Bail-in uncertainties remain; Portugal and Italy mark tough start for BRRD.

Europe’s plan for a bad bank in Italy, it turns out, is to not have a bad bank at all.

Italy, Austria, Germany take brunt of 18,000 job losses; lingering capital doubts overshadow efficiency drive.

International investors are scrambling to establish themselves as the country’s huge NPL market finally starts to creak open. But this is not a market for the faint-hearted, and achieving those double-digit rates of return will require skill and unrivalled local knowledge.

CFO leaves MPS for UniCredit after new chairman arrives; lack of buyers stymies M&A.

After years of crisis, a quiet revolution is happening in Italian banking. A mountain of bad debt and a government and regulator intent on reform have ended a fundamental tenet of the cooperative system – with implications for the vast tracts of cooperative banking elsewhere in Europe. Will the reform and a wave of mergers succeed in bringing Italian capitalism out of the regions and into the 21st century?

The onslaught of regulatory change and capital requirements is putting pressure on co-operative ownership of banks across Europe, but especially in Italy.

Renzi’s reforms and favourable winds seem to be working some magic on the country’s numbers.

For European banks, the days when a lack of big international operations was seen as a weakness are gone. Nowadays, some of the continent’s biggest and most successful banks are using large market shares in a single market in increasingly profitable ways – setting an example for bigger peers. Euromoney asks their CEOs how they are doing it.

Fineco share price shoots up; rivals set up similar businesses.

Only structural change, not tweaks, will bring a recovery across Italy’s banking sector.

Later this year 50 people will go on trial in Venice charged with complicity in illegal arms trafficking to Iran. Among the defendants will be leading figures, past and present, from the world of Italian finance as well as senior government officials. Evidence amassed over several years strongly suggests that banks in a number of European countries have been involved.

For 40 years, all roads of Italian capitalism have led to a single man at a single merchant bank – Enrico Cuccia and Mediobanca. During the past four years this obsessively secretive 80 year old, whom his close friend André Meyer considered to be Europe’s best financier, was nearly dethroned. He stays, but what succeeds him? Steven Solomon looks at the man who has built up Italy’s oligopolistic family capitalism.