Just as banks in Russia were beginning to resemble their peers outside the country, engaging in conventional retail and corporate banking, the western financial market crisis hit. Reduced availability of long-term funding from abroad highlights the shortage of such a market in Russia and reveals a systemic vulnerability. Will this help state-owned banks, which had previously been losing market share, turn the tables on their privately owned rivals?

Investment banks are rushing to offer systematic payoffs and smart underlyings as structured notes, partly in response to investors’ growing mistrust of more complex products. But is replicating hedge fund strategies in note form as simple as they are trying to make out?

The US secondary market in life insurance is being extended to sellers who can ill afford to relinquish their policies.

Inter-dealer broker Icap has confirmed that it is trialling and will soon launch an internet-based version of its EBS spot trading platform. EBS Global Access is scheduled for launch by the end of June and the company says it is intended to provide a cost-effective and easy means of accessing the foreign exchange market’s predominant spot liquidity pool. Icap says that all manually traded EBS products – spot FX, precious metals and non-deliverable forwards– will be available on EBS Global Access. Clients will not have to install any hardware and Icap says they will have the same access to the EBS liquidity pool as existing users. While latency is potentially an issue, Icap says that the benefits are reduced telecom costs and time to market. It is estimated that deployment of EBS Global Access will take less than a week.

According to market participants, cash holdings are at an all-time high among investment managers.

Millennium BCP used to be the star of Portuguese banking. But a period of destructive internal rivalries, abortive takeover bids and dubious strategies made the firm a basket case. Can a new chief executive – seen as a safe pair of hands – rebuild the bank’s capital and revitalize its growth?

There may be plenty of doom and gloom among private equity practitioners in the US and western Europe as a result of the global credit crunch that has all but dried up their cheap financing. In Russia, though, the mood among their peers is almost euphoric. "I am amazed by how relatively easy it is to raise money for a private equity fund in Russia," says Florian Fenner, managing partner at UFG Asset Management in Moscow, which is fundraising for its second private equity vehicle. UFG is looking to raise at least $500 million and expects to make a first close at least half that figure in May.

ING has released a report on the economic and market implications of US obesity. Entitled The fat of the land, the report looks at possible effects on the US economy of the growing numbers of obese people. In 1980, some 15% of Americans were classified as obese, under the (admittedly questionable) BMI method. By 2004, that figure had risen to about 33%.

Retail FX provider Oanda is building up its presence in Asia following the recent appointment of K Duker as its managing director for Asia Pacific. The company has hired Maxine Loh, formerly a marketing director at UBS; Zena Tong, formerly a senior sales executive at Saxo Bank; and Tracey Tan, who was a senior customer service executive at Bloomberg, to work out of its Singapore office.