The UK’s Prudential and Bank Aljazira, Saudi Arabia’s smallest bank, have signed a memorandum of understanding to promote takaful or Islamic insurance in the kingdom.

The ability to hold a tune may not be top of the list of talents required to succeed in the cut-throat structured finance industry – but that could all be set to change. Not many sectors of the capital markets industry can boast their very own band but the ABS market can: the painfully entitled D’Leverage.

Private financing and the crossover space between debt and equity is an increasingly attractive area of business for investment banks. Already a player in the sector, Deutsche Bank is making a renewed push for dominance in Asia with a significant hiring programme.

Hedge fund research group HFR says that in response to enquiries from investors, it is launching an index of hedge funds run by women and minorities called the Diversity Index. Since January 2003, the number of minority and women-owned hedge funds in the HFR database has doubled to more than 100. HFR president Ken Heinz says that requests have come from institutional investors that are required to invest a certain percentage with minority groups. On a historical basis, from January 2003 to May 2007, the index would have produced an annualized net return of 11.26%.

Latin America’s largest issuers have for a while been competing on pretty much a level playing field with their competitors in fully developed countries. That’s important for Brazilian miner Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, which in the wake of its acquisition of Canada’s Inco is now one of the world’s four largest mining companies, alongside BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, and Anglo American.

In a move that demonstrates the broadening appeal of Russian assets, HSBC Investments has launched the first pure Russian equity fund for Japanese investors, raising more than $150 million since launching a marketing campaign at the end of March.

Telefónica has successfully closed the largest multi-tranche Czech koruna bond issue by a foreign corporate. The main purpose of the transaction was to extend the company’s investor base to Czech investors – a move the Spanish telephone company has been interested in since its arrival in the Czech Republic after it acquired a majority stake in the country’s main telecom operator, Cesky Telecom, in mid-2005.

There’s trouble brewing in the Chinese stock market. But a short, sharp shock could be just what is needed.

A new index might increase both liquidity and volatility.

"OK, so I screwed up. Even my COO called me up and said: "Great pitch mate, really compelling – shame about the logo on the top of the page"

Foreign bank interest in Turkey’s fast-growing banking market shows no sign of slowing down, with ING of the Netherlands the latest new entrant into the country’s increasingly cosmopolitan financial services sector. In June, ING signed a contract with the Armed Forces Pension Fund (Oyak), to acquire its subsidiary, Oyak Bank.

As part of Deutsche Bank’s recent expansion initiatives for its overall prime brokerage business, the firm has launched a hedge fund consultancy.

Broker/dealer Louis Capital Markets is recommending auction houses as investment of the month. Sotheby’s, it says, is benefiting from the "soaring fortunes of the ultra-rich". The firm is auctioning works by Monet, Matisse, Warhol and Bacon in July that should – after rises in commission rates earlier this year – significantly increase auctioneer’s earnings.

According to a study by Greenwich Associates, funds of hedge funds are beating high-net-worth individuals and family offices as a source of assets for hedge funds with more than $1 billion in assets under management. HNWIs and family offices contribute 21% of assets, while FoHFs contribute 25%. Pension funds, endowments and foundations directly investing comprise 25%. US institutional allocations to hedge funds are now at more than double the 2001 level, says Greenwich. Some 36% of US institutions invest in hedge funds.

One of the most puzzling aspects of Asia’s headlong economic growth has been the conspicuous absence of inflation. Despite net foreign exchange inflows of more than $2 trillion since 2000, money supply and credit growth have actually fallen sharply in Asia.

The launch of further FX indices by Citi and Axa underlines the acceptance of FX as an asset class, which has attractions across the entire investment spectrum.

110 the percentage increase in SEC-registered ECM volume from the mining sector year-to-date. Mining companies have raised $6.7 billion via 11 deals so far this year, compared with $3.2 billion via nine deals over the same period in 2006.

HVB has continued the build-up of its FX business with several senior-level sales appointments, including Mark Sweeting, who it enticed from ABN Amro in London. The bank also hired Toby Angel from JPMorgan, Peter Graham from Pru-Bache and Sue Rasmussen from ANZ.

The Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong announced in June that it would be "streamlining and simplifying" the licensing process for hedge fund managers with immediate effect. Alexa Lam, the SFC’s executive director of intermediaries and investment products, said: "These initiatives will make the licensing process easier for fund managers and more particularly for overseas hedge fund managers. They are not intended to lower our regulatory requirements because we recognize that these contribute to Hong Kong’s reputation among investors as being a jurisdiction in which appropriate standards are insisted upon among its market participants."

ANZ combined a number of features on its latest tier-1 deal that allowed it to cut the premium an issuer normally pays to access institutional investors without a coupon step-up at the call date. The £450 million ($898 million) tier-1 perpetual paper was ANZ’s first sterling capital security.

Proxy season in Japan is in full swing, with hundreds of companies holding annual general meetings at the end of June, often on the same date. There is nothing new in that: Japanese companies began clustering shareholder meetings in this way years ago to avoid extortion by yakuza (Japan’s criminal gangs), who would threaten disruptive action unless they were paid off.

When it’s Euromoney’s awards season, our journalists get to feel what it must be like to be the client of an investment bank for a few weeks at least, as the world’s leading firms wheel out their big guns, and big pitches, to secure one of our prestigious awards.

Move helps normalize relations with international financial community.

Banking analysts are starting to ring alarm bells about Brazil – in recent months there has been a rapid increase in consumer lending by local banks, but this came hand in hand with a large increase in the non-performing loan market.

William Cumming, former European head of Citi’s global special situations group (GSSG), is on the move again. He has quit Citi for rival RBS, joining the UK bank’s private equity division in New York. Cumming moved to Citi’s GSSM just over a year ago in April 2006. Before that he had been co-head of the bank’s European securitization business with David Basra since 2004. In his new role Cumming will be working alongside Lindsay McMurray, who rejoined RBS in October 2005 after quitting the bank in April 2004 to join Drawbridge Capital, sister company of Fortress Investments. During her time away from RBS she also spent a few months at Merrill Lynch.

Optimism that the launch of collateralized foreign exchange obligations (CFXO) would attract a new range of participants to the market (see Structured products: CFXOs bring in new investors, Euromoney June 2007) now looks well founded. Merrill Lynch says that it attracted more than €1 billion ($1.34 billion) for its recently launched CFXO, which is managed by Crédit Agricole Asset Management. "The deal went much better than we even expected," says Atanas Bostandjiev, managing director and head of structured rates and FX marketing, EMEA, at Merrill. "The roadshow in Europe alone raised the global target. Compared with CDOs that have been launched on non-traditional assets, this has been excellent."

Ask any foreign partner involved in a Sino-foreign public-private partnership (PPP) deal and they will tell you that they are far from straightforward to complete. So plans to establish, fund and build China’s first fully digital world-class hospital are not going to be easy.

Commodities offer a means of diversifying investment portfolios, and of bringing down volatility. They can also offer good returns to the savvy investor. But the markets still have some way to go in terms of increasing sophistication.

Sub-prime-induced volatility was cited as the reason for the withdrawal of a five-year and 10-year euro-denominated transaction by Arcelor. The lead managers – Calyon, Citi, Commerzbank and RBS – sent out a terse statement saying that the borrower would return when stability returned.

UniCredit stole a march on its banking rivals in late June with the signing of an agreement to buy at least 85% of Kazakhstan’s fifth-largest financial services provider, ATF Bank. The roughly $2.2 billion transaction will catapult the Italian bank to the top of the foreign bank pile in the oil-rich central Asian republic, with UniCredit leapfrogging such rivals as Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and ING, which all have long-established operations in the country.