaijani banking sector continue to improve as bank balance sheets strengthen and tighter regulatory oversight is established. Nowhere is this more evident than at Bank ABB – International Bank of Azerbaijan – which has made good progress since the decisive resolution of its legacy risks in 2022.
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The awards period marked a triumphant return to performance for Allied Irish Banks (AIB), Ireland’s best bank. Putting behind it its involvement in the years-long industry-wide tracker mortgage scandal in Ireland, for which it was fined €100 million in 2022, the bank posted a very strong recovery in 2023, with record profits that nearly tripled versus the previous year. Revenues rose 62%, driven by net interest income that was up more than 80%.
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As the equity capital markets remained sluggish across Europe last year, financing activity was all about debt. So, it is perhaps no surprise that western Europe’s best bank for financing this year is the one that dominated the debt capital markets league tables working on 509 deals worth $128 billion equivalent for a 7% market share: BNP Paribas. Even in ECM, the French firm ranked number five behind sector leaders BofA Securities and Goldman Sachs.
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The 100th anniversary of Isbank, Turkey’s biggest private-sector lender, has come after some challenging years for the country's economy and financial sector.
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In recognition of multiple market-leading developments in its banking business and an impressive financial performance last year, maib is Moldova’s best bank.
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Things could not have gone much worse in 2023 for Islandsbanki, the bank that won this award in the past two years. A long-awaited regulatory report into the sale of part of the government’s holding in 2022 found that Islandsbanki itself had committed various violations during the process. Islandsbanki was fined Isk1.2 billion ($8.6 million), a record for Iceland.
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Despite the Estonian economy experiencing a severe recession last year, the country’s banking sector remained robust and continued to generate stellar growth, supported by the resilience of companies and households facing higher interest rates.
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It was a mixed year in Austrian banking in 2023. Higher eurozone interest rates bolstered banks’ net interest margins, but at the end of the year the bankruptcy of Austrian real estate group Signa shone the spotlight on what Moody’s said was €2.2 billion of lending by Austrian banks to Signa.
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For the volume of sustainable finance being provided to the Turkish economy, as well as innovation in sustainability products, Akbank wins the award as best bank for environmental, social and governance this year.
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Slightly later than expected, early 2023 saw the legal completion of OTP’s takeover of Nova KBM, Slovenia’s second-biggest bank, first announced in mid 2021. OTP announced in mid April 2024 that it planned to merge Nova KBM with SKB banka – which it bought from Societe Generale in 2019 – in the second half of 2024, subject to regulatory approvals. OTP said the merged entity’s brand will be OTP banka and it will be the country’s biggest bank, overtaking national champion NLB.
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Commerzbank has seen a remarkable bounce back in its profitability and share price over the past four years, something that was particularly apparent in 2023. The year began with its re-inclusion in the DAX in February, five years after it was ejected from the index of German blue-chip stocks. This was thanks to a dramatic recovery in its share price from the depths it hit during the early Covid-19 period.
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Market doubts, three years ago, about whether Andrea Orcel’s management of UniCredit would be sufficiently orientated to shareholder value have proven to be far from the mark. Orcel might have shied away from a deal with the Italian government to buy Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in 2021, but this has not prevented UniCredit from remaining a large and growing part of the European banking story.
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Despite the Latvian economy dipping into recession last year, the banking sector delivered impressive bottom-line growth, with total profits almost doubling year on year to €622 million.
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Banca Intesa Beograd had standout year in 2023, launching a number of key initiatives and delivering another set of record results.
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Barclays has integrated sustainability across its operations and financing activities, significantly reducing emissions and enhancing its commitment to green investment.
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For HSBC, 2023 was an important year at its UK ring-fenced bank. This delivered its strongest set of results since it was created in 2018, with revenue coming in 36% higher than in 2022. That was in part thanks to higher rates and fat net interest margins, but also to key strategic decisions, such as to make growing market share in mortgages a priority.
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Despite the overbearing presence in Hungary of national champion OTP – and the emergence in 2023 of a much larger government-owned lender in the form of MBH Bank – international firms continue to compete in the domestic market. The biggest of these international players is K&H Bank, owned by Brussels-based group KBC.
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It has been a great time to be a Greek banker. Rating agencies returned the sovereign to investment grade in 2023 and the country’s lenders, having reduced non-performing loans and cost of risk while rebuilding capital ratios, also delivered improved profits.
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NLB Banka is Montenegro’s best bank, having demonstrated strong growth and development last year, which in turn contributed to its record bottom line.
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BNP Paribas Wealth Management operates across 17 countries, serving a client base of entrepreneurs, family offices and high net-worth individuals.
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Belgium-based KBC’s Bulgarian unit formally merged with former Raiffeisen International Bank subsidiary United Bulgarian Bank (UBB) in 2023, creating the country’s biggest bank. KBC had completed the legal acquisition of RBI’s operations in Bulgaria in 2022. Most of the synergies of the merger were, therefore, far from being realised in 2023 as the operational integration was only just beginning.
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DemirBank is Kyrgyzstan’s best bank in recognition of an impressive performance last year.
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Western Europe is the most competitive region in the world for investment banking. The big five US firms, with the ambition and capability to claim global leadership, all lead transactions for the continent’s biggest companies as well as for US and Asian multinationals acquiring and raising capital in Europe.
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HSBC wins the award for western Europe’s best bank for transaction services thanks to the delivery of an impressive range of services to corporate treasurers that the bank has developed over years of heavy investment.
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French banks have not had the net interest margin bonanza that higher interest rates have offered many southern European banks recently. In fact, some French banks saw profit decreases in their domestic retail divisions last year, while areas like markets and vehicle leasing have been less of a support to group profit compared to the immediate post-pandemic period.
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The Czech Republic has long been considered one of the most attractive banking markets in central and eastern Europe in terms of the risk-return dynamic. All the top five banks are foreign-owned, and the sector has been relatively consistent in terms of its earnings. The higher interest-rate environment, so far, has reinforced the sector’s good profitability, despite a new tax on bank profits, not least because asset quality has remained healthy.
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The M&A advisory rankings for 2023 tell a familiar story in western Europe. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs rank top both by revenue and by deal value. But Rothschild & Co advised on almost twice as many transactions as either of the bulge bracket pair and it maintained its third place in the revenue league table ahead even of Morgan Stanley.
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For Danske Bank, Denmark’s best bank, 2023 was a year of rehabilitation after a difficult period that culminated in the settlement in late 2022 of historic money laundering issues. With a strong financial performance that saw profits nearly double even after adjusting for the regulatory charges in 2022, the bank has come roaring back to life.
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Croatia’s entry into the euro in January 2023 was a landmark event for the country’s banking sector, which is dominated by banks from elsewhere in the European Union.
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The strategic case for banks to remain in central and eastern Europe remains intact: that is the official line from Scope Ratings at least. The agency found that faster growth and higher interest rates in CEE have, overall, boosted the profitability of western European banks present in the region.
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Despite a local economic slowdown, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s banking sector remained healthy in 2023 for growth, profits and asset quality. It is a market that UniCredit Bank Mostar and Raiffeisen Bank dominate in terms of market share, and this year UniCredit – led locally by chief executive Amina Mahmutović – retains the award for the country’s best bank.
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The Belgian government’s retail bond programme last year, which pressured lenders to raise deposits, was just one element of a relatively tough environment for banks in Belgium. The country also sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to southern Europe in terms of the proportion of loans on floating-rate deals, meaning local banks benefit less from higher eurozone interest rates.
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Banking small and medium-sized companies across central and eastern Europe has become intensely competitive for the regional banks. Even amid the anaemic economic growth of last year, competition to grow the SME client base remained high as banks sought to expand their market share and boost assets.
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In investment banking, the biggest event of the year was the €2 billion IPO of Hidroelectrica in Romania, Europe’s biggest IPO in 2023. This was Romania’s largest-ever IPO and played a role in reopening the market across the continent, thanks to a strong performance in the secondary market. It also helped reawaken the international capital market to the opportunities in central and eastern Europe.
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Like in the neighbouring Czech Republic, foreign groups own all five of Slovakia’s top five banks. And like in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, higher interest rates have brought higher profits – and new taxes on banks, in Slovakia’s case following the formation of a new government in October last year.
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Romania was the place of perhaps the most important bank M&A deal to be announced in 2023: the merger of the local units of Italian group UniCredit and Greece’s Alpha Bank. The deal promised to allow UniCredit, as the owner of 90% of the merged entity, to supplant Societe Generale-owned BRD as the country’s third-biggest bank.
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For many banks, sustainable finance is about more than just finance, it is about the quality of advice they provide and what they themselves are doing to be more sustainable.
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All banks invest heavily in their digital products and services, but the return on that investment can vary widely.
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Nerves were jangling hard in Europe last year, when the panic that had seen many tens of billions of dollars’ worth of deposits flee large US regional banks in a matter of hours suddenly began emerging in Europe.
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In 2023, central and eastern Europe’s M&A markets held up relatively well, with a total deal value of more than $30 billion according to Dealogic. Lazard, CEE’s best bank for advisory, was involved in many of the most important advisory situations in the region.
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For a small economy, Luxembourg boasts many banks: 120 were authorized in 2023. Many of these primarily serve international clients, in particular providing securities services to institutional investors from across Europe and beyond.
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While political protests in Tbilisi introduced some additional risk to the Georgian economy last year, economic growth remained robust thanks to strong domestic demand and capital inflows from tourism and exports.
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The recent move by Greek lender Eurobank to establish a majority stake in Hellenic Bank, Cyprus’ second largest bank, is a potentially transformational deal for the island’s banking sector. During the awards review period, however, it was still unclear when or if Eurobank would be able to merge its existing Cypriot business with Hellenic, but if it does, it could become the largest bank in the country.
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The fourth-biggest bank in Portugal, which has been fully owned by Spain’s CaixaBank since the end of 2018, saw an exceptional performance in 2023. After record results for the firm across the board, Banco BPI is clear winner of the award for Portugal’s best bank.
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Under group chief executive Andrea Orcel, UniCredit has reaffirmed its commitment to central and eastern Europe – highlighted by its announcement of the €300 million purchase of Alpha Bank Romania, part of a deal that also involved it taking a stake in the Athens-based group.
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Lithuanian banks successfully shrugged off a stagnating economy and the government’s windfall tax last year to double net profits.
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Often this award goes to the bank that has done a particularly good job of providing useful digital features through a smartphone app to retail customers. This year we recognize a wholesale bank, most renowned for the technology behind its CashPro offering for payments, receivables, liquidity and FX management. Bank of America is western Europe’s best digital bank.
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Transaction services are a vital part of UniCredit’s rationale as a pan-European bank, and its leadership in this area is particularly evident in central and eastern Europe, where the bank’s regional head of transactions and payments is Riccardo Madinelli.
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Benefiting from robust economic growth in the country, Uzbekistan’s banking sector continued its rapid expansion last year and one bank led the pack, SQB, the country’s second largest lender.
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The fourth-biggest bank in Portugal, which has been fully owned by Spain’s CaixaBank since the end of 2018, saw an exceptional performance in 2023. After record results for the firm across the board, Banco BPI is clear winner of the award for Portugal’s best bank.
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There are many ways in which banks can demonstrate their commitment to social responsibility and some come amid the most challenging times. The devastating earthquake in southern Turkey at the beginning of last year triggered an immediate response in support for the affected communities from the country’s corporate and banking sectors.
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Giving state-owned lenders awards for commercial banking is typically something Euromoney is reluctant to do, especially in former Communist countries. But anyone who knows Ukraine knows that PrivatBank is not your average former Soviet state-owned bank.
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A spike in Armenian bank M&A this year has underscored the growth opportunity for banks in the local market. The country’s best bank, Ameriabank, was bought by Bank of Georgia earlier this year, and Ardshinbank is in the process of acquiring HSBC Armenia.
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Even its rivals in Spain admit to feeling the impact last year as CaixaBank moved on from integrating Bankia to concentrating more exclusively on developing its business organically. This is evident, for example, in the savings market, where its customer funds increased by 3.1% in 2023. In insurance, a vital part of the group’s activities, there was also healthy growth, with a 7% volume growth in general and life risk premiums.
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SEB, a regular winner of this award, certainly did not rest on its laurels in 2023, posting strong financial results and was able to boast a host of developments across its franchises. For its consistently dominant performance, it is once again Sweden’s best bank.
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Raiffeisen Bank Kosovo is the country’s best bank after a year in which it introduced of a series of new and enhanced products across its banking businesses, materially grew its client base and generated a record net profit.
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Since its foundation in 1885 as a cooperative and mutual bank, social usefulness has been central to Crédit Agricole’s business model. It was an early pioneer of sustainable finance. It was one of the first banks to commit to exiting the thermal coal industry by 2030 in OECD countries and by 2040 for the rest of the world.
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Raiffeisen Bank is Albania’s best bank this year in recognition of its retail, corporate and treasury banking services, and its strong financial performance during the year. This was demonstrated across product and service enhancements in its main three banking businesses.
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HSBC’s choice of a new CEO to replace Noel Quinn was long flagged. Elhedery’s fortune is to be handed the reins of power in an extended period of calm for the UK lender, which benefited immensely from Quinn’s calm stoicism. But deteriorating Sino-US relations mean that turbulence for the London- and Hong Kong-listed lender is sure to return.
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The bank is targeting the often-overlooked service sector with structured solutions, along with identifying embedded finance as a fast-growing segment. With the launch of Global Trade Solutions, it goes beyond traditional product offerings and financing.
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France’s political and banking troubles obscure good momentum in Societe Generale’s corporate and investment bank. Yes, capital is constrained, but the bank says it is moving in the right direction.
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The bank’s decision to sell a large minority stake in Credit Suisse’s former China JV to BSAM, a Beijing-based fund it has known for decades, is a setback for Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities. The US firm is still committed to expanding in China’s troubled market.
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Diego De Giorgi’s arrival at Standard Chartered has coincided with important changes at the bank. He talks to Euromoney about the transition from investment banker to chief financial officer, and how the firm can further leverage its advantages amid growing profitability and geopolitical risk.
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The limitations of the Alternative Investment Market are forcing many companies to explore other sources of funding. Nevertheless, there is optimism that the market for small and medium-sized growth companies can be revived.
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Basel-endgame pushback has reduced the urgency for US banks to relieve capital, but investor appetite for significant risk transfer trades is spilling over to Europe.
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The region’s tough economic history, coupled with its strength in soft and hard commodities, makes it best positioned to tackle today’s challenges.
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The Siena-based bank has a better bill of health and is once again a target in Italy.
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Despite an overwhelmingly Italian business in retail, Intesa Sanpaolo has stepped up its share of corporate and investment banking revenue outside the country. In its global growth markets, divisional chief Mauro Micillo says the firm is here to stay.
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With corporates taking a more holistic view of sustainability, banks are under pressure to address concerns over reporting and verification requirements for sustainable working capital, trade finance and liquidity management products.
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Risk aversion has spread quickly since the call for a snap election in France, from French government bonds, through bank stocks and CDS spreads to now derail the IPO of an Italian maker of luxury trainers.
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It is getting tougher for investors to execute block trades of more than €2 million in Europe’s fragmented equity markets. Matching buyers and sellers needs a return to negotiation and away from pure electronic trading.
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After years of retrenchment, Commerzbank’s head of corporate clients Michael Kotzbauer tells Euromoney of a tentative return to growth. The bank has dodged Germany’s commercial real estate slump but is having to adapt to a worsening geopolitical backdrop. Capital and cost efficiency remain big priorities.
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Rising confidence in European banks has raised hopes of a surge in domestic M&A, perhaps laying the foundations for the long-sought ideal of genuinely pan-European firms.
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Does the high number of drawn-out insolvency cases in the UK suggest a failure of regulation?
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John Mathews, head of UHNW Americas for UBS in New York, tells Euromoney why the US’s private banking model is so successful, why the Swiss firm is really in the life counselling business, and explains why it has targeted US ultra-high net worth clients.
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Corporate treasurers are playing it safe when balancing the merits of exploiting improved access to capital against the risk of unexpected economic shocks and business interruption.
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Financial markets reacted calmly to news of an early UK election, expecting whoever wins to stick to the fiscal rules. But whoever wins must also cope with rising debts and onerous interest payments.
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President Macron’s newfound zeal for cross-border financial M&A is creating a headache for France’s big banks.
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Will increased transparency in the European corporate bond market lead to higher transaction costs for large trades?
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In an interview with Euromoney, European Banking Authority chair José Manuel Campa joins the European Central Bank and others in pressuring banks to do more to prepare for geopolitical risks spreading from Russia to China, the US and Middle East.
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Banks and regulators are keen to use instant payments to reduce the influence of Visa and Mastercard on the European payments industry – but replacing these two dominant players will be far from easy.
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Although the relative health of some nationalized banks may facilitate their privatization, major obstacles to any sales remain.
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UK banks, asset managers and individuals see better returns from dumping UK stocks and investing elsewhere, but the impact eventually becomes ruinous.
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BBVA’s bid for Banco Sabadell didn’t appear to be going well when its share price slumped after the announcement. Then Sabadell rejected the offer despite the substantial premium to its own share price.
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Twenty-five years ago in Spain, ING launched a branchless bank – still its biggest greenfield retail operation. Euromoney asks Iberia chief executive Ignacio Juliá Vilar what still makes it stand out from both incumbents and newer arrivals.
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As mandated real-time payments loom, Europe’s banks and other payment providers must look at modernising legacy infrastructure.
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Corporates’ longstanding complaint on banks’ payments offerings is that they don’t know what they are being charged for but suspect it is too much. Airwallex now provides an alternative at global scale.
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BBVA could have bought Banco Sabadell much more cheaply in 2020. Sabadell’s CEO César González-Bueno has since turned his bank around. But BBVA’s return to the negotiating table comes at a time when European banking may be moving to a new and more confident phase.
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Restructuring HSBC, like painting the Forth bridge, is a never-ending job. While Noel Quinn has done well, the board must not make another ham-fisted transition.
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The body responsible for settling about $6.5 trillion of global daily FX trades has decided against extending its deadlines to accommodate non-US participants who still want to use its next-day settlement service. But it expects the impact to be limited – far too limited to justify the complexity that a change would impose on its members.
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The two European banks are both trying to de-emphasise their investment banks and want to build up areas where they see weakness. Barclays is later to this party than Deutsche, but both will have found encouragement in the first three months of 2024.
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A private credit market growing so fast, away from the oversight of bank regulators, may be a new source of systemic risk. With smaller investors taking greater exposure to an asset class whose high returns and low losses look almost too good to be true, there could be trouble ahead.
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Quarterly survey reveals that UK finance professionals may be feeling more upbeat about prospects, but that this is yet to translate into a willingness to take greater risk onto balance sheets.
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UK fintechs attracted more investment than all European rivals combined in a tough funding market last year, but a broken IPO market leaves them with nowhere to go.
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Rumours that FAB is in exploratory talks with a Turkish lender, together with hopes for a big-ticket IPO, point to optimism despite the dire outlook on inflation.
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The EU’s Instant Payments Regulation may have fired the starting gun on real-time payments in Europe, but many banks remain stuck in the blocks.
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Isbank’s chief executive Hakan Aran sees embedded finance and an innovative approach to bank branches as the future as the Turkish bank looks to rebuild on a better market environment for its 100-year anniversary.
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The good news is that bank executives don’t see big loan losses ahead; the bad news is that they lack the confidence and vision to invest in the business.
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The Greek bailout fund’s exit from Piraeus Bank last month was the country’s biggest post-crisis privatization. The bank’s chief executive, Christos Megalou, tells Euromoney that this is more than a capital-return story. It’s also about growth: in the economy, in wealth and asset management, and, thanks to neobank Snappi, internationally.
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After a decade of restructuring, EFG International ramped up hiring last year – above all from Credit Suisse. Chief executive Giorgio Pradelli talks about the firm’s scope to lead a wave of Swiss-bank consolidation, while doubling down on new wealth from the Middle East and Asia.
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Credit Suisse’s domestic bank was arguably the failed group’s best and strongest division. One year after the rescue, UBS is not the only one trying to feast on its domestic wealth-management and corporate-banking leftovers. Other Swiss and international players also hope to benefit from the longer-term fallout in Switzerland. Will the rush to pick up the remnants of the fallen champion pay off?
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The decision by the US SEC to drop mandatory Scope 3 reporting weakens global emissions reporting standards. However, many corporate issuers are already using Scope 3 performance targets on sustainability-linked transactions for non-regulatory reasons. Are the debt and equities markets leading companies onto ESG ground upon which regulators fear to tread?
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Norwegian wealth manager Formue has been growing revenues and assets since opening in 2000. It has done this by financially educating people who never gave much thought to wealth planning and by getting people to like it.
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Societe Generale Private Banking, the wealth-management arm of Societe Generale, is a worldwide private bank with a strong European base. It had €140 billion of assets under management at the end of September 2023.
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The wealth-management divisions of national-champion universal banks have won most of the regional private banking awards in Western Europe. But Lombard Odier offers a powerful reminder of the capabilities of a pure-play private bank, owned by its managing partners who follow a business model solely focused on managing their clients’ assets.
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LGT Private Banking is the private bank of the Princely House of Liechtenstein. Founded in 1920, it operates according to the same values and convictions that have guided the building and managing of its owner’s family assets for almost 900 years, across 26 generations: thinking and acting entrepreneurially; a long-term focus; openness to new developments and technologies; and a disciplined approach to risk and resources.
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BNP Paribas Wealth Management operates across 17 countries, serving a client base of entrepreneurs, family offices and high net-worth individuals.
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Caixabank Private Banking wins the award for best domestic private bank in Spain this year having demonstrated strong performance and launched important enhancements in many sectors.
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JPMorgan has been making a strong push in private banking in Europe, the Middle East and Africa over the past three years, substantially growing its numbers of advisers and clients, opening offices from Athens and Brussels to Copenhagen and Manchester, while taking advantage of its big technology budget to invest in new capabilities.
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The banks in each market that have excelled across a range of core private banking activities during the past 12 months.
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Few manage to do discretionary portfolio management better than Julius Baer today. The largest pure-play private bank by assets under management has been busy during its latest strategic cycle, which runs for three years through 2025.
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BNP Paribas has been relentlessly fine-tuning its secondary equities business in Europe for more than a decade. While the primary focus has been on reaching an affordable offering for institutional investor customers of its markets business, clients of the wealth-management business are now also benefiting.
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In its home market, Deutsche Bank has expanded its leadership with high net-worth (HNW) customers, as well as with the ultra-high net-worth (UHNW) clients that are becoming a core focus in Germany, Europe and cross the globe.
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Serving the next generation of wealthy individuals and family members is at the heart of everything Julius Baer does. The Swiss pure-play wealth manager is cognisant of the vast amount of wealth in the process of being handed from one set of family hands to the next; it sees this segment as a key vehicle for it to, in its words, “live out [its] purpose” and “create value beyond wealth”.
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BNP Paribas Wealth Management shows “a strong dedication to enhancing the client experience through digital means, innovation and research”, according to the judging panel for this year’s private banking awards.
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Deutsche Bank Private Bank is building a focus on the most challenging customer segment of all: ultra-high net-worth individuals and family offices.
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BNP Paribas Wealth Management’s philanthropy solutions have been a noteworthy part of its wider positive impact offering since 2008. The firm aims to provide clients, free of charge, with proposals that fit each step of their philanthropic journey.
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BNP Paribas Wealth Management has been named Western Europe's best private bank for sustainability this year. One of the many factors supporting this decision is the banks’ ability to embed sustainability into all its product and services by prioritising portfolio assessment and the upskilling of its bankers.
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Carnegie Private Banking wins the Sweden’s best domestic private bank award for the second consecutive year for the growth, investment and development it has made across its private banking business.
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The award for the best international private bank in the Nordics and Baltics goes to JPMorgan Private Bank this year. Among other things, the US lender impressed the judging panel with the philanthropic commitments it has facilitated for clients in the region.
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Amid strong competition between the region’s leading private lenders, Carnegie Private Banking is the judging panel’s choice for best private bank in the Nordics and Baltics this year. The bank has also been recognized in three other categories: family office services, investment research and ultra-high net-worth individuals.
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Carnegie Private Banking is this year’s winner for best bank for ultra-high net-worth individuals in the Nordics and Baltics.
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The banks in each market that have excelled across a range of core private banking activities during the past 12 months.
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Formue is this year’s winner for best bank for discretionary portfolio management in the Nordics and Baltics. Key to its success was the lender’s transition from a manually processed portfolio construction to an industry-leading portfolio and advice digital solution: Advent Genesis.
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DNB Private Banking has been named this year’s best bank for family-office services in the Nordics and Baltics.
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For its mix of global capability with local expertise and philanthropic efforts, JPMorgan wins the award for Sweden’s best international private bank.
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Nowadays, wealthy investors are not only looking for further insights and analytical expertise to guide them through uncertain markets but also for the ability to integrate non-financial preferences into their decision-making.
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Sustainability principles are embedded across all the private banking products and services offered by Formue, the Nordics and Baltics’ best private bank for sustainability this year.
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OTP Private Banking is putting resources into sustainability and showing signs of progress in the area. At a group level, improved scores by several environmental, social and governance ratings agencies are testament to its improvements in the area recently. For example, it moved from a medium- to low-risk ranking by Sustainalytics.
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OTP Private Banking says it has recently embarked on an overhaul of its discretionary portfolio management services. This involves redefining the workflow to reflect topical industry themes, such as the focus on environmental, social and governance, as well as the implementation of what it describes as revolutionary new front-office software and a focus on increasing client alpha.
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UniCredit’s importance as a private bank in Central and Eastern Europe is particularly evident in its service offering for high net-worth individuals.
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OTP Private Banking’s approach to digital development and innovation is predicated on a regional approach, helping the firm benefit from its presence across central and eastern Europe.
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Over the past decade, OTP Group has grown as a regional bank in central and eastern Europe – even as other international banks have begun to retreat from the region. Listed in Budapest since 1995, the group now covers 12 countries, counting 17 million customers. Although it is headquartered in Hungary, it also considers itself a market leader in Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Slovenia in terms of the overall banking market, including retail.
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The banks in each market that have excelled across a range of core private banking activities during the past 12 months.
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Chief executive Andrea Orcel has made it clear that Central and Eastern Europe remains at the heart of UniCredit, not least through the purchase of Greek lender Alpha Bank’s Romanian operations last year.
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While welcome, initiatives by the government and financial sector bodies designed to make it easier for companies to raise funds in the UK face a number of obstacles.
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A wall of liquidity among investors has helped to drive a busy start to the year for bond issuers, as they rush to capture tight spreads.
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The German lender’s decision to put its chips on southeast Asia is paying off handsomely. Under the leadership of Asia CEO Alexander von zur Mühlen, Deutsche Bank has doubled its capital in Vietnam and Indonesia, with more to come, moved a host of global roles to the region, and has seen Asean eclipse its India and China business in terms of growth and absolute numbers.
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Asset managers and industry regulators face operational challenges around the tokenization of private assets.
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Caution at local commercial banks – coupled with the eagerness of large investment banks to foster relationships with private equity players – means large real-estate deals fuelled by back leverage could be primed for a comeback in Europe.
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Corporates seeking to leverage sustainable investment opportunities continue to be restricted by the lack of reliable data on which to base their assessments.
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The Basel committee is shocked – shocked! – that some banks might be reporting inflated leverage ratios.
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The UK startup is now a fully regulated bank and private funds are backing its vision to embed regulated banking in non-financial companies as well as fintechs.
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With some big deals launching this week, Europe’s IPO pipeline is flowing at last. If they do well, they should put to bed the notion that ‘private IPOs’ are what is needed to provide exit routes for sponsors. A handful of recent deals shows that the biggest driver of success is doing the simple things well.
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The UK Chancellor has big plans for the tech sector.
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Thinner margins across the banking industry hit smaller banks harder. But investor pressures are also less of an issue for mutually owned lenders.
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For a deeply unpopular government with little room to manoeuvre, the chance to bribe voters with a cheap offer of bank shares is irresistible. The bank in question is now well-run and profitable while its stock still trades at a discount. But the great NatWest share offer will do little to revive UK capital markets.
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The UBS chief investment office’s sustainable and impact investing strategist wants to avoid measurement for the sake of measurement, but responding to client demand for more data while ensuring its readability remains a challenge.
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The newest ESG trend in retail banking might be a niche offering for now, but all banks will have to take it seriously someday.
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Leading commercial banks are focusing on their approach to relationship management to reassure corporate customers that they are being listened to.
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There are sensible elements to CEO Slawomir Krupa’s plans for Societe Generale, but their communication needs attention.
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In 2020, Deutsche Bank’s Asia chief, Alexander von zur Mühlen, placed more of his chips on fast-growing southeast Asia. As global firms diversify out of China, his prescience and willingness to deliver on his convictions is starting to pay off.
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Investors and staff at Societe Generale are slowly starting to understand chief executive Slawomir Krupa’s brutally honest approach to the bank’s many challenges. Taking them with him as he embarks on his restructuring plan may prove a more delicate task.
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Diego De Giorgi’s arrival as Standard Chartered’s CFO coincides with a shift away from asset shrinkage and a “final push” on digital transformation.
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A private debt hangover in real estate is threatening middle-class retirement savings across Germany. Local banks, which focused more on senior loans, should be safer. But are these lenders ready to finance the recovery in commercial property that the German market so badly needs?
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Even after the rally on its latest restructuring plan, investors still value the UK bank at such a wide discount to book that management must consider radical action.
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Barclays chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan intends to stop a low-returning investment bank from dragging the rest of the group down with it. He argues that most of the improvements are within the bank’s own grasp. That is debatable, and in any case hardly reassuring.
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The UK government’s impending sale to retail investors of a big stake in the bank informs the shadow-play guidance on this year’s earnings.
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Corporates continue to exhibit worrying levels of complacency when it comes to the implications of rate rises for their bottom line.
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Extracting value from Russia via a stake in Strabag previously owned by Oleg Deripaska shouldn’t be confused with a proper disentanglement from Russia by Raiffeisen. The main impetus for the transaction may, in fact, lie with Deripaska and Strabag’s other shareholders.
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Trade-receivables securitization transactions are flourishing as corporates seek more affordable access to long-term financing.
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Banks need to start quantifying the legal risks of both climate action and inaction.
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It is not hard to find short-term worries over global markets’ state of readiness for the US’s transition to one-day settlement in late May. But even if the UK, Europe and those Asian markets still using two-day settlement can adapt to the shift in the longer term, they will also face intense pressure to lessen their dislocation from the US cycle by copying its move. Many also fear the ultimate end-game of same-day or even instant settlement.
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The Sino-Swiss corridor, set up to encourage Chinese firms to sell global depositary receipts to international investors in the European state, took off fast in 2022. But a host of challenges, from Chinese regulatory concerns to an apparent lack of global interest, has stalled its progress.
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The midcap broker needs new business lines to survive a prolonged IPO drought.
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Record regional bank profits, plus strong capital ratios in Western Europe, have fuelled hope for more bank acquisitions in Central and Eastern Europe. The uncertain effect of recent court rulings on Swiss franc mortgages, however, is a big obstacle to deals in Poland.
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Corporates are adopting a variety of approaches to mitigate the impact of uncertainty in foreign exchange markets caused by divergence in economic policy and performance.
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They already dominate the investment banking business in Europe, and now the leading US banks have their eyes on an even bigger prize. They see their vast investments in the digital technology transforming payments and transaction services and their retained global presences as the keys to winning even greater revenues from Europe’s midsize corporates.
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Appealing to issuers by removing investor protections makes no sense when London’s decline as a listing venue stems from domestic investors abandoning the UK market.
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Collaboration between national banks has seen widespread adoption of mobile payments schemes. The French and German-led approach of focusing on a single European scheme could therefore be seen as a distraction. But is it the only real way of keeping US payment companies at bay?
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The London Stock Exchange Group’s head of sustainable finance strategic initiatives wants climate data to redefine the act of indexing.
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Ambitious brokerage firms have precipitated a shift in demand for FX licences, with interest in regulated European and Asian markets on the increase at the expense of offshore jurisdictions.
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After overseeing radical transformations at Bawag and Hamburg Commercial Bank, Cerberus Capital Management now has ultimate control of HSBC’s French retail bank. Former UniCredit banker Niccolò Ubertalli is running the new business, and reveals a very different strategy to the private equity company’s German-speaking antecedents in European banking.
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Recently, investors have welcomed Turkish USD debt with open arms. As 2024 approaches, prospective borrowers will be hoping that the renewed interest can last.
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Outgoing supervisory chair Andrea Enria warns against ‘complacency’ – despite higher capital ratios at eurozone banks – as he announces new requirements on banks to tackle investment-banking leverage, liquidity shortages and leveraged finance risks.
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Outside Switzerland, European banks largely escaped the banking turmoil last March. That hasn’t prevented supervisors using it as an excuse to ratchet up the pressure. Ahead of its 10th anniversary as a supervisor, is the ECB – as some bankers suggest – getting too intrusive?
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The chief executive of Newton Investment Management is a forthright believer in the power of active investors to effect change at the companies they invest in, and thinks tinkering with market rules is unlikely to boost the appeal of London-listed equities.
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Many corporates are realising the benefits of intercompany netting on FX risk, trading and cash-flow visibility.
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Barclays hopes to win over investors with new return targets and buyback commitments next February, but it really needs a revival in investment banking.
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National Bank of Ukraine governor Andriy Pyshnyy talks to Euromoney about stabilizing the country’s financial system after the invasion, how rapid shifts to cloud-based banking can work and why cyber risks mean other countries are now seeking Ukraine’s advice about keeping banks running when national electricity infrastructure is down.
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Regulators are starting to take a more messaging-based approach to sustainable finance, but stopping greenwashing won’t automatically lead to a transition to net zero.
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The Signa Group of companies is complex, but its problems are simple: debt service costs are going up while property values are going down.
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More and more bond trading is automated. As volatility now shifts from rates to credit that will provide a stern examination of new trade execution tools.
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The overall use of cash will continue to fall, but the decline of bank branch networks means that businesses now face a headache in handling physical takings.
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When Kevin Gartside was medically discharged from the British army in 2012 after three tours of duty in Iraq, he was unsure what to do next. He saw cross-over appeal in banking, an industry with a surprisingly flat operating structure that prizes punctuality, teamwork, adaptability and decision making.
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Standard Chartered’s corporate and institutional bank can increase its profitability even when rates fall, divisional head Simon Cooper tells Euromoney. After reaping the benefit of investments in cash management, he is now turning to the financial markets business, especially credit – reinforcing efforts to grow clients in Europe and the Americas.
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Competition for deposits is influencing pricing decisions on commercial loans. However, the major cash-management banks insist that they have maintained both deposit levels and lending rates.
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The war in Ukraine has suddenly ramped up demands on the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development after the institution spent years searching for a new role. President Odile Renaud-Basso talks to Euromoney about the bank’s strategy and plans to boost its capacity through a €4 billion capital increase.
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Enel could trigger the largest step-up event in the sustainability-linked bond market if it misses its CO₂ emissions targets at the end of this year. How the market reacts will set the tone for the future of these instruments.
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The Swedish regulator digs deep into background of prospective senior managers.
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UK banks that focus on tech are seemingly rewarded with greater customer trust.
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Corporates are taking a big punt on markets remaining relatively benign, given their apparent lack of confidence in existing FX technology and systems.
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A $3.5 billion deal attracts $36 billion of demand, answering the question of whether Swiss banks can return to this market after Credit Suisse's collapse.
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OTP Bank recorded impressive growth in lending volumes during the awards period and has also advised on some landmark financings.
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ING Bank’s commitment to sustainable and responsible banking in Germany makes the best bank for environmental, social and governance in the country this year.
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Net interest margins are shrinking. Banks may need to find new sources to fund customer loans, perhaps even by lending to each other.
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Turkey’s central bank took another step on the path to normalization when penalties for exceeding interest-rate caps on lending were scrapped last week. It is good news for banks, but will it last?
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Ardshinbank is Armenia’s best bank for environmental, social and governance after demonstrating a commitment to sustainability with its carbon footprint-minimization strategies and green financing work.
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Barclays has made visible progress across the board in environmental, social and governance, advising on large sustainability financings, enhancing its sustainable mortgages and offering more support to green startups.
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The banks in each market that have excelled across a range of core banking activities over the past 12 months.
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The banks in each market that have excelled across a range of core banking activities over the past 12 months.
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Andrea Orcel’s complex deal with Alpha Bank ultimately opens a new front in the Milan-based lender’s pan-European strategy: Greece.
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In one of his last interviews in office, Ignazio Visco sets the record straight on his controversial 12 years as Italy’s central bank governor: a period of almost constant crisis. Today, the country’s NPL problems seem cured but, as he acknowledges, simmering risks remain.
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Banks may be retreating from lending directly to small and medium-sized enterprises, but by lending to credit specialists with good technology they can still be a source of funding for the sector.
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Sustainability-linked loans have faced growing criticism for their opacity and concerns around greenwashing. Sustainability-linked loan bonds could help to bring more transparency to the market and help legitimise these structures.
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It took five years for the invoice finance specialist Accelerated Payments to advance its first €1 billion, but just nine months for the next €500 million.
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Bidding $2.5 billion for the bulk of Credit Suisse’s sub-Saharan Africa ultra-high net-worth private bank book 18 months ago has been a ‘game changer’ for Barclays in the region, the UK bank’s Africa market head Amol Prabhu tells Euromoney.
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Even as the industry pleads its solidity, accidents keep happening.
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Just three weeks on from the rapturous response to Arm Holdings re-listing on Nasdaq, the prospects for a revival in IPOs suddenly look dim.
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A market-beating increase in UniCredit’s share price is just the beginning, chief executive Andrea Orcel tells Euromoney. He must now prove the many remaining sceptics wrong and show the bank can still thrive when net interest margins fall and credit costs rise.
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More banks have announced partnerships with asset managers to place loans into private debt funds that offer investors better risk-adjusted returns than bank equity.
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European corporates are finding a warm welcome from investors, pushing investment-grade volumes to a 2023 monthly record last month – their biggest total since the start of the interest-rate hiking cycle. But while investors are clearly ready to buy even the more adventurous stories, they still need the reassurance of sensible pricing.
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As a relative outsider, Slawomir Krupa might have appeared better suited to the chief executive job at Societe Generale precisely because it had done so badly under an establishment insider. BNP Paribas’ good performance, by contrast, would make the traditional background of its rumoured chief-executive-in-waiting, Marguerite Bérard, less of a barrier.
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BlackRock joins Allfunds initiative to distribute new variants of private equity and credit funds to wealthy individuals.
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Euromoney talks to Jacques Levet, chief digital officer at BNP Paribas, about the competitive advantage that newly acquired FX fintech Kantox offers.
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Slawomir Krupa may yet turn around Societe Generale. But it won’t be by shock and awe.
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Despite tweaks to improve efficiency, Societe Generale’s new strategy has received a lukewarm reception. New CEO Slawomir Krupa has lifted the capital target, but revenues will remain flat, and there is a lack of news on asset sales.
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Bankers at Lloyds say that progress in FX, fixed income and structured finance this year reflects chief executive Charlie Nunn’s strategy for targeted growth in corporate and institutional banking.
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Market participants have welcomed recent moves to enhance FX liquidity by increasing the efficiency of credit payments for trades.
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Borrowers that financed cheaply in 2021 will soon hit a maturity wall. Many will struggle to refinance at higher cost. Some will default. Private credit managers – still magnets for institutional capital – are set to step in and bridge some of the financing gap left by the banks.
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Financial market practitioners might be forgiven for reflecting on a job well done now that the final Libor panel has ended its submissions. The journey has been immense, but the focus is turning to loose ends, including the argument that just won’t go away: is there a place for credit-sensitive rates in a post-Libor world?
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As other investment banks cut staff, HSBC has been hiring to build a leading bank in tech and healthcare.
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Banks and investors opposed to European Union derivatives clearing plans have made an astonishing charge: the EU is worse than the US in jealously guarding its own markets.
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HKEx chief executive Nicolas Aguzin opened the group’s latest new office in London on Wednesday. His aim: to get more global firms to IPO in Hong Kong and convince investors to put money to work there. But against the backdrop of China’s economic situation, his team will have its work cut out.
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Despite the cross-border growth of Hungary’s OTP Bank and the regional potential of Romania’s Banca Transilvania, banking in central and eastern Europe is increasingly a national game.
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China is having a shocker of a year. Growth has stalled, deflation is back and global firms are moving production elsewhere as they de-risk from China to boost supply-chain resiliency. FDI is down sharply and exports are sinking. Just as Brexit reshaped the UK’s relationship with the world, has Covid done the same for China?
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The political response to rising bank profits should focus more on debt distress than on deposit rates and taxation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Banks including NatWest and JPMorgan are struggling to put out reputational risk-management fires.
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The NatWest chief executive’s resignation ends a solid if unexciting three-and-a-half years at the helm.
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BlackRock, JPMorgan and McKinsey are working on plans for a new development finance institution focused on Ukraine’s reconstruction. The project has already had to temper some ambitions, but its advisers still hope it can propel flows of private-sector money to Ukraine in years to come.
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The increased corporate focus on environmental, social and governance issues is impacting treasury teams that can struggle to justify their initiatives.
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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.
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Big banks capable of competing with US players are part of Europe’s geostrategic interests, Deutsche Bank CEO tells audience at Euromoney dinner.
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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.
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Last year, ING was the first bank in central and eastern Europe to stop providing dedicated finance to new upstream oil and gas fields, despite the fact that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatened energy supply on the continent. The Dutch lender remains the bank of choice for green or sustainability labelled deals in the region.
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Geopolitical tensions in the region have provided a welcome boost to Armenian banks’ profitability. Ardshinbank stood out during the awards period for making the most of this opportunity under the leadership of chairman of the management board Artak Ananyan. Profit before tax more than quadrupled in 2022, from Dram16 billion ($42 million) to Dram77 billion.
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Despite the war in Ukraine, the past year has seen UniCredit operating with more of the purpose and commitment that international banks in central and eastern Europe too often lack.
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Under chief executive Hakan Binbasgil, Akbank demonstrated an innovative and proactive approach to small and medium-sized enterprise banking during the awards period, despite the difficult operating environment in its home market of Turkey.
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Wealth management across central and eastern Europe is still in a state of flux, nearly 18 months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In that period, some lenders have pulled back from specific markets in the region; others have sought ways to cut costs by reducing their roster of senior private bankers.
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The past year has seen Societe Generale play a crucial role in central and eastern Europe’s financing markets, led by Philippe Madar, head of corporate coverage for Europe. It is top of Dealogic’s mandated lead arranger rankings for regional syndicated loans in the awards period. Its market share in loans was almost twice as high as the next ranked bank, and it was also involved in some of the key bond deals during the awards period.
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Best Bank: OTP Bank Albania
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Government clients and the reduced presence of international banks are typical features of finance in central and eastern Europe, and M&A is no exception. But the region is not beyond the reach of JPMorgan, central and eastern Europe’s best bank for advisory.
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With the war in Ukraine adding to global volatility in capital markets, investment banking deal flow was weak in central and eastern Europe during 2022 and early 2023, especially for lower-rated names.
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Good perceptions of corporate social responsibility have become ever more important for banks in central and eastern Europe since the start of the war in Ukraine.
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UniCredit has long been regarded as a leader in corporate banking in central and eastern Europe. Transaction services continues to be a vital part of this regional franchise under Riccardo Madinelli, head of transactions and payments for central and eastern Europe.
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Even rivals recognize that OTP Bank has advanced strongly in digital banking recently, ensuring that its technology wins and retains customers in Hungary and across central and eastern Europe.
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BNP Paribas Fortis is Belgium’s best investment bank this year. It took the top position in the equity capital markets league table during the awards period, from second last year, with a 20% market share, having completed six transactions worth a total of €457 million.
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The lasting impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on global energy markets has steered the sustainability conversation towards efficiency and practicality in western Europe. Beyond investing in low-carbon solutions to reduce the energy intensity of across a range of sectors, banks were preoccupied with clients’ transition plans to reduce their own financed emissions, while facing tougher disclosure regulations and public scrutiny of their continued financing of the oil and gas sector.
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Last year, Rothschild & Co advised on a higher volume of M&A transactions than any of its European rivals, with its $220 billion of completed deals putting it comfortably ahead of Barclays on $207 billion, Lazard's $185 billion, BNP Paribas' $178 billion and Deutsche Bank's $145 billion.
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With retail banking operations in Belgium, France, Italy and Luxembourg, BNP Paribas is the clear leader among a very small handful of European banks that have grown beyond being national champions in their home markets to serve personal customers across the continent.
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In a quiet year for equity capital markets, BNP Paribas worked on the two main deals that took place: the $1 billion accelerated bookbuild for Energias de Portugal in March this year and the €53 million rights offer for Greenvolt Energias Renovaveis in July 2022.
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Perhaps it is no surprise that when Euromoney sits down with Bank of America to discuss the bank’s pitch for this category there are five people in the meeting – and they are all women. This is a bank that has led from the front across all aspects of corporate social responsibility (CSR), including diversity and inclusion (D&I).
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Charlie Nunn, who has been chief executive of the UK’s best bank since 2021, announced a new strategy for Lloyds Banking Group in the first quarter of 2022. It didn’t receive much attention as it was announced on the same day that Russia invaded Ukraine. And the new strategy is really the old strategy with a slight shift in the focus beyond cost discipline and scale efficiencies towards investing in growth and doing more for the bank’s market leading 26 million customers.
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BNP Paribas has also had an excellent year in its corporate and institutional banking division, particularly in its home region. The division posted record revenues in 2022, of €16.5 billion, up 16% on the previous year. The equity and prime services, global banking and securities services units all saw new highs, while global markets had its best year since 2009.
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UBS’s financing business might not have the widest scope in the industry these days, nor does the bank top the debt and equity capital markets league tables, but what it does have is expertise that is unusually well tailored to the times. For its skill in responding to its target clients’ needs, and particularly those of financial institutions, it is our pick as western Europe’s best bank for financing.
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The past year has seen Societe Generale reap the benefits of its long-term investment initiative in its transaction services business across Europe.
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BNP Paribas’s wealth management team has had a stellar year. In Euromoney’s 2023 private banking awards, it was named Europe’s best private bank and the Middle East’s best private bank. It also won a hatfull of country awards, including best domestic private bank in France and best international private bank in Belgium and in Switzerland.
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Isabel Guerreiro, head of retail and digital for Europe at Banco Santander, describes her employer as a digital bank with branches. This is what is behind the Spanish bank’s continued success with the small and medium-sized enterprise segment across Europe.
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BGL BNP Paribas positioned itself as the strongest commercial bank in Luxembourg in 2022.
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In April 2022, the European Central Bank launched a call for payment service providers, banks and technology companies to engage in the creation of prototypes for a digital euro and associated payment services.
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The region's best banks, country by country
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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.
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VÚB banka spreads its love for the environment typographically.
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The activist shareholder highlights concerns about a former poster child for private equity ownership of banks.
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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.
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The global disclosure recommendations don’t stand a chance against mandated regional regulation.
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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.
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High interest rates and low bank appetite for risk have created the perfect conditions for a renaissance in invoice factoring.
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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.
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Extreme FX volatility is proving a challenge for some finance directors who are struggling to minimize the impact on their bottom line.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As interest rate volatility persists, corporates are taking a hard look at their trade finance options.
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Leading firms join a new network of networks, but crypto natives see just another walled garden.
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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.
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The big transaction banks are becoming increasingly active in the B2B marketplace as they seek to cash in on corporate digital transformation.
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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.
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Pouncing on a firm with lots of corporate broking relationships at the low point for IPOs is a smart trade.
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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.
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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.
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Proceeds raised in the first three months of this year were 99% lower than the amount raised at the start of 2021.
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The French investment bank is taking a bet on a double-edged blockchain technology to stay ahead of both the tokenization and sustainability trends.
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The recent spate of deposit flight that spread panic through the banking systems of the US and Europe opens a chance for non-bank lenders to seize more of the core businesses that banks want to retain. Central bank emergency measures may have prevented the crisis from spreading, but a new phase of disintermediation has begun.
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The chair of Ping An Asset Management has called again for the break-up of HSBC and spin off of its Asia assets. His argument is a strong and valid one; his problem is that none of the bank’s other main shareholders seems to care.
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Standard Chartered’s new chief sustainability officer is not shying away from the reality of what the energy transition looks like in emerging markets.
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A flurry of collaborations and the acquisition of Nivaura’s technology is putting NowCM in a key position in the digital capital markets ecosystem. Its focus on real-time issuance and its ownership of a regulated marketplace may have just become even more relevant.
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Turkish airline Pegasus hopes an innovative funding solution tied to sustainability targets will help it increase capacity despite challenging market conditions.
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With the advent of its strategic alliance with Japan’s Mizuho Financial, Lombard Odier now has wealth management tie-ups in seven Asia countries, with the promise of more to come.
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Twinco Capital facilitates access to sustainable funding by focusing on pre-production finance.
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Rising interest rates have driven demand for more efficient liquidity structures.
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As soon as the ink was dry on the agreement to take over Credit Suisse, UBS chairman Colm Kelleher rushed to bring ex-CEO Sergio Ermotti back to run the bank and the deal. Execution risk is off the charts, and the nerves of shareholders, employees and taxpayers are jangling.
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Adding to its two other European awards this year, BNP Paribas Wealth Management wins the region’s Best private bank for digital award.
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Of many information needs today, two of the most prominent for wealthy investors are insight and analysis that help guide them through volatile and uncertain markets, and identify opportunities to invest sustainably.
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Amid strong competition between Europe’s leading private banks, the judges agree that BNP Paribas deserves to be recognised this year as the region’s best private bank, an award supported by two other honours: best for digital and discretionary portfolio management.
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Following up on its recognition last year as Euromoney’s Best bank for wealth management in Western Europe in our Awards for Excellence, UBS is now recognised as the leader in the region for high net-worth individuals.
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Supporting its award as Europe’s Best private bank, BNP Paribas is the judges’ Best bank in the region for discretionary portfolio management, too.
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LGT Private Banking’s strong financial performance and distinctive offering creates a compelling case to make the bank the region’s best for ultra-high net-worth individuals and two others: family office services and environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.
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It takes a family office to know what a family office needs.
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Societe Generale Private Banking has demonstrated to the judges its ability to provide differentiated and valuable advice and solutions in wealth transfer and succession planning better than its peers in the past year, supporting its regional award in this category.
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Completing its trio of European awards, LGT Private Banking is the judge’s Best private bank in Europe for environmental, social and governance investing.
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Pure-play Swiss private bank Julius Baer has had to reconfigure its business model for the 2020s. Chief executive Philipp Rickenbacher talks to Euromoney about why scale and nurturing talent are key to the long-term success of a firm that does just one thing and one thing well: serving wealthy private clients.
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The Credit Suisse deal may have merely accelerated Hamers’ anticipated departure.
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The failure of venture capital’s favourite bank is bad news for a sector reliant on new injections of cheap capital to sustain loss-making growth.
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Both Egypt and Turkey have recently been able to tap dollars more cheaply through sukuk.
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What will UBS’s post-merger sustainable finance strategy look like?
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First Abu Dhabi Bank’s recent interest in a bid for Standard Chartered and an ill-fated investment in Credit Suisse by Saudi National Bank have put the spotlight on Middle East banks as potential acquirers of international firms.
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It has been over a decade and a half since a Chinese financial institution bought or invested in a Western counterpart. Beijing sees the West’s banking system as incomprehensibly chaotic and messy, and its own – albeit flawed – as a bastion of stability.
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Hong Kong conference moves along. Nothing to see here.
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Recent events call into question most of the core assumptions behind the rules designed to keep banks safe through a liquidity squeeze.
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Will the fall of Credit Suisse be a seismic moment for private banking? Probably not – the reality is that wealthy clients need their financial advisers too much. Wealth is flighty for sure, but it usually alights nearby at a more stable lender.
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UBS’s integration of Credit Suisse will be a long and uncertain process, but keeping the latter’s Swiss universal bank may mean the deal eventually comes good.
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Bankers have been at pains to stress how different the world is today from the dark days of 2008: higher capital; more liquidity; lower credit risk and all that. But while individual banks may be safer than they were, collectively they arguably now face a worse existential crisis. Societies face awkward questions about how they value the utility of the banking sector – and how they should pay for it.
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UBS shareholders might find plenty not to like in what seems at first glance like a great deal. The bank is making itself more complex at a time when creditors and investors put a premium on simplicity and focus.
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Big foreign-exchange banks are focussing on enhanced functionality to promote greater use of single-dealer platforms.
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HSBC’s global head of trade finance talks about how the bank has built 'the trade finance platform for the future'.
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Michael Klein can’t be expected to ‘devote significant time and attention’ to the unlikely prospect that UBS will allow a CS First Boston spin-off without being paid. Greensill-style invoices for Klein’s theoretical future services could be the answer.
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Solar thermal technology could offer cheap carbon-free heat for manufacturers. But tech developers are stuck in a financing gap between venture capital and project finance that will be harder to fill after recent bank failures.
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Credit Suisse came out of the global financial crisis in better shape than many peers. But fragility was never far away – in the years that followed its fortunes would swing back and forth, sometimes violently. Here is the bank’s route to 2023, explained through Euromoney’s own coverage.
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Unfortunately, while the SNB can provide ample liquidity that Credit Suisse doesn’t really need, it cannot provide the trust and credibility it sorely lacks.
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The decision by its Japanese owners to relist ARM, the UK’s great technology success story, in the US instead of London was inevitable after years of decline and the hammer blow of Brexit. Deregulation might further accelerate its collapse, even as the City wins a boost from new technology bringing the vast pool of retail money into equity capital markets.
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Banks like Santander, BNP Paribas and SocGen see auto finance and the future of mobility as critical pieces of their overall group strategies. But as mobility becomes an increasingly fractured business, what does the auto finance bank of the future look like?
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HSBC runs towards the storm as others are fleeing it.
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For one of the most considerate men in capital markets, nothing was ever too much trouble.
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The former Barclays chief executive is set to scale up the core banking-technology provider that aims to do banking 10 times better.
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Santander executive chairman Ana Botín has stepped back from the M&A-based restructuring many assumed former CEO candidate Andrea Orcel would oversee. Euromoney asks Botín and her new chief executive, Héctor Grisi, how they plan to make this international retail bank succeed.
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The EU green bond standard is understandably broad. But because of this, the limits between sustainable and transition finance remain unclear.
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Patents are a high-profile demonstration of a bank’s commitment to innovation, but they are not the only option for those looking to encourage new ways of thinking.
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Droit helps traders decide in milliseconds if deals comply with the ever-changing rules and aims to do the same for wealth managers.
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The COO of Deutsche Bank’s International Private Bank, Sandra Wirfs, tells Euromoney how it has been able not just to slash costs but also to make its wealth management business more cost-efficient than the core bank.
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Tokenization is spreading fast. Regulated finance is finally embracing blockchain technology just as most cryptocurrencies stand revealed as overleveraged Ponzi schemes. The institutional herd is moving, but can the blockchains they are shifting onto bear the load?
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After its DAX return, Commerzbank now has a clear – if uncertain – path to achieving its profit target, according to CFO Bettina Orlopp.
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The former CEO of Cazenove has written an intriguing reflection on his 23-year career at the storied London institution. It captures his view from the heart of the turmoil, but mostly steers clear of score-settling.
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More blue blood than bad blood at former chief executive’s book launch.
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Restrictions on upstream oil and gas financing aren’t the silver bullet that the sector needs to achieve its climate goals.
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Firms betting on interest-rate declines will be hoping that inflation does not force central banks to raise the cost of borrowing again.
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Higher interest rates will weigh heavily on the property development lending that makes up the bulk of OakNorth’s loan book. But chief executive and co-founder Rishi Khosla tells Euromoney the bank can maintain its ultra-low loan losses and keep growing.
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Four years ago, Christian Sewing set out to give the German bank new direction. His plan, based on income-rich services like private banking, continues to surprise and succeed. Euromoney caught up with the head of International Private Bank, Claudio de Sanctis, to discuss last year’s financials and his plans in Asia and the Middle East.
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With the digital pound, the UK is following much of what the European Central Bank has done on the digital euro. But could the UK’s more unified banking sector foster a more revolutionary central bank digital currency?
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A month ago, First Abu Dhabi Bank said it had looked at Standard Chartered but decided against a bid. Now, it is believed to have changed its mind. What has changed?
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While the bank plans to spin off its troubled investment bank, the new worry is whether and how soon it can repair the wealth management business.
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New platform acts as central account keeper under Luxembourg law for first ever sterling bond deal on blockchain.
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Banks and corporates are taking a variety of approaches to mitigating the impact of rising interest rates, quantitative tightening and economic uncertainty on the availability of liquidity.
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Just back from Davos, the bank’s new head of sustainable finance says the industry needs to do more, and Barclays needs to do more on transition.
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Private credit funds are committing more to specialist non-bank lenders such as iwoca, seeing big potential in small business credits, even if NPLs are set to climb.
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Some leading FX banks have struggled to stay competitive in forwards, swaps and swaptions thanks to SA-CCR rules, but compressing portfolios helps.
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While big US banks edge slowly towards exchange-like trading of loans, a group of market veterans have tested a system in Asia and will soon launch in Europe.
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Appetite for corporate issuance remains robust as investors dismiss recession fears and take on credit exposure.
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Strong collective-action campaigns might hurt some banks' reputations, but they will do little to convince those institutions to change their energy policies.
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Going all out to keep the sell side sweet seems a sensible strategy for success in the difficult P2P FX market.
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The recent update to the green taxonomy and implementation of the SFDR RTS have received a mixed reception in parts of the EU.
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With little likelihood of currency volatility subsiding any time soon, corporates continue to face difficult decisions when it comes to how best to mitigate FX risk.
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Some issuers are grabbing the opportunities offered by a new capital markets year. Others would do well to face reality sooner rather than later.
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Macroeconomic disruptions and regulatory scrutiny will drive market participants to adopt a practical environmental, social and governance strategy in the year ahead – one that is less about narrative and more about materiality.
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It seems difficult to convince investors that higher bank profits are sustainable.
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As Europe’s economic mood sours, a sharp rise in interest rates is putting commercial real estate through its first big cyclical turn since 2008. The non-bank sector, which has become a vital enabler of funding at higher leverage, now faces a test of its resilience.
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First Abu Dhabi Bank looked long and hard at Standard Chartered, and others will do the same so long as it’s cheap. But any suitor must win the approval of Temasek.
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The European Commission has mandated instant payments across the eurozone, and banks must urgently ensure that their payment systems are fit for purpose.
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The ECB is barely half way through raising rates. Quantitative tightening will further raise the cost of debt in 2023, and is set to test bond market capacity.
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AT1s rallied on news that UBS will redeem a key deal in January. But with refinancing costs higher than coupon re-sets, the pressure now passes to other big banks.
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The UK government has launched a sprawling range of measures to reform the country’s financial sector and markets. But the moves were mostly already under way – it is really all about the optics.
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While there are some entertaining items – one country banning meat, the UK voting to UnBrexit – Saxo sees recession failing to halt inflation with the world economy on a war footing.
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On December 1, EU member states agreed on a general approach for the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. The final text shields banks from their full responsibility to prevent environmental harm, thanks in part to France’s post-Brexit ambitions.
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As a long recession looms for the UK, past successes may be a sign of future problems.
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Concerns about the wider economy and its impact on disposable income have eroded individuals’ appetite for FX trading, despite attractive levels of volatility.
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While other economic blocs aren’t so convinced of the merits of issuing retail central bank digital currency, the eurozone is ploughing ahead. In doing so, however, it is having to water down the project to such an extent that its usefulness will be limited.
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Shareholders will be keenly watching two market levels for Credit Suisse shares in the weeks ahead: the theoretical ex-rights price and the subscription price for the capital increase that is under way.
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Societe Generale and AllianceBernstein may look like an equities odd couple. Leveraging Societe Generale’s derivatives franchise is key to the new joint venture, as is maintaining AllianceBernstein’s reputation for independence.
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Credit Suisse directors may sigh with relief that shareholders have approved the latest capital raise, but they are already guiding to yet another big loss.
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Most governments would have been delighted to do what Iceland managed with its sale of Íslandsbanki shares earlier this year. But an audit of the deal has triggered a war of words with the body responsible for it, as well as some very odd conclusions from an Excel spreadsheet.
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After 12 years of near continuous restructuring and capital raising at Credit Suisse, the longest-serving chief financial officer of any G-Sib bank offers a few parting lessons.
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Euromoney meets Damian Payiatakis, Barclays Private Bank’s head of sustainable and impact investing, to talk about how quiet private wealth has been so far at the UN Climate Change Conference.
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The country has one of the world’s best-performing economies with one of the few emerging market currencies to be appreciating against the dollar. It also has large numbers of highly skilled Russians fleeing across the border to avoid conscription. National Bank of Georgia governor Koba Gvenetadze speaks to Euromoney.
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NatWest digital SME bank Mettle has broken new ground in its partnership with Polish fintech firm Vodeno.
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HSBC’s outgoing CFO, Ewen Stevenson, has mounted a robust case for the bank’s cost performance in an intriguing call with analysts that also featured an appearance by his replacement, Georges Elhedery. As he prepares to leave the bank, Stevenson defended his legacy by taking on the firm’s arch-critic, Ping An.
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The German bank’s strong third-quarter earnings are a partial result of forming a new international private bank division two years ago, honing it and continuing to invest in the strategy.
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Market experts fear that continued inflation and poor growth mean that many currencies are vulnerable to the pressure that the UK has seen recently.
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European banks have raced far ahead of their US peers on sustainability. But the continent is now facing an energy emergency, creating pressure from some corners to reverse investment declines in oil and gas. Can Europe’s banks remain frontrunners in sustainable finance in today’s fragile geopolitical environment?
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The biggest IPO in Europe for a decade has not generated the kind of excitement that might have been expected in calmer times. Porsche’s flotation was solid enough, but its structure and unusual nature make it a poor proxy for the broader equity capital markets business, which is on its knees.
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Bankers are sending mixed messages about market strains. Dire warnings about year-end pressures, pleas for regulatory help and assurances that banks can sort this out are being deployed simultaneously.
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Credit Suisse has finally lifted the lid on its reorganization. But for all the frenzy of deal making it now plans, questions still remain over whether recasting the investment bank as a nostalgic partnership with a throwback name is the answer to the bank's strategic problems.
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The UK’s humiliation after bond investors rejected its mini-budget and sparked a liquidity crisis threatening the country’s pension funds holds two lessons for the rest of the global financial system. First, more markets will break down thanks to rising rates. Second, the battle everywhere between central banks fighting inflation and governments seeking to sustain economies and manage the cost of vast stocks of public debt will define finance for years to come.
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Growthfund was formed six years ago as a steward for Greek state-owned enterprises in the hope of improving and extracting value from them. As chief executive Gregory Dimitriadis explains, its ambitions now include investment, emission reduction and enabling the flow of capital from the Middle East.
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The weakness of the pound and strength of the dollar has implications for companies on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Boutique investment bank DAI Magister suggests donor funds could catalyse private equity and debt investment in climate tech, the big theme of COP27.
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UK pension fund hedges have failed the first real stress test in a new era of rising interest rates. Bankers are surprisingly relaxed about the implications for other threats to global systemic stability.
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In public at least, the Bank of England has been determined to end its gilts intervention when it said it would, but it’s getting harder for the BoE to manage its conflicts – and the market doesn’t know what to believe any more.
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Regulators want to prevent greenwashing; corporates need to abide by the rules. What happens when science doesn’t help?
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With domestic retail borrowers under rising pressure, does political risk matter more than strong profitability and capital buffers at UK banks?
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While the UK government remains unwilling to make notable concessions on its economic policies, the Bank of England will struggle to restore confidence in the embattled pound.
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Societe Generale has exited, and Citi is winding down in retail, but the two biggest remaining Western European players in Russia are also spending a lot of time working out their exposures and operations in the country.
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The French bank has continued its string of direct investments in fintechs this year and is looking for more with VC fund Anthemis.
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Societe Generale’s choice of Slawomir Krupa to succeed Frédéric Oudéa suggests an approach of riding out the storm and continuing elements of Oudéa’s recent strategy, rather than any radical change.
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A new job running Bayern Munich's finances could be more rewarding for HVB CEO Michael Diederich, especially after UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel’s push for more cuts in Germany.
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Clearing up after the government’s mess will only provide a short break in the repricing of UK risk.
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The things that attracted Lone Star to Bank of Cyprus are present in banks in Greece and elsewhere in peripheral Europe. If other private equity-like investors take an interest, domestic political blessing could be the key to success.
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Not long ago, correspondent banking was as basic as finance got. These days it is compliance and cost-heavy and in the crosshairs of aggressive and powerful regulators. Little wonder that so many banks are exiting small or fragile markets – actions that help their bottom line but hinder efforts at financial inclusion.
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Fossil fuel assets were set to become obsolete in the transition to net zero. But the war in Ukraine is forcing European governments to secure alternative energy sources and driving demand for coal, oil and gas back in the wrong direction. With the global energy transition seemingly pitched against national energy security agendas, banks are trying to navigate a difficult path through the turmoil.
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Issuing bank debt used to be easy. But with many banks now crowding through the same narrow issuance windows, even high-quality issuers have barely covered the books on some deals. And as non-performing loans look set to rise, investors are worrying that the boon from higher rates won’t last.
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With far-right leader Giorgia Meloni now set to become Italy’s new prime minister, can policies put in place by her predecessor – coupled with reputational self-help – prevent Italian banks from taking another hit?
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Kwasi Kwarteng’s debt-funded tax giveaway has re-priced UK risk at a stroke, but the high cost may bring scarce benefit.
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The recent multi-decade lows experienced by the pound and the yen may have different origins, but they are also a reminder that history has a habit of repeating itself.
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When Margeir Pétursson bought Bank Lviv in 2006, he had much to learn about operating a bank in a country permanently in Russia’s crosshairs. Talking to Euromoney six months after the invasion, he says there is opportunity among the chaos in this key Ukrainian city.
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PrivatBank chief executive Gerhard Boesch looks to the future and the bank’s war-delayed privatization.
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Oleksandr Pysaruk, chief executive of Raiffeisen Bank Ukraine, describes how contingency planning for war rapidly morphed into the real thing.
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Despite the Russian bombs pounding Ukraine, there have been no wartime bank runs, no bank collapses or even the suggestion of a systemic wobble. That is largely thanks to the work of former National Bank of Ukraine governor Valeria Gontareva. She tells Euromoney that the time for further reform to the stricken country’s banking sector is now.
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Removing UK bonus caps and undermining the BoE could exacerbate a sterling crisis while entrenching US IB dominance.
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China has in the past felt compelled to accept the terms of IMF programmes in struggling nations without due consideration of its own views.
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Smaller firms are expected to pull back on expenditure as recession risk rises.
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The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have brutally exposed the fragility of global supply chains.
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As the world’s biggest investment banks prepare to report third-quarter earnings in October, the signals are bad across the board.
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India’s refusal to take a side over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is typical of a geopolitical approach that aims to keep everyone onside – to India’s advantage. Doing so helps the country to keep inflation in check, the one threat to an exceptionally powerful domestic story that is enticing the banking sector.
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The Netherlands wants biodiversity to be at the forefront of agricultural reform. But the government’s plan to buy out livestock farmers – which was behind the resignation of agriculture minister Henk Staghouwer last week – is a short-sighted solution.
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Anti-ESG boycotts are unlikely to cross the Atlantic.
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Bank of Cyprus has its quirks – such as a sanctioned oligarch as a large shareholder – but it is far from the only European bank with good potential still shunned by mainstream investors.
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Banks must keep spending on systems that deliver more efficient anti-money laundering as crises spur financial crime.
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When the founders of Belgian digital disruptor Abbove held a meeting with 120 wealthy families, all had the same tale of woe, unable to grasp the complexity of their money and getting little help from their private bankers. Abbove set out to create a platform to let them do just that.
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The government is prepared to take drastic measures to reduce the nitrogen produced by livestock. But as farmers resist being pushed out of a profitable sector, the dispute demonstrates the cost of turning climate agendas into a race to cut emissions as quickly as possible.
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Ukraine’s recent debt restructuring agreements with international bondholders give it a better prospect of returning to market once its war with Russia ends. But the IMF – more used to pulling countries out of purely economic crises – faces a policy challenge in assisting a country at war.
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The market is awash with speculation over what Credit Suisse might do in its latest strategic reset, and what the future is for its perennially underperforming investment bank. But as talk mounts of radical cuts to come in that division, the real challenge lies elsewhere.
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Banks may soon match energy companies for political unpopularity – posting soaring profits, even as customers struggle with the cost-of-living crisis, and higher interest rates. To safeguard their long-term interests, banks need to show much greater social awareness in their actions.
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In what was supposed to be a banner year for Poland’s banks, free universal mortgage holidays are set to halve profits in the sector in 2022. Many fear the government will extend the policy as elections approach in 2023. Are Poland’s attacks on mortgage interest margins in the name of fighting Russia-fuelled inflation a sign of things to come elsewhere?
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With Turkey maintaining its ties with Russia, the risk of secondary sanctions against Turkish banks rises. But even if such sanctions are targeted, the central bank’s policies are already risking a deeper crisis.
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One of the architects of Deutsche Bank’s corporate and investment bank leaves a complex legacy.
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With more than 220 million homes to renovate, banks must provide the necessary funding to avoid being left with non-compliant housing assets. But a lack of standardized data on energy performance certificates makes it difficult to justify lending to some homeowners.
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The European Central Bank has made it clear that it would look favourably on big bank mergers to create stronger pan-eurozone lenders. But M&A between large lenders in different eurozone states is still stalling through financial and political fragmentation – despite hopes for a closer union after Brexit and the war in Ukraine.
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UK regulators have pushed big banks to establish an innovative form of payment that could leave fintechs struggling.
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Getting rid of Natixis’ minority shareholders has helped the investment bank use the strength of mutual group BPCE’s balance sheet, says divisional leader Nicolas Namias. There are some signs it’s making a positive difference.
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The European Central Bank has gone out of its way to encourage cross-border mergers that might strengthen the single market in banking. Supervisory board member Edouard Fernandez-Bollo tells Euromoney that this could include mergers between large institutions.
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While Germany fires up its coal-burning power stations once more, it’s almost as if the country itself is protesting.
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If Russia stops the gas this winter, the damage to European banks will be worse than Covid, and Germany will be at the centre of the storm.
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HSBC’s interim result shows that banks are drawing a line under pandemic-related provisions, while simultaneously setting aside new ones for the disease’s economic cure. All banks must make this transition, but HSBC has other things to worry about besides: a campaign from China’s Ping An to split the bank in half.
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UK policymakers are trapped between reducing inflation and boosting the flagging economy.
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A new chairman and chief executive at the Swiss bank once again struggle with how to build an investment bank for tomorrow from one that is floundering badly today.
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Corporate bond deals in euros are now a rarity as issuers and investors struggle to judge the new price of credit.
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While ING is paring back the retail-banking ambitions held dear by former CEO Ralph Hamers, sustainable finance is helping the wholesale bank become a growth engine for the group.
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Markets welcome surprise 50bp hike but question new bond-buying programme and ECB’s capacity to judge spread widening as unwarranted.
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Raffael Gasser is a hybrid: part Zurich wealth manager, part Silicon Valley disruptor. He was tasked with crunching data to serve ‘classic’ PB customers who sit just below the ultra-wealthy segment and are often, curiously, overlooked. Here is how he got on.
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China’s support for Russia is part of its strategy to reduce the world’s dependence on the greenback – might it work?
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Supply-chain disruption has driven up corporate stock holdings. Firms may move excess inventory off balance sheet.
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Wealth managers are keen to engage with clients on biodiversity, but concerns over liquidity and access pose challenges to retail and private clients.
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Best Investment Bank: Trigon
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The transaction services franchise at UniCredit combines an international network with much deeper regional coverage than other banks, typically US rivals, which lack the same network in central and eastern Europe.
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Despite selling some retail banks in central and eastern Europe to OTP, mostly in smaller markets, Societe Generale remains heavily involved in financing in this region under its global banking and advisory unit, led in CEE, Middle East and Africa by Denis Stas de Richelle. In Czech Republic and Romania, SocGen’s international banking operations are plugged into its local universal banks. But even as it has sold banks in other countries, it has sought to hold on to its sovereign and corporate clients there. It also enjoys a cooperation agreement with OTP in corporate and investment banking.
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Euromoney's Country Awards for Excellence 2022: Central and Eastern Europe
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Despite its growth into one of biggest banks in Romania, small and medium-sized enterprises remain core to the strategy of Banca Transilvania and SMEs constitute a large proportion of its lending. In 2021, its SME loan portfolio reached L19.2 billion ($4.06 billion), with L3.7 billion of new loans during the year, reaching 18,000 SMEs and micro-enterprises.
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Greater support for capital-light investment banking business at UniCredit since the arrival of Andrea Orcel as chief executive in early 2021 is fostering a change in mindset in the firm’s advisory franchise. The region’s best bank for advisory also brought support in terms of product and sector expertise thanks to hires in Munich and Milan. That’s adding to the bank’s existing advantages in terms of geographic coverage, which includes around 50 M&A bankers spread across eight central and eastern European markets.
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Turkish banks are known across Europe for their advances in digital banking. This is often attributed to a relative lack of legacy IT infrastructure, but it’s also due to early investments in digital banking, as well as factors such as a younger retail base in the home market.
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Central and eastern Europe’s best bank for corporate responsibility this year inevitably goes to an institution that has focused on aid for Ukrainian refugees. For many banks in the region, this was an overwhelming priority during the first days and weeks of the war.
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Wealth management in central and eastern Europe is undergoing a period of rapid and fundamental reorientation after the invasion of Ukraine and the accompanying international financial isolation of Russia.
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Erste Group’s long-term focus on European Union states in central and southeastern Europe proved to be particularly well judged this year. Other big banks in this region now face billions of euros of losses in Russia and major headaches in managing their operations in that state. Erste is the only major regional lender with negligible direct exposure to Russia.
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In investment banking, deals were already becoming harder to do in central and eastern Europe before Russia invaded Ukraine, as interest rates began to creep up in the second half of 2021. Executing deals has since become even harder both because of the war and because of those rate rises.
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With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatening vital energy supplies to central and eastern Europe, sustainable finance initiatives – especially in renewable energy – are more important than ever. Regional banks are increasingly focusing on sustainable finance and this year the bank that stands out is ING, CEE’s best bank for sustainable finance.
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Best Bank: Lloyds Banking Group
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BNP Paribas is western Europe’s best bank for financing. It ranks first in the Dealogic bookrunner rankings in debt capital markets, ahead of Deutsche Bank in second place, JPMorgan in third, Barclays in fourth and HSBC fifth.
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While it has been a leader for many years in European debt and loan financing, BNP Paribas has in recent years built out its secondary markets businesses. It now includes a full service offering in equities as well as fixed income currencies and commodities (FICC) across research, secondary markets, prime services, derivatives and capital markets.
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Best Bank: CaixaBank
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CaixaBank has its roots in corporate responsibility. It was founded in 1904 with the aim of fostering savings, retirement planning and disability insurance for the working class. The bank provides an interesting blueprint for CSR today through two institutions: the La Caixa Foundation and MicroBank, its specialist microlender.
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As European banks fight back against neobanks such as N26, Wise, Starling, Monzo and Revolut that are taking more of the incumbents’ market share and competing across every service area, it is the Spanish banks who look best placed to match them.
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Best Investment Bank: Barclays
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Small and medium-sized enterprises are particularly vulnerable to the economic shocks that have buffeted the region in recent months. Any bank that serves these businesses needs to be acutely aware of the challenges they face and have deep experience across the region in how to deal with them.
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Best Bank: BNP Paribas Fortis
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The region's best banks, country by country
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In a record 12 months for M&A volumes, the big US banks dominated the revenue and volume league tables in Europe while, as usual, Rothschild advised on a higher number of transactions than any other firm.
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Banking in Europe remains a national sport, with only a handful of domestic champions also running large businesses beyond their home markets. Banco Santander is recognized as the region’s best bank this year as a reflection of its progress in moving operations in Portugal, Spain and the UK onto a single operating platform along with those in Poland, which it also includes in its Europe division.
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Western Europe’s best bank for wealth management this year is UBS. In Euromoney’s private banking and wealth management survey for 2022 the Swiss bank held off a stern challenge from JPMorgan to be named once again as the leading provider in the region.
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Best Investment Bank: BNP Paribas
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Always a strong candidate in this category, BNP Paribas has made great progress in its ambitious decarbonization commitments this year, in addition to prioritizing high social-impact and inclusive-finance goals.
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The geopolitical shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the end of the awards period has compounded the challenges faced by treasury teams that were emerging from the impact of the Covid pandemic. The ability to assist corporates facing severe stress in their supply chains or in their working-capital requirements quickly, flexibly and effectively is a must under these conditions. UniCredit is again named western Europe’s best bank for transaction services in recognition of the progress that it has made in this regard.
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The International Chamber of Commerce is confident the UK Centre for Digital Trade & Innovation will spur standards.
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Banks want to capitalize on the surge in green capex borrowing as corporates rush to decarbonize. Cost inflation has increased the risks involved but not the long-term benefit of carbon reduction.
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The idea of capping the price of Russian oil and gas exports sounds good in theory, but it might be better to test methods for energy rationing.
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Private companies are doing everything they can to avoid down rounds, raising new equity at lower valuations than past deals, but can’t hold the line for much longer.
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As investors and dealers struggle with inflation levels not seen for 40 years, the only good news is that markets are still functioning… for now.
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Markets are trading interest-rate expectations over actual rate decisions – proving the power of market sentiment.
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Digitalizing and automating its FX risk management has notably improved a pharma's treasury function.
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Stress tests mean that banks must assess their own climate impact. The glaring data gaps will close as the science progresses and methodologies evolve.
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Spikes in shipping prices have hit mid- and lower-tier commodity trading companies at a time of bank caution.
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The banking industry has become frustrated by slow regulatory progress as it waits for necessary standardization of climate risk assessments and disclosure policies to meet net-zero targets.
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Rising interest margins help Spain’s biggest domestic bank more than most, but intense competition in mortgages means that fee-earning products are still vital.
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FX analysts have diverging views on the prospects for the euro over the coming months, after a bank research warning.
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European corporates saw losses from currency volatility fall late last year, so hedging has stayed largely unchanged.
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Bernd Spalt’s rift with his board shows Austria’s biggest bank is still finding its way in the post-Treichl era, even as it outperforms peers.
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The currency’s fairly benign passage through the early months of 2022 is now under threat from a variety of factors, including spiralling inflation, the cost of supporting the currency and even a growing interest in cryptocurrency.
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Artificial intelligence has revolutionized cash-flow forecasting at educational services provider Pearson.
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The UK Electronic Trade Documents Bill is expected to greatly improve access to trade finance, particularly for contracts that use English law.
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Providers of business-to-business buy-now-pay-later services believe that they can provide a competitive alternative to invoice factoring. As rates rise, however, the risks embedded in the process will only grow.
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With the US Federal Reserve apparently keen to step up the pace of interest-rate rises over the coming months, it is not just emerging market currencies that are expected to suffer.
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Bank privatizations are never simple, but the outcry that has erupted in Iceland over a recent sale of Íslandsbanki shares looks set to halt the programme in its tracks – despite the overwhelming success of the bank’s landmark IPO in 2021. With state holding company ISFI now under threat of being closed down, its head takes Euromoney through the drama of the last 12 months.
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As their involvement in fintech matures, large banks are focusing on building standalone digital businesses rather than just taking stakes in third-party startups through venture capital funds and accelerators. Can these new in-house ventures disprove the thesis that incumbent banks can’t create disruptive business models?
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The first three months of the year have been tough for many investment banking business lines, but Europe’s banks are putting up a good fight against the might of the US firms.
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Payment service providers have welcomed the UK Payment Systems Regulator’s plan to promote account-to-account payments, but much needs to be done to boost take-up.
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The global cryptocurrency platform is sponsoring the relaunch of a 122-year-old live music venue in London.
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The Swiss bank is still paying for its misdeeds, but this might be a taste of what’s to come for others.
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Kyrylo Shevchenko, governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, has been corresponding with Euromoney as war rages in his country. Here he tells us how the central bank has kept the banking system operational and protected the currency in extraordinary circumstances.
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In a volatile equity market, asset managers may now pay the price for having concentrated research spend on analysts from a few bulge-bracket firms.
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Credit Suisse is making heavy work of meeting its obligations under a 2017 RMBS settlement with the US Department of Justice. If it wants to make real progress, it will have to bite the bullet soon.
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BNP Paribas’s top private banker talks to Euromoney about his love of Brittany’s rough seas, the power of ESG, and digital’s ability to transform and improve every step of the client journey.
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Treasurers need to reassess their approach to interest-rate hedging as monetary policy on either side of the Atlantic continues to diverge.
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If the French company cuts greenhouse gas emissions, it will use savings on loan margin to finance sustainability projects: if it doesn’t, its banks will fund them.
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While Amundi’s new ECM desk seeks the best investor roles from lead banks, Bernstein Research sees the chance for a new kind of ECM business.
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Crédit Agricole’s purchase of a 9.18% in Banco BPM could have benefits, even if it doesn’t presage a full takeover.
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The European Central Bank has radical suggestions for ending AT1 conversion triggers and allowing only profitable banks to pay coupons. This could make these instruments riskier than equity.
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SocGen’s deal to sell Russian lender Rosbank back to Vladimir Potanin’s Interros Capital is painful, but could help it to move on from the war in Ukraine.
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The UK bank’s new fund aims to deliver metaverse-themed investment opportunities to wealthy clients in Hong Kong and Singapore.
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Without Russia, Raiffeisen will be a different entity – one focused on safer countries in the former Habsburg heartlands. The low home-market profitability that Russia once served to mitigate, however, will be more evident than ever.
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A number of commodity currencies have received an unexpected boost from the conflict in Ukraine as Western economies look to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels from Russia more rapidly than previously planned.
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Banks need to be hyper-vigilant as threats grow from both malign and accidental disruption.
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A combination of geographical position and commodity strength is working in the country’s favour.
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The financial frontline of Russia’s war in Ukraine runs through the offices of overworked sanctions officers at banks everywhere. It is their job to freeze the accounts and assets of sanctioned oligarchs. The pressure is colossal: get it wrong or act too slow, and the impact on a bank’s brand and bottom line will be felt for years to come.
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The war in Ukraine has further highlighted the benefits of Banco Santander’s diversification across Europe and the Americas, according to executive chairman Ana Botín. However, its European home market may be a big disadvantage in Citi’s looming auction of Mexican lender Banamex.
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ESG has been an intense focus for banks in recent years – not least for their communications teams. But with war in Ukraine, ESG has hit its first real test – and the talking has stopped.
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Margin hikes are raising the table stakes in markets from commodities to stock loans. Margins may be a better risk signal than curiously subdued measures like the ViX index of equity volatility.
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The Russia-Ukraine war is a sobering reminder for all treasurers that geopolitical risk can escalate rapidly. The importance of forward planning cannot be overstated.
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How can sanctions work when banks spend billions on box-ticking compliance, but criminals still easily launder vast sums through the banking system?
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The provider of embedded banking to UK fintechs heads to Europe after its technology achieves speedy implementation of Russian sanctions screening.
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JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi and Credit Suisse hope more banks will join their syndicated loans platform Versana. Greater efficiency and transparency could also attract new capital to the market.
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When a group of leading banks were unable to source the roubles needed to deliver in settlement of FX swaps, compression trades saved the day. The episode serves to highlight how fragile very large, complex and interconnected financial markets have become.
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What practical steps do banks have to take when a client falls foul of a sanction list?
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After the 2020 sale of its US bank, BBVA’s global ambitions in retail are alive and well. It has entered Brazil with digital bank Neon, ploughed more capital into UK app-based lender Atom Bank and launched in Italy in a way that presages branchless growth across the eurozone.
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Western governments need to wise up to how smart Putin and his people are at hiding and moving their money.
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Despite the current financial turmoil, proponents of de-dollarization still have a mountain to climb. But blockchain and digital currencies could put their goal within eventual reach.
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Where do the borders of ESG lie – now and in the future? Investors from the US to China are revisiting these questions and finding thorny and often unpalatable answers, even as they dump Russian assets for ethical reasons. The results are set to shape the financial world’s relationship with sustainability for years to come.
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The early days of war in Ukraine saw the price of bitcoin rise. New technology now improves the prospect that wealth stored in crypto may be spent.
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As the US takes action to tighten sanctions on Russia by banning energy imports, Europe is trying to pull together a plan to wean itself off Russian gas through greater use of LNG and renewables.
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The last big Wall Street broker-dealer has had a spectacular run in the last 20 years. It now wants to build ‘the best world-class global investment bank’.
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It has been a tough few years for Europe’s banks, but they finally seemed to be firmly on the road to recovery in early 2022. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Will the financial turmoil that follows derail the sector’s hard-fought-for revival?
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The prospect of China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System vying with or supplanting Swift grabbed attention in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But CIPS isn’t ready for the big time. It is too small and underdeveloped, and is a policy vehicle dominated by Beijing for the purpose of globalizing the yuan.
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Western governments hope Russian citizens will blame the regime of president Vladimir Putin and seek change. That is a gamble.
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In just a few years, the New Eurasian Land Bridge, which conveys rail freight between China and Europe, became a key part of Beijing’s fading Belt and Road Initiative. Thanks to sanctions levied against state operator Russian Railways, that vital trade link threatens to be disrupted – and possibly severed.
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With little chance of a swift resolution to the conflict in Ukraine, the effect on FX markets is being felt well beyond the bounds of the former Soviet Union. But not all reactions have been typical for a crisis.
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Oligarchs that use shell companies and fake identities may dodge the pain of Russian banks being shut out from Swift, heaping it on innocent people instead.
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Several sovereign funds have either pledged to leave Russia or are considering doing so. But how will they get out? Could their exit enrich those that sanctions are intended to penalize?
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ING and Intesa Sanpaolo could take bigger hits than Societe Generale in a ‘walk-away’ scenario, according to Autonomous Research.
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Jane Fraser can front Citi’s investor day with good news about consumer divestments in Asia. It is hard to see a Russia sale now, though.
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Exclusive: The head of Ukraine’s largest bank tells Euromoney that it is refilling ATMs and keeping branches open even as Russian attacks intensify.
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The US has named Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and its chief executive in strikingly harsh language as part of its sanctions package. Is RDIF ‘a slush fund for president Vladimir Putin’ or a legitimate vehicle ‘building international relations and supporting constructive ties’?
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Decades of work have been put into building Russia’s financial system. Putin’s war is destroying it overnight.
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Russians could try to use cryptocurrencies to dodge sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine, but a move into the mainstream by crypto exchange heads hungry for fiat currency wealth will complicate evasion tactics.
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In the raging crisis between Russia and Ukraine, fixed income bankers picking over a disrupted new issuance market are finding echoes of the start of the coronavirus pandemic. But they warn that the conflict is only worsening inflation concerns – and that central banks are in a bigger bind than ever.
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For Putin, the threat of expulsion from Swift carries far less weight than it did in 2014. Russia’s own system for transfer of financial messages can now settle domestic transactions, but the move would still trigger a deep recession in the country.
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Russia’s incursion dispels vain hopes of manageable tail risk and heralds a bear market correction.
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Energy price volatility driven by war in Ukraine could deliver a windfall to banks such as Goldman Sachs that retain scale in commodity trading. Profits from dealing can also be made without triggering ESG or sanctions-related pain.
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If regulated investors are to buy bonds on blockchain, incumbent infrastructure providers such as CSDs must embrace the very technology that threatens their traditional role.
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Even the most optimistic observers anticipate a few bumps along the road as the securities lending industry adapts to the new settlement discipline regime imposed under the CSDR.
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Public blockchains have been shown to allow near immediate settlement of new issues. Why aren’t the primary markets embracing them?
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The rates sell-off is making it more expensive for high-yield and high-grade borrowers to access the bond markets. Maturities on offer are shortening, and it could be about to get much worse.
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After a generation of low inflation, rising consumer and business costs have leapt to the top of the list of factors influencing FX pricing.
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The specialist loan servicer and portfolio manager has grown fast but sees high demand from banks and investors to manage illiquid credit.
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SoftBank’s likely choice of the US to list Arm might say something about UK equity investor culture, but using it as evidence that London reform efforts are failing is a step too far.
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The next decade will be one of exceptional value creation in the birthplace of private banking. European entrepreneurs are handing the reins of mid-sized Mittelstand firms to the next generation, while others sell out to global investors and venture capital firms.
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A city packed with private banks is quietly serving the needs of a large and wealthy part of northern Germany, yet it remains generally unnoticed as a wealth management powerhouse.
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The launch of ISY Bank spearheads a new cloud-banking strategy at the Italian lender as it seeks to reduce costs, counter fintech and target international retail growth.
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Share buybacks are suddenly commonplace in European banking, as supervisors are more wary about touching dividends – and because banks lack better use for their new capital surpluses.
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In his first year as chief executive, Andrea Orcel has backed out of a deal to buy Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena and prioritized capital distributions at UniCredit. However, his flirtation with an acquisition in Russia has shown that the bank can still raise eyebrows. Orcel talks to Euromoney about the bank’s biggest opportunities and how M&A can help realize them.
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Trading update does little to answer concerns around underlying performance and a slowdown in wealth management.
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Early in the Covid crisis, CACIB avoided the big equity derivatives losses its local rivals suffered. Chief executive Jacques Ripoll tells Euromoney how the bank plans to take advantage of the rise of sustainable finance, which plays to its long-standing expertise in infrastructure and energy.
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Nicolas Cailly, head of payments and cash management at Societe Generale, is responsible for growing the French bank’s cash-management franchise. He tells Euromoney why the bank’s new treasury offering is a step forward for TMS implementation.
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Brought in to help clean up Credit Suisse, the high-profile Portuguese banker has been forced to quit to preserve what is left of its reputation.
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Douglas Flint, former HSBC chair and current chairman of Abrdn, talks to Euromoney about climate change, his hope for the future and how he convinced CEO Stephen Bird to join the firm over fish and chips and a pint in an Edinburgh pub.
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It took all of six days of the new year before the tone was set: XP Inc’s announcement of its acquisition of Banco Modal. The deal will need regulatory approval, but is being warmly endorsed by the target’s management and its minority shareholder, Credit Suisse.
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As legacy banks plough billions into fintech, their valuations – especially compared to standalone fintech players – are far from seeing the desired benefit. Spin-offs and subsidiary IPOs are part of a growing push to make these fintech investments more independent and visible, and to force a sum-of-parts valuation. Is the answer to restructure into a listed financial holding company, of which the legacy bank would just be one part?
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LeasePlan’s absorption by Societe Generale-owned ALD comes at the same time as rumours of a takeover by SocGen of ING France, potentially adding to digital bank Boursorama’s growth.
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Many observers remain unconvinced about the Scottish government’s official currency if the country were ever to gain independence.
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The Swiss firm’s decision to sell specialist Zurich-based wealth manager Wergen & Partner is the latest in a series of M&A deals. Expect more activity as private banks expand into new markets, or exit non-core markets to focus resources and invest in technology.
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Sustainable account allows corporates to measure the impact of the sustainable finance assets their deposits are referenced against.
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The digital banking expert and recently appointed chair of the UK board of Zip is confident that the buy-now-pay-later sector has nothing to fear from forthcoming regulation.
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BNP Paribas has in effect ruled out using the proceeds of its US retail bank sale on big bank M&A in Europe.
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Gerard Tuinenburg, director systems, processes and transactional banking at Unilever treasury, explains how the company is improving its cash forecasting efficiency through enhanced use of treasury data.
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Liquidnet’s network of asset managers might see big benefits from automating new issue data and workflows from TC Icap’s bank customers.
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Executive chairman Ana Botín will be under pressure after adverse ruling in Madrid
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It might have the wind in its sails, but the bank will need to be nimble and smart if it is to find success in its three principle aims.
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Now back at single-A with both leading rating agencies, Deutsche hopes to win more business and improve margins as investors await their share of the returns.
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Losing your chief executive in messy circumstances is never a good look, but Barclays does at least have momentum in its investment bank as it looks for a fresh start in 2022.
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Beyond the headline-grabbing talks on buying Banca Monte dei Paschi, the new chief executive has radically reshaped the bank as he seeks to better harness its potential.
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Greater regulatory clarity, and perhaps a sale of Bank of the West, leave the French bank with the happy dilemma of what to do with excess capital.
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Ralph Hamers is quietly imposing his vision on UBS, axing senior titles to simplify the structure and eyeing a new US digital bank for affluent customers.
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Credit Suisse’s hopes for 2021 were dashed by March, thanks to Greensill’s collapse and Archegos’s implosion. It really needs 2022 to go well.
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StanChart had more to lose than most from the disruption of Covid – and more to gain as the markets where it operates recover.
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Being France’s biggest retail bank might not sound as appealing as it once was. But Crédit Agricole’s management is focused on the growing number of additional products it is plugging into the network.
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After years when the UK and the US banks were Santander’s problem children, those markets are now leading its recovery.
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A year ago, Sber’s stellar profitability looked to be under threat. This year, it has defied the doubters and has just unveiled record net profit for the first nine months of the year.
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Chief executive Andrea Orcel’s new plan for UniCredit has little of the asset-selling drama of his predecessor. Whether it works better than the old strategy may be longer in the telling.
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At the end of each year, Euromoney takes a close look at the performance of 25 key institutions that we cover. Speaking to senior executives at these firms, we assess what went right and what didn’t, together with what might lie ahead. This year, we have also examined the views of those at the top on two important factors for 2022: their own and others’ asset quality, and the disruptive threat of China. Their observations are discussed in the two features below, followed by our reports for 2021 on the Euromoney 25.
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Rising inflation expectations matter to the banking industry. Santander CEO José Antonio Álvarez explains, however, that negative real rates will probably persist for the next five or 10 years because of Covid.
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A new index aggregates corporate profitability, asset values and debt service capacity, and shows worrying signs of stress even amid low default rates.
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Turkey’s currency continues to flounder, with hardline president Erdoğan apparently determined to prove that the best way to curb inflation is to reduce – rather than increase – interest rates.
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Emerging Europe has been slow to join the fight against climate change. Now the region’s biggest banking group is making its voice heard.
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Chief executive of commercial banking Doug Petno says advanced payments technology rather than lending is the key to winning mid-market clients.
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A second large AT1 deal this year shows increased investor confidence around the bank’s transformation, but timing the deal was tricky.
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Alexander Wynaendts has worked in insurance for a quarter of a century, but is not a stranger to investment banking.
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Perhaps it is not such a strange time to bet billions on Turkey’s economy.
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Businesses in the UK struggling under Covid-related debts are sitting on assets worth £1 trillion.
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Citi has announced a raft of EMEA region hires across Citi Global Wealth, launched in January. It’s a sign the new division is coming together.
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Rabobank CEO Wiebe Draijer says that private finance must have a role in financing the transition to a more sustainable, equitable and healthy way of feeding the planet.
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António Horta-Osório shifts more capital away from investment banking and into wealth management, while the executive team sells his risk management overhaul as a growth story.
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Questions over chief executive’s personal judgement finally end his successful stewardship of the UK lender.
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Policymakers in Moscow are finally promising to tackle climate change. Will the Russian private sector follow suit?
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Under new leadership and with new technology, the Dutch merchant bank pivots from shipping loans to digital lending to SMEs across Europe.
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The world’s oldest bank lives to see another day, but the taxpayer – and the local workforce – will pay a heavy price
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Spac sponsors in Europe are now offering a modest yield to investors for their cash and making part of their own promote performance-related. This has led to the completion of a couple of new listings in the region.
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Trading in sterling, listed on Amsterdam, searching for value not growth, offering higher rewards to investors, Europe’s first special purpose acquisition company in months is a ground-breaker.
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With local elections fuelling the political sensitivity of UniCredit’s mooted MPS deal, it will be even harder for CEO Andrea Orcel to secure both national support and investor returns.
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With in-house asset managers in vogue, UniCredit chief executive Andrea Orcel might try to revisit the bank’s sale of Pioneer to Amundi.
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Sustainable agriculture holds the key to reducing emissions and transforming the global food system, says Rabo Carbon Bank’s chief executive.
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Speakers at the IIF’s annual meetings play down worries over inflation, even as they recognise the short-term disruptions of the pandemic.
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Green bonds are still a tiny percentage of total market outstandings, so maybe borrowers making net-zero pledges should tie all their liabilities to them.
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The issuance of green bonds is that rare thing: a strategy on which the EU and UK agree. That is especially welcome because achieving net zero will require the participation of enormous volumes of private capital.
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Sovereign wealth involvement in football clubs has a chequered history. Saudi’s intentions with Newcastle are clearly about more than investment, but can these deals ever work?
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Credit Suisse’s chief sustainability officer is no ESG ideologue. She is at heart a hard-nosed investment banker who sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to guide clients to a more sustainable future.
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Macquarie Group chief executive Shemara Wikramanayake has laid out her bank’s ambitions in green energy, as its Green Investment Group reports a record portfolio.
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Francesca Nenci, the recently appointed global head of trade finance at UniCredit, talks to Euromoney about the bank’s trade finance business and the client trends that will shape her approach to her new position.
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The established banks have mixed feelings about the growth of buy-now-pay-later as they ponder new payment options that are undercutting lucrative credit-card transactions.
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As conventional banks, asset managers and regulators embrace crypto, the institution warns this large and volatile asset class poses new risks to the world financial system.
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Annual stress tests of bank balance sheets were one of the last decade’s most obvious supervisory responses to the global financial crisis. With a wave of new bottom-up assessments now getting under way, regulators hope to do something similar with climate risks. Can they do it or will this simply result in a toothless box-ticking exercise?
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Derivatives could turbocharge environmental, social and governance markets, with a related boost to bank revenues. However, they could also make it harder to monitor exposure.
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Gas price volatility is delivering profits to speculators. It is a reminder that carbon trading markets could face PR problems if energy dealers are viewed as big beneficiaries.
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Relief on dividends is not enough to propel the sector back to greatness.
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Sustainable finance and renewable energy are becoming more important for the French firm, as it reduces its emphasis on equity derivatives.
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Can multilateral development banks fight climate change while still promoting economic development in emerging markets? The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is the first to set out concrete plans on how to do this.
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Adewale Ogunleye was rich and already retired from American Football when he learned what a basis point was. He’s now head of a new UBS wealth segment called Athletes & Entertainers that helps sports icons and singers plan their financial future.
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After reaching 10 million users this month, the firm is raising funds and seeking licences in Turkey and the EU.
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Societe Generale’s decision to launch a joint treasury management solution with Kyriba is just the latest example of banks and technology vendors collaborating to offer more sophisticated treasury functionality.
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The US bank has launched the next generation of its global virtual account management solution to clients in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands.
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One of the stars of Estonia’s post-Soviet generation, André Küüsvek, talks to Euromoney about escaping lockdown in Kazakhstan, expanding the NIB’s environmental remit and the risks posed by rising inequality.
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While big banks and institutional investors spent years trying to bend blockchain for use in traditional finance, they missed out on the boom in crypto prices and the income from decentralized finance. Now, alarmed by stretched valuations and zero yields in conventional markets, they just want in. The race is on to build a sturdy infrastructure to support the stream of old money into new digital assets that could become a flood.
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A new analysis of European banks by ShareAction finds that while some firms distinguish themselves in some climate and biodiversity practices, the overall picture is of a sector that still has much work to do.
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Deutsche Bank’s restructuring has not been thrown off course by the pandemic, but upside surprises can hide risks. Discipline will be needed to avoid the temptations of the past.
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This time last year, Euromoney recognized progress at Deutsche Bank as the best transformation story of 2020. Twelve months on, the German lender might be getting its act together at last. Can it sustain its recovery?
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Two years ago, Deutsche pulled back in ECM. Now, in Asia, it wants back in.
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In September, the EU will issue bills through the auction system operated by the Banque de France for the French Trésor. But they will not immediately be a reference safe asset for European capital markets.
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A new anti-money laundering centre housed in the Baltic state’s central bank is growing and hiring fast. It aims to turn Lithuania into an AML hub – and to address and reverse the region’s questionable reputation.
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ESG issues are part of the package with emerging market sovereign bonds.
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As fintechs approach 10% of the banking and payments universe, the pioneer venture investor and founder of Capital One says banks must learn to partner with them or begin to lose ground.
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David Wildermuth, the new chief risk officer at Credit Suisse, may have much of the heavy lifting done by the time he arrives at his desk in Zurich.
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It is the deal everyone was waiting for – but UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel has to appear guarded, as he enters exclusive negotiations with Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena.
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Recent reports concerning a payment made by Deutsche Bank to Europe’s largest winery are a reminder that disputes over FX derivatives mis-selling have yet to run their course.
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The Swiss bank claims a resilient performance lies beneath the meagre returns after de-risking post-Archegos and Greensill, but big questions remain.
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More focus on keeping a client happy than keeping the bank solvent; a risk management department that wasn’t tough enough and enabled bad practice; a willful reduction in margin; and two co-heads who each believed the other ran the relevant business. The report into Credit Suisse’s Archegos debacle makes grim reading.
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The big question remains when governments will return to fiscal consolidation. How will NPLs fare when taxpayer support is withdrawn is also in doubt.
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Barclays wants to be compared with the big five US investment banks. So let’s do that.
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With investors already struggling to generate positive yields on most money market funds, managers are concerned that proposed legislative changes could render some funds unviable.
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The EU’s Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) is spurring talk of growth at Greek banks. But for their investors, it’s still all about last decade’s legacy.
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The $33 billion valuation in neobank Revolut’s latest funding round puts it in the same league as lenders with trillions of assets and billions in profit.
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Banks are slowly realising the commercial promise of data and data analytics products, but there is still a long way to go for many institutions to move beyond services that deliver limited business insight.
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As Covid cases surge, the widespread hope that economic growth will contain defaults and banks will emerge unscathed looks optimistic.
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Despite concerns over recent regulatory changes, synthetic risk transfers remain a key driver for business lending in markets where private investment is underdeveloped.
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A barnstorming year in primary equity markets and M&A advisory, combined with consistent and comprehensive debt capital markets coverage, earn Citi the award for the region’s best investment bank.
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The region's best banks, country by country
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Many banks could press strong claims to be western Europe’s best investment bank for the first year of Covid – when all issuers desperately needed financing, corporations and sovereigns sought strategic advice and investors required ideas and liquidity to rapidly adjust market exposures.
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Sustainable finance is rapidly gaining traction in the Turkish banking sector, with Akbank, Isbank, Vakifbank and Ziraat Bank all issuing ESG-labelled bonds in the year to the end of March.
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UBS performed strongly again in Euromoney’s global private banking and wealth management survey in 2021. It topped the western Europe regional rankings for: best private banking services overall; serving mega high net-worth clients worth more than $250 million; family offices; business owners; and high net-worth clients with $5 million to $30 million to invest.
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As well as winning the best bank and best bank for financing awards, BNP Paribas is also western Europe’s best bank for sustainable finance.
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It’s not often any bank sits above JPMorgan in an important financing league table, but BNP Paribas far outstrips the US bank as a bookrunner both of syndicated loans and of debt capital markets deals for borrowers in western Europe.
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An unrivalled regional network presence, commitment to innovation and consistent support for clients during the pandemic earn Citi the award for CEE’s best bank for transaction services.
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In a bumper year for Eurobond issuance, JPMorgan once again demonstrated the unrivalled breadth and depth of its debt capital markets franchise in central and eastern Europe.
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Although the biggest universal banks regularly appear higher up the M&A advisory league tables by transaction value, Rothschild & Co works on far more deals than any competitor. According to Dealogic it advised on 222 deals in the 12 months under review compared with Goldman Sachs’s 132.
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Amid the scramble for cash during the pandemic lockdowns, efficient treasury management was key to ensuring that companies made the most of the liquidity already available to them, minimizing the need for, and cost of, emergency measures. Corporates looked to free up otherwise trapped liquidity through techniques such as cash pooling, either through physical sweeping or – as the imperative to go digital mounts – through virtual accounts.
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The award for the region’s best bank for corporate responsibility recognizes the holistic commitment to responsible banking of SME lender ProCredit Group.
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The region's best banks, country by country
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A decade of work on reinforcing capital bases, managing bad debts, improving risk management processes and investment in technology paid off for the big regional banking groups in central and eastern Europe (CEE) during the first 12 months of the pandemic.
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Santander has spent four years catching up with local and regional rivals that were quicker to adapt to mobile banking. In 2017 it saw itself as the leading bank in Spain but found its app ranked 13th in the country. The bank’s leaders, under executive chairman Ana Botín, realized they had to transform Santander and give key senior executives specific responsibility.
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In a year when technology was key to success in banking, Tinkoff Bank’s groundbreaking ecosystem and relentless pace of innovation make the Russian lender the standout candidate for central and eastern Europe’s best digital bank award.
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With a unique reach into the small and medium-sized enterprise, and mass affluent segments in central and eastern Europe, as well as a long tradition of wealth management in its Austrian home market, Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) is ideally positioned to play a leading role in private banking in the region.
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Digital leadership and a client-centric business model made ING Bank Slaski an ideal partner for Poland’s SMEs during the first 12 months of the pandemic. Its ability to support clients and maintain growth during a time of market turmoil makes it the worthy winner of the award for CEE’s best bank for SMEs.
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In a difficult year for M&A in central and eastern Europe, UniCredit once again leveraged its regional network, sectoral approach and careful market positioning to notch the largest number of announced deals in the 12 months to the end of March.
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Covid has, unsurprisingly, dominated the corporate responsibility agenda at banks across Europe. A key determinant in this category was the effectiveness with which firms addressed the acute challenges that many of their clients have faced, from the initial healthcare emergency to longer-term financial distress. BBVA stepped up to the task promptly and at scale and takes the regional award this year.
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HSBC, with big operations in the UK and France as well as a presence on the ground in 20 markets across Europe, wins the award for the region’s best bank for small and medium-sized enterprises this year, against strong challenges from UniCredit and Santander.
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Business diversification has proved to be a crucial asset for BNP Paribas over the past year. Relatively intact operations such as fixed income trading have provided vital props to its financial performance compared with local rivals that had made deeper cuts to those businesses pre-Covid. Post-pandemic the bank has become even more important as a financier to its western European clients. It has also moved earlier than other top-tier global banks to burnish its sustainability credentials.
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New platforms that underwrite and process invoices due from large creditworthy payers may encourage bank and institutional financing for small and medium-sized enterprises.
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New FX platform MillTechFX reckons that rather than cannibalizing existing trading activity, it can generate new flows for its counterparty banks by undercutting standard exchange rates.
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That distant sound is the warning bell as bond investors’ desperate search for yield leads them down ever-risker paths.
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The French lender’s wealth management university, introduced in 2017, is central to its ability to train private bankers to reach out and serve the high-net-worth clients the bank cannot afford to lose.
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Fintechs are caught in a brutal competitive squeeze between losses on businesses they are good at and the urgent need to offer new ones.
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More fintechs are selling out to big incumbent banks, but the German pair would rather merge to achieve their vision of savings as a service.
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The European Commission keeps pressing, but a consolidated tape for bonds is not yet realistic – and firms should use AI analytics to create a quasi-tape.
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The past year has shown how building a corporate and investment bank more equivalent to its standing in retail could be a vital prop to Santander’s earnings, especially in Europe. Does divisional head José Maria Linares now have the backing to match his ambitions?
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What worries the wealthy most? It is a question that provides answers the rest of us would be wise to heed.
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When Stephen Williams joined HSBC more than 20 years ago, the bank was a backmarker in Asian debt markets. When he retires next month, he leaves it top of the heap.
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We are at the peak of the hype cycle for central bank digital currencies, now being touted as one of the most fundamental innovations in the history of central banking. It is time for central banks and governments to be honest with unenthused populations. CBDC can’t deliver all the many promised improvements. As we come to design choices, there will be trade-offs. We might get improved payments but less credit. We could see greater financial inclusion but will lose privacy. Are the few benefits really worth the risk of disrupting the financial system?
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Buying robo-adviser Nutmeg is a bold and telling first step for the US bank’s new digital banking venture in the UK.
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With margin requirements rising sharply, banks must do a much better job managing surpluses and shortages of collateral across all their businesses.
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Scandinavia’s biggest bank is at last outperforming European banks in the way that smaller Nordic lenders did in the 2010s. The jury is out on whether or not this can continue when its more nationally focused Nordic peers regain momentum.
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HSBC’s new global wallet offering is the latest in a line of services enabling businesses to make and receive international payments from a single account.
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Naysayers were swift to condemn Lithuanian involvement in the German scandal.
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Barclays has long wanted to rebuild the European ECM franchise it got rid of in 1997 with the sale of BZW, but has often struggled to do so. With a foundation of corporate broking in the UK and hiring in continental Europe, it’s finally making some progress.
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Since Jes Staley took charge of Barclays at the end of 2015, he has faced constant questions over his ability to reposition the firm as a credible force in investment banking. Sticking to his guns in the face of activist shareholder pressure, he now looks vindicated, but growing from here presents a new challenge.
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Corporate insolvencies are poised to rise sharply once pandemic-related state support is removed. In the UK, companies must familiarize themselves with new insolvency regulations as the deadline for the removal of protections looms.
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BBVA is relying more on its Latin America business. And the countries in that region are relying more and more on the global bank in turn. BBVA’s global head of country monitoring, Jorge Sáenz-Azcúnaga, explains how he expects this symbiosis to evolve.
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Most speakers at Isda’s annual meeting avoided mentioning the Archegos Capital Management blow-up. IOSCO head Ashley Alder didn’t get the memo.
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Basel’s latest effort to improve market resilience is expected to accelerate the development of clearing solutions – but it won’t leave everyone better off.
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Other funds have shown how shareholder activism can work in financial stocks, especially in Europe.
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The implosion of Bill Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management focused attention on family offices, a fast-growing, lightly regulated and ill-defined investor group. Greater oversight is surely inevitable, as is the evolution of the sector away from small, standalone entities into truly global multi-family wealth managers.
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With Greensill and Archegos, António Horta-Osório has more on his plate than a medieval King. But Credit Suisse’s new chair could do something that would placate doubters and please investors: pivot firmly to Asia.
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Most open-banking solutions introduced to date have been focused on retail users, but the pandemic is driving demand from corporates for new application initiatives.
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The bank’s new CEO signals openness to M&A, while flagging investment fees as a key profit driver this year.
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Regulators have set high conduct standards for banks in assisting particularly smaller corporate customers with the impact of the transition away from Libor.
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Utility and energy companies have tapped strong demand for hybrid bonds to protect their ratings.
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While doubling of profit at the investment bank stood out, it was not the bank’s only strong performer.
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Fnality applies for a DLT-based sterling payment system pointing the way to faster and more resilient decentralized financial market infrastructure.
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US hedge funds have cleared the way for more activist-style investing in European financial institutions. Now some home-grown activist funds are targeting banks too. They will need to adapt their tactics, but underperforming bank chief executives have another reason to be worried.
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A sign of too much risk and exposure in a frothy market or just two banks that didn’t have their risk management in order? Prime brokerage has become a profitable mainstay for several banks but, as Archegos shows us, it punishes the distracted
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Raising capital may have been painful, but it is the sensible thing to do. There were bigger surprises when the bank announced first-quarter results.
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European football is hardly a model of sustainability at the best of times, but JPMorgan is to be commended for its noble attempt to make it even worse.
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Banks are refining their sustainable cash-management offerings, seeking to align their corporate sustainability strategies to financing and treasury actions.
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Low interest rates, lockdown boredom and super-sophisticated trading apps have lured millions of Russian retail investors into the capital markets over the past year. But will they stay for the long term?
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The US investment bank sidesteps an avoidable reputational own goal as a planned football European Super League collapses.
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The European Commission unveils details of its €800 billion NextGenerationEU funding programme, following the playbook of sovereign debt managers.
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If the current geopolitical tensions escalate into military action, even the most hardened foreign investors might start looking for an exit from Russia.
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In just a few days, Deliveroo’s IPO went from having a book that was oversubscribed at the top of the price range to pricing at the bottom and then collapsing in the aftermarket. What went wrong and does it mean anything for other London listing candidates?
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The maverick activist is blazing a trail by targeting a big southern European bank – and is warning against the risks of a deal between UniCredit and Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena.
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The storms buffeting Credit Suisse represent big trouble for the Swiss bank. Its new chairman may install a new CEO and set a new strategic course, but with big European banks gearing up for consolidation, Credit Suisse just put itself on the block.
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As US Spac deals start to slow after an extraordinary first quarter, any new growth must come from outside the US
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In executing what may be the biggest European corporate Sofr-linked swap yet, BMW has shown what well-prepared company treasuries and their advisory banks can achieve as the sun sets on Libor.
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Analysts are positive about sterling’s prospects over the next few months, figuring that monetary policy flexibility and attractive UK equity prices will outweigh any downward pressure from the European Union – whether trade or coronavirus-related.
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Deals such as this leave deeper problems unsolved at Societe Generale and similar banks.
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Unlisted banks, especially cooperatives, face less pressure to shrink as a result of low returns. They are gaining market share – but falling behind in digitalization.
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The EU will soon have to start funding a €750 billion recovery programme as rates rise and bond markets sell off. Short-dated EU-bills must carry more of the borrowing burden. That requires auctions and a new system of primary dealers.
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With monetary union off the table, a national break-up could make Brexit seem like a skirmish.
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António Horta-Osório makes no apology for the unbridled optimism that has defined his 10 years running Lloyds Banking Group. Critics say he leaves it over-exposed to Brexit and dwindling interest margins. But, as he prepares to move to Switzerland to become chairman of Credit Suisse, Horta-Osório tells Euromoney that Lloyds’ greatest days could still be ahead of it.
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The country’s banks have successfully weathered a series of crises during the past six years. Will this time be different?
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While a bid still remains for duration, the EU could achieve much for member states through more flexible borrowing in short-dated instruments.
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In buying out its Exane equities joint venture partner, BNP Paribas reckons it can make a success of a business where few European peers have thrived. It also hopes to see a halo effect on underperforming franchises like ECM.
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The former Commerzbank chief executive and co-head of wealth management at UBS heads a strong team to help company founders with running a public company.
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After a lifetime in Vienna, Peter Bosek has moved 1,600 kilometres north to head up Blackstone’s banking operation in the Baltics. He talks to Euromoney about life in Tallinn, how to take advantage of millennials’ new-found enthusiasm for investment and what banks can learn from Netflix.
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Less charismatic chief executives will serve Europe’s banks well in the 2020s – unless it simply means that more power will reside with their chairmen.
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UBS has applied to buy out two minority investors in its China joint venture, boosting its stake in Beijing-based UBS Securities to 67%. The bank’s strong and long-standing relationship with the owner of the other 33%, a division of Beijing local government, is a timely reminder that there is no one right model for success in China.
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The data-cloud company has laid down an intriguing marker for its peers
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Deliveroo’s pending stock sale gives London a much-needed financial boost, but the global IPO market is becoming a straight fight between China and the US.
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Zafer Sönmez was well underway with a long-term plan to model Turkey’s sovereign wealth fund on Singapore’s Temasek and Malaysia’s Khazanah – his former employer – when he was unexpectedly removed from his role in March. Before going, he gave Euromoney a detailed interview on the challenges involved in building a wealth fund in a country that is not blessed with oil wealth, plentiful foreign exchange reserves or even budget surpluses. Those challenges will remain after his departure.
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Jonathan Hill’s recommendations for UK listing reforms have dug deep into areas at the forefront of capital markets debate in 2021. Here we assess what he has to say.
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In making his long-awaited recommendations on how to improve London’s standing as a venue for raising capital, Jonathan Hill faced the challenge of how to reform while not racing to the bottom.
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Jean Pierre Mustier has spoken candidly with Euromoney throughout his five years of running UniCredit. Here is the inside story of how the first foreign chief executive of Italy’s international banking champion came close to continental leadership but left in acrimony – after clashing with the country’s financial establishment and with chairman-elect Pier Carlo Padoan.
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Rob Karofsky will become sole president of the investment bank at UBS, ending his ‘odd couple’ partnership with co-president Piero Novelli.
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The link between share ownership and voting rights has been weakening for a long time. With dual-class share structures more popular than ever, is the struggle to resist their rise now over?
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London is, unsurprisingly, struggling to embrace Brexit. Its advocates say the City just needs to try harder.
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The FTSE250 company launches an open pre-emptive share offer underwritten by a concert party of wealthy individuals to appease creditors in its pub securitization.
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The chief executive of a leading mid-market London broker reckons there are more funding opportunities than ever for small and medium-sized UK firms, in spite of the pandemic. But she still wants changes to London’s listing rules.
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Investors modelling prices from data across fragmented and illiquid bond markets find that cloud computing brings speed, while AI offers precision.
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Mid-market specialist DC Advisory has come a long way since its days as a unit of Close Brothers. UK chief executive Richard Madden reckons its acquisition by Daiwa and subsequent build-out of a more coherent international franchise has stood it in good stead.
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The sponsors of a new special purpose acquisition company aimed at European financial services argue that the region is ripe for the kind of patient capital that the structure can provide.
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Investment grade and non-sterling bond investors submitted big orders for the largest ever European high-yield deal, but half received zero allocation.
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Polish companies have been behind the curve when it comes to sustainability. A reinvigorated Warsaw Stock Exchange plans to bring them up to speed.
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As the unlisted firm shrinks further in investment banking, its asset management business might IPO on its own.
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Strong fundamentals, generous Covid support and timely digital banking regulation mean that Hungary’s banks are in good shape for 2021.
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The Bank of England’s latest FX trading survey shows how sterling trading exploded in October amid the twin pressures of Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic.
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The UK has been hit by Brexit as well as the pandemic, making for poor returns and a weaker recovery. UBS argues that this allows investors to buy while it is cheap.
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UBS’s wealth management team had another stellar year despite the Covid crisis – and once again the Swiss lender takes the top spot in Euromoney’s private banking survey.
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The Spanish group’s rise to private banking prominence didn’t happen overnight. An internal merger helped, as did work integrating Europe and Latin America. The next step will be the biggest of all, as it begins a concerted push into the US.
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Banks are guiding to lower cost of risk in 2021, but government support and forbearance make the true state of their loan books hard to discern.
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A primarily national approach to post-Covid bad debt has cut adrift states such as Greece and Portugal, making future banking crises more likely.
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Emerging markets have regained some of the buoyancy lost during the early months of the coronavirus crisis, but analyst opinions hint at the difficulty of identifying which EM currencies investors should favour.
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UK-based banks will continue to lose out and international banks in London will transfer more staff and capital to the EU.
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Anchor investors usually come into a Spac through a pre-merger Pipe deal. But the latest Europe-focused vehicle has brought them in from the very start.
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The fintech’s fast growth highlights the large banks’ inability to adapt their technology to provide basic finance to small businesses.
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The consummate dealmaker appeals to shareholders and the board, by being an Italian with a big international profile.
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The ECB is desperate for banking consolidation. Cross-border deals remain unlikely, but wholesale combinations may be coming.
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Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey rejects the unsound decisions of the EU.
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Less pain in the downturn means less gain in an upturn.
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An abundance of low-cost finance and soaring stock market valuations are driving M&A towards record levels. But as M&A fever spreads, so riskier deals based on more dubious logic are appearing.
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Capital is already shifting out of the UK and people will follow, leaving the big Brexit question: can the EU take advantage to complete its capital markets union?
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The pan-European payments initiative benefits from links to many of Europe’s largest banks – and has fintech in its sights.
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The latest move by an asset class that just can’t keep out of the news is less surprising than it might appear.
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Critics question whether the bloc’s taxonomy will work for emerging Europe.
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European bank shares have rallied even though the pain of loan losses still lies ahead. It is also not clear how they will repay emergency ECB funding
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Asset managers and owners are scrutinizing firms’ climate commitments like never before, as HSBC is discovering.
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UK bank urged to set timeline for fossil-fuel financing phase-out.
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The saga of Poland’s Idea Bank has finally been resolved with a forced takeover by number two player Pekao. But questions remain over the role of the state.
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Russia’s big state bank wants to be the leading player in the country’s fast-growing e-commerce sector. It could succeed.
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The battle for control of Petropavlovsk has been raging since the board and management were unexpectedly voted out at the AGM in June. But only now has it become clear the role a conversion of bonds may have played. At issue are allegations of unequal bondholder treatment.
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SocGen appears willing to accept lower volumes as the price for avoiding losses of the kind it experienced in 2020.
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With investment in technology supporting its Crédit du Nord merger, the bank hopes that product partnerships and a lower cost-to-serve will make it stand out in French retail.
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In rushing to oust chief executive Jean Pierre Mustier halfway through the reporting cycle, UniCredit’s board may have revealed its weaknesses, not its strength.
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Wealth managers profited from the volatility of 2020. With the same beneficial gyrations unlikely in 2021, Victor Matarranz, global head of Santander Wealth Management and Insurance at Banco Santander, says the hard work starts now.
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Litigation funding has surged in recent years. The asset class is catnip to yield-hungry investors, with funders expanding from their roots in Australia and the UK to tap new markets from Germany to Brazil and the US.
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As government debt burdens keep rising to fight the virus, so do the chances of sudden sell-offs that could suck all markets into a vicious downward cycle.
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UniCredit entered the Covid-19 crisis flush with capital. That money was earmarked for dividends and share buybacks. So far, it has gone on frontloading loan write-offs.
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It’s easier to reach your destination if you know where you’re going.
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The transformation plan appears to be working and as the investment bank regains market share, Deutsche looks better set for the coming consolidation.
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The past year has brought new challenges for Crédit Agricole’s partnerships in products and distribution. But the wave of bank M&A sweeping Europe is also an opportunity – as its Creval deal shows.
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Covid-19 has hit the Spanish lender particularly hard, but the pandemic could spur a longer-term strategic shift.
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Every bank has had to balance Covid and geopolitics in 2020, but few have had it harder than HSBC
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Every bank wants to rebrand as a tech player, but few are aiming as high as Sberbank.
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The investment bank has proven its value in a tough year, but revenue stability is the challenge ahead.
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After a year when credit markets propped up the financial performance of continental Europe’s biggest bank, concern remains about its credit risks.
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Despite Covid, it was a good year for UBS and its outgoing chief executive Sergio Ermotti. Now it’s time for his successor Ralph Hamers to show his hand.
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Turkey has been the outlier in CEE this year for many reasons.
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Investors are locked in meetings with European growth companies that may go public in 2021, with Spacs now making it easier to list and raise substantial capital.
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Emerging Europe’s dormant primary equity market springs back to life. Can the revival continue into 2021?
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Critics of the US firm’s appointment to consult on integrating ESG into EU banking regulation have welcomed a damning report by the bloc’s ombudsman. But does it miss the point?
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As the outsiders – those foreign nationals who turned around Europe’s largest banks – move on, it is not immediately obvious how well Lloyds’ António Horta-Osório fits Credit Suisse.
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The recent wave of M&A has left behind weaker banks such as Banco BPM, Sabadell and, above all, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. Jean Pierre Mustier’s exit from UniCredit shows why.
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Jean Pierre Mustier’s decision to leave UniCredit raises the alarming prospect of the crippled Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena pulling down a much bigger and stronger Italian bank.
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Pre-2008 M&A mistakes still stand in the way of a bolder bank purchase such as Banco BPM.
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A new Swiss-Singaporean enterprise styles itself as the world’s first digital asset bank. It is regulated, resembles the structure of a mainstream bank and has some high-visibility advisers and investors, among them Peter Wuffli. Will it work?
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Post-2008 accounting standards set aside capital for tomorrow’s problem loans today. In doing so, they rely on the judgements of the banks themselves. However, after Covid-19, European banks cannot afford to provision for write-offs in the same way as their US counterparts.
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The bond market could be the answer to financing better preparedness for the next global pandemic.
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Unbundling hits European research provision as providers grapple with transparency and valuation.
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All governments are desperate for revenue. With Spain joining France and Italy in imposing an FTT, more countries may follow.
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Selling its US bank to PNC fixes BBVA’s capital problem and allows it to consolidate in Spain. Arch-rival Santander’s similar troubles may be harder to solve.
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The Swiss asset and wealth manager’s Natural Capital fund, launched on Monday, is a first of its kind in the public equity markets.
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A global green recovery is still a distant ambition, but leadership across sectors is slowly coming together.
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Tighter BTP-Bund spreads obviate the need for an international sub-holding, UniCredit CEO Jean Pierre Mustier tells Euromoney.
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There is broad agreement that the ECB will not cut rates further, but the coronavirus pandemic is seen as the key factor governing the outlook for the euro.
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Ralph Hamers’ project to centralize ING’s operations was flawed from the outset. Scrapping it is sensible, but a mark against his legacy.
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Fear of Chinese advances with programmable money and Facebook’s Libra are pushing central banks to digital currencies, which may transform financial markets.
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Corporates borrowed their way through the crisis of 2020. What might happen next? Seven months after the first lockdowns began in Europe and the US, is coronavirus now priced into debt markets?
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One of the biggest capital markets stories this year has been the rise of social bonds.
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Turkey’s FX strategy might look odd but, despite the damage it is wreaking on the lira, analysts doubt that the country’s economic policies will change.
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Covid-19 adds to the urgency of reorientating retail to e-commerce. Combining Openbank with consumer finance is the logical next step in Santander’s cloud-based banking transformation.
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Banks in Europe face a bleak choice. They can redouble cost cutting and capture the move to digital. They can also top up capital with AT1s, for which there is still a bid. But as the acute phase of the crisis now approaches and loan losses rise, banks’ fabled capital strength faces a stern test
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Italy’s biggest bank is floundering because it is based on a flawed premise.
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Within three years a quarter of Europe’s bank branches could be closed – more if the rising M&A wave strengthens. When banks shout about investing in digital for their customers, they want investors to hear they are cutting costs. In the rush to become tech companies could they lose what keeps customers loyal?
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It was vital that the first deal in a €850 billion programme went well, but tougher tests lie ahead.
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Swift regulatory clearance raises fully fledged new bank’s hopes for smooth path to profit in an under-served market segment.
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The outgoing CEO’s surprisingly good final results mean his successor has less room for manoeuvre.
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Incoming UniCredit chairman Pier Carlo Padoan could be a useful ally to CEO Jean Pierre Mustier, but the latter may not realise his dreams in Germany and Europe unless the bank plays a greater role in Italy, too.
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Tidjane Thiam is no longer running Credit Suisse, but the clever appointment of Christian Meissner to bridge its private banking and investment banking teams, delivering new services to super-wealthy clients, shows his dream lives on.
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The BRICS economies, which between them represent 40% of the world population and 32% of its GDP, are a powerful force for the private banking industry as their economic engines drive wealth creation. But they are all distinct markets with their own unique opportunities and challenges.
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As European bank consolidation finally gets under way, Euromoney looks at the financial firepower of the region’s top 20 players. Which banks are now best-placed to do the acquiring and which are at risk of being swallowed up? Mid-tier banks in southern Europe look especially vulnerable.
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As Spain prepares to digest the €17 billion merger of CaixaBank and Bankia, Andalucían lender Unicaja has revived merger talks with rival Liberbank as it faces a threat to its regional dominance. While its community roots are an advantage, it also needs an answer to the calls for change
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UK regulatory proposals could mean tougher times ahead for mortgage customers, but challenger banks could get a little more competitive.
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Natixis’ mistakes in equity derivatives and commodities this year repeat a pattern of outsized wholesale-banking losses. In the future, as in asset management, it should focus more on the underlying advantages of parent group BPCE’s retail network.
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A specialist calculation agent reckons now is an ideal time to break into a busy region for equity-linked deals.
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No golf please, I’m delivering: how the German bank’s new CEO sees himself.
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A bank with a profitable core business is a better bet than one designed to lose money.
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Manfred Knof starts early next year, after Martin Zielke is ousted by Cerberus. He joins recently arrived chairman Hans-Jörg Vetter.
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The chairman of UBS seems determined to force a wave of European banking consolidation. A merger of his firm with Credit Suisse may not be possible, but other deals are likely.
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Rushing back to capital distributions won’t solve the sector’s deeper crisis.
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Putting together Spain’s two biggest domestic lenders makes sense, because, while both have good management, one side is better skilled at cross-selling.
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Bank of Singapore reports positive first year of operations for Luxembourg subsidiary.
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The banking-as-a-service provider enjoys a boost as older banks accelerate digital transformation. It also harbours ambitions to become a cross-border clearing bank.
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As the second wave of the coronavirus hits, The Hut Group may win from new lockdowns after completing the biggest UK IPO in five years and largest ever for a tech company.
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There’s no point attacking banks for filing suspicious activity reports as they are required to, but they must work better together with law enforcement to fight financial crime.
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While banks have made progress on integrating environmental considerations into areas such as project finance and corporate lending, investment bankers have so far faced few – if any – sustainability-related restrictions on their activities.
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Different sovereign funds have approached Covid in different ways – drawdowns, contrarian investments, flights to safety and backstopping local raisings – but Ireland’s has perhaps been the most clearly defined.
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Covid-19 may be the moment sovereign wealth funds were made for: a shocking disruption to national economies that calls for a stable, patiently invested buffer. Funds have reacted in different ways, but they’re all bigger, shrewder and hopefully smarter than they were during the GFC.
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Even during Turkey’s recent economic turbulence, Akbank has maintained its commitment to innovation and has been the standout private-sector lender in the country.
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Its reincarnation as a sensible corporate bank is still a work in progress, but Deutsche’s achievements so far deserve recognition.
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Citi’s scale across the emerging markets is unrivalled, and its investment bankers have been successful in playing to that strength throughout the last year.
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The ECB has been pushing consolidation in the hope that it will make European banks more efficient and sustainable, but it will require large-scale job losses in a weak economy.
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The G20 has called for renewed efforts to enhance slow and costly international payments. The founder of Worldpay and ClearBank may have the answer.
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The lifeline that Berlin promised Germany’s businesses earlier this year was so large it made other corporate rescues in Europe look tame. In its determination to protect companies and jobs Berlin is stirring new debate, at home and abroad, about its growing role as an industrial decision maker and even shareholder. Can the country use its financial muscle to relaunch its own sputtering economic model?
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The EU recovery fund could deliver so much more than just a short-term boost to peripheral sovereign bonds and European equities.
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Despite the fanfare around their announcement, many of the proposed benefits of the 'fintech bridges' or bilateral agreements the UK government has reached with regulators around the world have yet to be realized.
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Euromoney Country RiskInvestors beware – countries in the region have been downgraded in Euromoney’s country risk survey this year.
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The EU’s new recovery fund is a historic step to help the countries worst affected by Covid avoid a debt trap. If the EU’s short-term bills become a risk-free, interest-rate instrument, this temporary response to the deadly virus could become a permanent change to Europe’s capital markets
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Exits at ABN Amro, including its big operation in commodity trade finance, raise questions about ING, as both firms enjoy much better returns in Dutch retail lending.
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UniCredit CEO Jean Pierre Mustier is among bankers pushing for easier corporate access to government equity, as state-backed loans have heightened firms’ indebtedness, and firms’ sales struggle to recover.
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With staff working from home and use of digital signatures not yet ubiquitous, banks need to step up security measures to prevent opportunistic criminals profiting from the disruption caused by coronavirus.
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State-guaranteed lending to help hard-hit firms in Germany has lagged its equivalents in France, Spain, Italy and the UK. State development bank KfW says that’s a good thing.
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Analysts expect the European recovery fund to underpin a strengthening of the single currency against the dollar over the rest of this year and beyond.
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The coronavirus recession makes the need for bank consolidation in Europe even more pressing. But neither a more accommodative stance on M&A at the ECB nor the EU’s new recovery fund will be enough to make it happen.
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A backdrop of buoyant economic growth, falling unemployment and rising consumer confidence gave Serbia’s banks a welcome boost last year.
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Few banks have undergone as great a transformation over the last four years as PrivatBank. In December 2016, when it was taken over by the state, Ukraine’s biggest bank held more than a third of the country’s retail deposits and boasted 20 million customers.
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In September 2019 Garanti BBVA signed the world’s first gender loan, a newly designed structure that the bank hopes will encourage its customers to improve their gender equality performance.
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Crédit Agricole takes the lead in Western Europe in this year's Euromoney Awards for Excellence.
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As the biggest retail bank in a country where cash usage is lower than other big European states and where cloud-based neobanks have particular traction, Lloyds Banking Group faces an unusual digital banking challenge.
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Tight labour markets and low interest rates put a floor under credit demand across central and eastern Europe last year and mitigated the effects on banking sectors of slowing economic growth, regulatory curbs on consumer lending and proliferating sectoral levies.
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Over the past decade Poland’s banks have consistently been at the head of the pack in Europe in terms of digitalization.
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While it was hard before, the Covid-19 pandemic will make it almost impossible for most European banks to earn their cost of equity any time soon.
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Western Europe’s best investment bank, BNP Paribas, is increasingly central to capital markets across the continent. That’s been particularly clear since the onset of the coronavirus crisis.
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Businesses and banks in Belarus have faced a particularly tough challenge during the Covid-19 crisis due to the refusal of the government not only to impose any national restrictions but also to acknowledge the risks of the pandemic and implement any measures to mitigate its economic impact.
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Keeping supply chains functioning is essential for the success of CEE’s open, globally connected economies, and the banks best-placed to do so are those that combine deep local knowledge with international expertise.
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Banking small and medium-sized enterprises is challenging in any market, particularly at the smaller end of the scale. It is even more so in Turkey, where the market is distorted by the predominance of large state-owned banks focused more on pumping up the economy with cheap credit than on commercial imperatives.
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The vital role for UK corporate clients played by Barclays was clearer than ever during the coronavirus crisis: the bank arranged £9.9 billion of commercial paper issuance under the Bank of England’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility, almost half of the total.
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The coordination of the financial response to the coronavirus crisis has sometimes seemed easier in France than elsewhere in Europe.
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Cyprus’s strict approach to tackling the coronavirus has meant the health crisis has been much less severe there than in many other states in Europe.
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There is fierce competition in sustainable finance in Western Europe, but this year one bank stands out for its commitment across all the sectors and countries in which it operates and for its work on ensuring the needs of both environment and society are addressed.
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Early on in the coronavirus crisis, Credit Suisse’s senior management was instrumental in the design and implementation of Switzerland’s scheme of government-guaranteed loans. The scheme was so successful that other countries later moved to bring their programmes in line with it.
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Societe Generale’s footprint in CEE has changed dramatically over the last four years. At the start of 2016, the French group had one of the largest banking networks in the region, covering 13 countries from Albania to Georgia.
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CaixaBank’s response to the coronavirus crisis started with a recognition of the vital role of its physical network, which reaches more small and isolated communities than any other bank in Spain.
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Santander has been one of the most innovative groups in the world in its response to the Covid-19 outbreak, and its Polish subsidiary is no exception.
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The Covid-19 crisis has emphasized the importance of banks that can stand by their clients and bring them funding in the toughest times. Euromoney’s best bank for financing in Western Europe, BNP Paribas, has stepped up to a greater extent than peers, especially on a pan-European level – although its achievements this year go beyond the coronavirus response.
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The pandemic and following market crisis during 2020 has seen many high net-worth individuals across central and eastern Europe return to the safety and security of large international banks. Among those benefiting from this flight to safety has been Credit Suisse, which has seen increases in net new assets over the first few months of the year.
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With lockdowns shuttering businesses across the continent, commitment to banking small and medium-sized enterprises has taken on even greater economic and social importance this year.
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UniCredit is the region’s best bank in this year’s Euromoney Awards for Excellence.
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As you’d expect from ING, Euromoney’s best bank for transaction services in Western Europe, technological innovation a plays a central role in its wholesale banking offering.
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Kazakhstan’s banks faced a difficult challenge in the first two months of the pandemic. When president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced a state of emergency on March 16, he also unveiled plans to provide a support payment of KT42,500 ($106) to all citizens economically affected by the pandemic.
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Another brisk year of M&A deal flow in CEE produced a clear winner on the advisory side. The best bank for advisory, Citi, dominated Dealogic’s league tables for the 12 months to the end of March, acting on 17 deals worth $17.7 billion, versus just $9.5 billion for its nearest rival.
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The Covid-19 pandemic destroyed many of the assumptions underpinning M&A deals under preparation before the outbreak. Therefore it has been vital for advisory banks to shift focus to help clients understand and manage the situation. Much of that is about having built up a well-rounded franchise.
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BNP Paribas has sustainability and inclusiveness at its heart, as shown in its approach to all of its stakeholders. This year the bank wins the award for the region’s best bank for corporate responsibility.
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Center-Invest Bank became the first Russian bank to issue a green bond with its R250 million ($3.56 million) offering in November last year. It was a natural step for a bank that has been committed to the environment and responsible banking from its inception.
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UniCredit Bank Austria wins this year’s award for Austria’s best bank by virtue of its excellent profitability and commitment to innovation. The Italian subsidiary, which boasts a market-leading position in corporate banking and private banking, saw net profit last year jump by 33.7% to €568 million, representing a return on allocated capital of 14.1%.
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After much restructuring in 2019 that saw the de-layering of management, regionalization of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and streamlining of client segments, it wasn’t clear what the beginning of 2020 might look like for UBS in Western Europe.
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Albania’s leading banks once again turned in a respectable set of results last year but were unable to compete on either growth or profitability with a newcomer to the market. OTP Albania, the winner of the award for Albania’s best bank, has been part of the Hungarian OTP group since March 2019.
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After years of pullback from emerging markets by big Western banks, only two players can now claim to offer truly comprehensive investment banking coverage in CEE.
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As Spain became one of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus, Spanish banks were quick to pledge financial support for small and medium-sized enterprises.
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With approval from Brussels, Germany can roll out Mittelstand recapitalizations through a new €600 billion Wirtschaftsstabilisierungsfonds, or WSF – just in time for the country’s troubled but economically vital automotive sector.
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Institutions don’t have to believe in any investment case for cryptocurrencies to garner returns from volatility in a growing, active, inefficient market.
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Attorney Mel Georgie Racela runs the Anti-Money Laundering Council Secretariat in the Philippines, one of two agencies tasked with getting to the bottom with the country’s involvement in the Wirecard scandal. He talks to Chris Wright.
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Customers are starting to embrace digital forwarders that provide supply chain finance services as well as digitized freight forwarding.
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The country’s response to the scandal is a chance to show good governance.
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Everyone wanted radical change at Commerzbank, except the bank itself.
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Investors should stop pretending to care about ESG risks.
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Nationalist desperation to get ahead in fintech surely explains some of the spectacular regulatory failure in the Wirecard accounting scandal.
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Now an independent firm outside ING, Katana is upgrading its algos and scanning more bonds for correlation trades between pairs not normally linked.
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A complex investment in Wirecard by Deutsche Bank veterans now working at SoftBank has effectively compounded the eventual embarrassment for Germany Inc from the failure of the online payments firm.
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Hedge funds have profited handsomely from the boom in equity capital markets, but retail buyers haven’t been completely excluded.
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Fewer exits at lower prices will depress private equity returns for now, but the time is fast approaching to snap up bargains to boost performance.
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Claudio de Sanctis says that the new unit he heads is the next step on Deutsche Bank’s journey to global scale in wealth management.
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Firms such as Deposit Solutions and Raisin are thriving, partly because Europe’s wealthy are so risk averse.
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Scarred by the lockdown, suppliers now want payment upfront while customers demand extended terms: a problem is brewing in B2B payments and receivables.
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Online trade finance provider Stenn has raised several hundred million dollars during the past month and reckons it is well placed to help close the funding gap for manufacturers in developing economies.
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International diversification counts for little in a pandemic, so shares in Sweden’s Handelsbanken have done better than most other lenders in Europe – but its loan book faces a stern test.
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A trend that was already under way is set to accelerate as companies realise the importance of better oversight of day-to-day financials.
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Italy’s anti-trust authority could yet side with those who argue UBI Banca will serve Italy’s banking system better by doing acquisitions of its own.
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The European Central Bank's purchase of more than €35 billion of commercial paper since late March shows just how rocky the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis were for short-term funding.
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Capital markets volumes show how well the industry has adapted since the coronavirus crisis began, but as economies emerge from lockdown, bankers and clients need to look much further ahead.
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Banks have to prepare for crises; if investors won’t make companies do the same, should someone else?
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FX trading algorithms are getting smarter at dealing with crises – and getting more popular as a result.
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Virtual meetings have afforded women greater visibility during the Covid-19 crisis, but little to nothing has happened. Will things finally start to change in the financial sector?
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The May IPO of video conferencing platform Pexip was an all-round virtual success.
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A new law prohibiting the return of banks to their former owners will unlock international funding for Ukraine. But is it really the game changer some are claiming?
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Will it be back to business as usual as soon as lockdown restrictions are lifted?
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Fears that the Covid-19 virus might live on banknotes and coins has focused public attention on once esoteric experiments with central bank digital currency. The virus has also exposed the slow pace of emergency government support payments through the conventional banking system, so what once sounded futuristic may be coming soon. CBDC just got real.
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After a slow start, the processing of CBILS loans has picked up. Now finally accredited, the specialist SME lender says much more needs to be done.
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Central bank intervention has delayed the deluge of insolvency that Covid-19 lockdowns will cause, but it can only plug the dike for so long. Lenders face the grim prospect of deciding who to save and who to let go.
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The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority may struggle to show anything explicitly wrong in the awarding of recent equity mandates.
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Tinkoff Bank’s virtual assistant is good for eating out, but not food for thought.
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UK banks’ returns on equity will still be below pre-virus levels in 2025, while CET1 ratios across Europe could fall to 8%.
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Europe’s online-only challenger banks are still losing money, despite millions of retail clients in their home continent.
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The digital bank struggled to make an impact in a fiercely competitive field.
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Lessors and bondholders had little choice but to keep Norwegian Air alive, but bigger losses will come as the industry gets used to its new normal.
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Leading firms in emerging Europe welcome a surge in interest in digital payments products and online lending.
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The German constitutional court wants limits on ECB sovereign bond buying when the real question is whether it can do enough to stave off sovereign defaults.
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Co-founder Sergey Khotimskiy says the coronavirus crisis could help Russia’s private-sector banks fight back against state dominance.
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Banca d’Italia plays a key role behind the scenes in embedding distributed ledger at the core of the country’s banking system.
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Trade bodies, such as the Association of Independent Music, are taking it upon themselves to help the most affected in their industry during the coronavirus lockdown, turning to fintech solutions to do so.
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Former investment bank head Tim ‘Danger’ Throsby sadly isn’t at the firm to see the team he built deliver in a crisis.
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Liquidity data from CLS has revealed unusual trading activity around the 4pm London fix – but it has more to do with corporate inertia than market manipulation.
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Revolvers could be the debt Achilles heel of cash-strapped corporates.
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The coronavirus crisis has hit Europe so hard and so suddenly that banks have to radically rethink their normal approaches to dealing with a crisis.
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Banks need to play their part in rescues without putting all the burden on shareholder funds, says Santander’s group executive chairman.
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It’s hard to blame anyone for looking for bright spots in these difficult times.
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Economies and banking sectors in emerging Europe have gone into the coronavirus crisis in good shape. But will they be able to navigate the political fallout from the expected downturn?
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UK banks have faced a torrent of criticism for slow delivery of the coronavirus business interruption loan scheme, but the real problem is that the UK is providing loans that need to be repaid. Grants offered by governments such as Germany look better designed.
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Fast-track financing, infrastructure support and equity investment opportunities: first vice-president Jürgen Rigterink details the development bank’s Covid-19 crisis response – and delivers a warning to banks in its region.
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Bernhard Spalt talks to Euromoney about banks’ responsibility to lend, the risk of a ‘blame game’ and the prospects for a return to business as usual in emerging Europe.
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With consumers and businesses demanding instant access to Covid-19 support financing, the RBI chief executive warns of a backlash against banks.
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Entering a potential credit crisis, when they are still battling an old one, leaves Italy’s banks exposed. That means strong government backing is more important than ever.
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French banks are handing out more state-guaranteed loans than other country in Europe, but they have more to worry about than small businesses in France.
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The biggest challenge in German banking has suddenly gone from job cuts to handing out state-guaranteed loans as quickly as possible.
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Central banks in emerging Europe have started buying local government bonds in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Has quantitative easing arrived in the region? And, if so, will it work?
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The country’s biggest firms are doing all they can to bolster their reputation, as the nation faces a human and economic crisis brought on by Covid-19.
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Sell-side research is integrating alternative data to navigate the current coronavirus crisis. It’s the future for bank research, but it’s not an easy transition.
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Veteran DCM banker Charlie Berman closes in on first product launch aimed at digitizing processes and workflows along the life of a bond.
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Just when SSA bankers were getting used to a market supportive of deals again, Germany has surprised them with a change of approach.
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The German leader joins local private banks in starting to steer clients towards third-party deposits platforms as the sector tries to pass on negative rates.
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Green bond issuance slows in market turmoil, while social bonds offer means to finance Covid-19 responses.
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Global cash managers are having to move fast and adapt solutions to support clients through the Covid-19 crisis.
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The coronavirus Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the need to build better consumer financial resilience – bank efforts to support personal savings and debt reduction will have a greater impact than writing cheques.
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Smaller asset managers and hedge funds that went into the cloud for trading may be better off than big banks that spent billions on proprietary server-based infrastructure.
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Loan growth can return to double digits in second half of 2020, says deputy chief executive.
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Recruited to set up a national payments system, the central bank’s Olga Skorobogatova has overseen initiatives to protect consumers and promote competition in Russia’s banking sector. In her first interview with international media, she talks sandboxes, blockchain and the challenges of regulating bank ecosystems.
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Private equity buyers have never had so much cash to put to work; they are already looking to make new investments in companies that will survive the lockdowns.
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Vladimir Verkhoshinskiy says Covid-19 crisis offers opportunities for leading Russian private-sector banks.
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For a sector reeling from money laundering scandals, it’s tempting to imagine that technology could be a low-cost way of solving such problems. AI could be a game changer for detecting low-level crime, but corporate-scale laundromats will remain tough to crack.
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The transition from Libor must be delayed to avoid pressuring coronavirus-damaged markets.
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Dealing room challenges, loan forbearance and short board meetings: CEO John Hollows describes the impact of Covid-19 on the Czech Republic’s largest bank.
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Coronavirus Covid-19 knows no borders, but the economic support packages being put in place sadly do.
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Proof of the Swedish supervisor’s mettle raises questions about the Danish response to money laundering.
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Banks came into the coronavirus pandemic much stronger than they went into the global financial crisis, but will the capital and liquidity buffers they have built be sufficient to see them through the most dramatic economic crash in history?
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‘Inadequate’ stimulus package could leave banks on the hook as Covid-19 pushes Poland towards recession.
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Most European residential mortgage-backed securities deals can absorb the hit from payment moratoria for now, but junior notes are at risk if the crisis persists.
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The former UBS private banking chief leaves an impressive legacy across the wealth management industry.
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Amid the coronavirus crisis, can emerging Europe's lenders persuade policymakers to call a truce?
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Not only were corporate deals done last week, but they were done with most people being at home. This is the new normal for at least the next couple of months.
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Slovenian market leader eyes further regional expansion after the purchase of Serbia’s Komercijalna Banka.
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Central banks have told lenders to eat into their buffers, but intense debate remains over recognition of non-performing loans in the push for debt moratoria.
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As the coronavirus Covid-19 crisis mounts, banks are finally being heard on negative rates, but that might not be a good thing.
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The virtue of private capital is that it can withstand short-term volatility in valuations of assets held for the long term – and now is the time to prove that.
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Debt forgiveness may stave off an immediate banking crisis in the country hardest hit so far, but the longer-term outlook is grave.
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Bankers say state guarantees to support payment holidays could prevent loan defaults.
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Emerging Europe’s economies are vulnerable to trade disruption from Covid-19, but strong macro fundamentals and robust banks will limit the impact.
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On February 25, a rather sheepish announcement from the UK’s FCA revealed that, in response to a freedom of information request last November, it had inadvertently made underlying confidential information accessible on its website.
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Political instability could delay the long-awaited revival of Romania’s stalled privatization programme, as hopes for early elections fade.
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Freshly empowered European bank chairmen are making perplexing lurches as they search for new chief executives. A random CEO generator might help.
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The cryptocurrency has surged in 2020, as investors worry that coronavirus-exposed equity and bond markets are set to crash.
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Turkey’s strong private-sector banks are its biggest asset – undermining their profitability for short-term political gain will prove counterproductive.
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What was Italy’s biggest bank is giving free rein to Intesa Sanpaolo in Italy, making CEO Carlo Messina’s crown even more secure.
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Intesa Sanpaolo’s €4.9 billion raid on UBI Banca could inspire similar deals, but it’s an eminently Italian takeover, not least due to the role of Alberto Nagel’s Mediobanca.
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Distressed buyers could face a labour of Hercules in establishing projected recoveries for Greece’s new NPL securitization scheme.
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After turning French banking upside down, Compte Nickel is taking its tech-savvy approach to financial inclusion abroad. Insiders say its barebones account service will spread further and keep its dynamism under BNP Paribas ownership. But can a bank for outsiders with a physical network also be the fintech champion of Europe’s banking establishment?
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HSBC launched its green deposit account in the first week of February with a deposit from a building materials company.
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Margin pressures on buy-side clients such as asset managers have prompted increased interest in outsourced FX solutions, but firms must know exactly what they are paying for.
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New CEO Thomas Gottstein will change neither the strategy nor the structure at Credit Suisse, but rather focus on growth in every division.
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Christine Lagarde’s strategic review should usher in new targets and new tools at the European Central Bank, as the risks to growth rise and negative rates become counter-productive.
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Geopolitical concerns are pushing corporates in Asia to work with European transaction banks.
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The ouster of Tidjane Thiam has caused more shock outside Switzerland than within, where the insiders who needed him to fix Credit Suisse have been quite ruthless in expelling him now the job is done.
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The leading banks in Euromoney’s Trade Finance Survey 2020 comment on the highlights of the last 12 months and their expectations for the year to come.
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UBS Global Wealth Management is the world’s best wealth manager. It is an accolade the firm has enjoyed for 13 of the 17 years of Euromoney’s annual survey. But its financial performance does not match its scale. A new partnership at the top of the firm has a plan to integrate business lines and streamline processes.
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There were many things declared at Davos this year that would lead us to believe that sustainability is now embedded in every decision a bank or investment manager makes. Here are some great examples that show 2020 is starting on a positive track.
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Across the UK, Legal & General has invested over £22 billion in affordable housing, homes for the homeless, clean energy, life sciences, creative industries, and technology and infrastructure. Is this the institutional-scale impact model we have been waiting for?
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If the reversal rate is lower elsewhere, Italy and Germany can’t blame the ECB.
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Banks have benefited from negative rates, but EBF president Jean Pierre Mustier says the downsides are increasing.
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As the howls of anguish at negative interest rates reach a crescendo, central bankers and prominent economists are still convinced that Europe’s financial sector would be even worse off were base rates above zero. Banks are increasingly vocal in their opposition to the policy. Are they right to believe the systemic risks are growing? And could a move away from negative rates hurt banks more than if the ECB kept them?
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Markets need more sophisticated measurement criteria to cope with the surge in demand for ESG integration.
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Some organizations, drawn in by irresistible fees, can’t resist working with high-risk clients – but technology might offer a solution.
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Stand-off in Slovenia highlights politicians’ failure to tackle retail lending boom.
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Dealmakers are optimistic about a pick-up in large deals and outbound M&A from Europe this year, but the need for regional consolidation is more urgent.
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Banks must prove to the increasingly impatient regulators that they have got Libor transition under control, or face costly consequences down the line.
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Cryptocurrencies have a specific use-case in countries where local currencies are in crisis, but elsewhere they remain a volatile speculative investment and will struggle to take off as a means of payment.
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The traditional debt specialist is aiming to round out its growing European franchise with an equity capital markets advisory business.
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Former PwC executive Robert Swaak is a 'safe pair of hands', but a money laundering investigation and negative rates heighten existential doubt at ABN Amro.
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Banks in emerging Europe are touting their fintech programmes and credentials, but is the enthusiasm reciprocated by the startup community?
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Lender lures China Merchants Bank’s head of private banking to oversee the Swiss bank’s onshore wealth management ops.
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While many European peers languish, Barclays’ transatlantic pivot is paying off – and helping it build elsewhere.
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As the bank finally grapples with the restructuring it has needed for years, there are reasons to be optimistic.
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Spain’s biggest bank is moving further away from its deal-making past, instead seeing a way forward for its troubled US and UK banks in payments and cloud technology.
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BNP Paribas will reach the end of its three year ‘transformation’ plan in 2020; how has it fared?
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‘Business as usual’ has been tough for the Swiss bank to achieve over the last 12 months. Management faces a challenge to show the bank will not just survive but thrive.
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Investors have rewarded cuts but restructuring may soon recommence, sparking fears of collateral damage in businesses it still cherishes.
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Returning money to shareholders was an important milestone; building revenues and controlling costs remains the key task.
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The senior management team at HSBC looks increasingly chaotic. It needs to fix that, before it can fix the bank.
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With falling rates in Europe and the US, and Turkey still in trouble, only Latin America – especially Mexico – can keep up BBVA’s spirits.
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Being the world’s leading wealth manager presents challenges in this market environment. UBS is coping relatively well.
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Will it be the banks that have built strong, steady relationships or those with big budgets that take transaction banking into the future?
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A no-growth decade won’t stop bankers from chasing fees and trading profits. Mystic Maca looks even further ahead.
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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.
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Leading exchanges have seen little return from their investment in electronic trading venues and face some tough decisions over how to increase revenues.
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The year 2020 is going to be a big one in the world of failed trades.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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In 2014, a $1 billion bank fraud nearly bankrupted the tiny state. It came through in better shape thanks to reformist policymakers, an IMF bailout and the sale of big banks. But a Russia-leaning administration now threatens to undo those reforms.
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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?
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The need to raise funding in international markets comes at a bad time for a sector facing uncertainty over Swiss franc mortgage litigation and rising levies.
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Sustainable financing is gaining ground in corporate Russia as firms look to improve their environmental, social and governance policies ‒ but can the country’s notorious polluters really go green?
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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.
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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
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Reformers in Kyiv and Dnipro come under fire as the battle for PrivatBank heats up.
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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.
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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.
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It appears that basic errors rather than deliberate attempts to game the system lay behind Citi’s large miscalculations of UK RWAs and CET1.
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The Italian fashion house’s sustainability linked loan, arranged by Crédit Agricole, builds the catwalk for other retailers to follow suit.
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A deluge of negative transatlantic headlines overshadows the achievements of Ukraine’s reformers.
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The German bank’s transaction banking franchise will be central to the success of its new corporate banking division.
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The senior management team at HSBC looks increasingly chaotic. It needs to fix that, before they can fix the bank.
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The former consumer finance specialist focuses on collateralized lending and sustainable finance ahead of its planned IPO.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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Finance minister Olaf Scholz has laid out Germany’s negotiating position for the completion of banking union, a pre-requisite for much-needed consolidation.
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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.
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Russia’s leading private sector lender looks to mortgages to maintain pace of loan growth.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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While the IMF highlights mispriced corporate debt as a systemic danger, so too is misvalued unlisted equity.
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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.
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New plans to clean up Soviet-style banking sector will see underperforming legacy loans transferred to state fund.
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This year’s dovish turn in global monetary policy is difficult for most eurozone lenders, but it’s propping up Greek banks, spurring demand for NPL sales; but if these banks return to normality and grow their loan books, negative rates could still end up causing them pain.
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The Trade Club Alliance, a new 14-bank partnership to match SME exporters and importers, reflects greater willingness among banks – especially in Europe – to work together against low-cost newcomers, while relinquishing their own global ambitions.
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Clients have had a much easier time than their banks in Germany, but fintech innovation is creating ways for the likes of Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank to thrive, even in the country’s SME heartlands.
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VTB has long lagged state-owned rival Sberbank in terms of profitability, but with sanctions limiting access to capital the pressure is on to close the gap – chairman Andrey Kostin explains why digital transformation and aggressive retail growth hold the key to success for Russia’s second-largest lender.
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The head of transaction banking at SEB says: 'Corporate clients ask us what we are doing to become a green bank.'
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The bank's global head of liquidity and cash management says: 'We need to stay on top of emerging trends.'
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The global head of transaction banking at StanChart says: 'We will see better results if we work together.'
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The bank's managing director of commercialisation and propositions for global transaction banking says: 'Why shouldn’t banking be just as simple as booking a hotel or ordering a taxi?'
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To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, clean up water supplies, prevent the loss of biodiversity, mitigate fire and flood risk and meet the nutritional requirements of a growing population the world must improve its regenerative and sustainable agricultural practices – new tools and support from the financial services industry are needed to fund that transition.
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Deutsche Bank’s decision to exit equities but continue with ECM is a startling move, but it reflects the reality of the industry as much as it does the bank’s own uncomfortable position.
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As entrepreneurs seek to improve institutional-grade custody and security for trading in crypto assets, conventional financial market participants remain suspicious.
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Deutsche Bank has taken the radical step of getting rid of its equities business, but thinks it can still offer ECM. Can it?
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Corporates' increasing need to use treasury resources more efficiently has persuaded BNP Paribas to partner with fintech Kantox to offer a new dynamic hedging solution to clients.
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The company is expanding its UK-tested platform through an agreement with Euronext to bring the retail bid into follow-on offers from listed SMEs across Europe.
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The Deutsche Bank CFO is adamant that not only are his bank’s new ambitions achievable despite a fragile environment, but clients are also supportive.