The region’s businesses are being held back by weak transport links, while markets are underdeveloped because of lack of infrastructure. Will Asean’s economic fusion in 2015 give southeast Asia the injection of funds it so desperately needs?

The IPO market appears to be picking up, yet overall investment banking activity in the kingdom remains subdued, especially for international players. Despite that, the market’s potential means most will stick around.

Indonesia’s finance minister, Muhammad Chatib Basri, has a clear mission: to make government easier to navigate – for its people, its companies and for foreign investors. His pragmatic approach is paying dividends. So much so that he might even be asked to stay on.

Lebanon’s banks remain a bastion of stability in a country that hardly has a government and is hurt by regional turmoil. However, in its ventures abroad, the sector has not always had immediate success.

Owners bored with remote investing; real estate, energy, health and finance preferred.

John Lefevre dished the dirt on the cut-throat, unfulfilling, absurdly self-important world of investment banking through his GSElevator Twitter account. But it took a publishing house to shaft him. He is exasperated, but confident his elevator will go back up.

There is no tougher client than a multi-billionaire. Few private bankers get the relationship right.

Nigeria seems to be ripe for mobile money, but the concept has yet to take off compared with Kenya, in part because of bank lobbying. Bob Collymore, Safaricom’s CEO, tells Euromoney why Nigeria is lagging behind.

Taxpayers to take portion of unexpected losses; guarantees only for new loans to smaller SMEs.

A new concept of holding orders to tackle latency arbitrage will be trialled for pauses of at least three milliseconds on USD/MXN trades on Thomson Reuters Matching, just weeks after rival EBS completed the roll-out of its latency floor.

Will Blythe join Bambi and Godzilla at Mercuria to create a new commodities trading dream team? The fate of Blythe Masters, head of commodities at JPMorgan, is in the spotlight now that the sale of the bank’s physical commodities business to Mercuria for $3.5 billion has been confirmed.

The much-vaunted acquisition by Singapore’s DBS of the Asia private banking arm of Société Générale has come to fruition with a $220 million deal – and received a mixed reception.

The sale of a jumbo pool of legacy Spanish real-estate loans written by Commerzbank unit Eurohypo is just the latest evidence that the long-awaited deleveraging of Europe’s banks is set to accelerate. But as demand and supply in this part of the market finally align, the careful timing of sales will be crucial to their success.

International companies are less likely to invest in India than Iran due to the seemingly more onerous regulatory and tax regime of the world’s largest democracy, according to a pulse survey conducted by Euromoney.