Europe is belatedly setting up an anti-money laundering (AML) supervisor, even an EU financial intelligence unit, but the plan faces tough political tests ahead.

An art installation shines a light on UBS.

Japanese banks must go overseas to build sustainable profits, each in their own way. Nomura is streamlining global operations and applying itself in China; Daiwa wants to be a global mid-market M&A house; MUFG has bought Asean banks; Mizuho prefers organic growth; and SMBC is somewhere in between. Who’s ahead?

It appears that basic errors rather than deliberate attempts to game the system lay behind Citi’s large miscalculations of UK RWAs and CET1.

The bank’s CEO and chairman are out, a week after allegations of AML failings that helped enable child exploitation.

It seems the Australian banking scandal has caught up with Westpac.

The country’s Supreme Court overturns a curveball decision from July, to the benefit of distressed debt investors.

Kenya’s parliament passes a law to lift an interest rate cap that has hampered credit growth and economic development, in a move that may pave the way to a new agreement with the IMF.

Russia’s leading private sector lender looks to mortgages to maintain pace of loan growth.

New proposals by the SEC have shaken the investor community, threatening the ability of smaller shareholders to file resolutions and potentially preventing ESG issues from being heard.

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.

A new approach to going public has so far been tested by only two firms, but the people who did those deals see them as the start of something bigger.

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.

It was just what the regulators didn’t want: another surge in Sofr just as the timetable for transition away from US dollar Libor enters its critical phase.

Euromoney's latest coverage of the benchmark that serves as a reference rate for hundreds of trillions of dollars in financial instruments - and the upcoming transition to new risk-free rates (RFRs).

As entrepreneurs seek to improve institutional-grade custody and security for trading in crypto assets, conventional financial market participants remain suspicious.

Deutsche Bank has taken the radical step of getting rid of its equities business, but thinks it can still offer ECM. Can it?

It might not happen, but if the US president were to stop Asian firms listing in the US, it would help a sector that has watched business slip through its fingers.

Applications to operate banks in Saudi Arabia show that consolidation has not shut the door to new entrants.

Saudi Arabia is pressing on with capital markets reform and its planned IPO of Aramco in spite of drone attacks on its oil facilities that briefly spooked markets. Virginia Furness reports from Riyadh.

Singapore’s emergence as a global financial hub is no accident, and has not happened overnight. The key, according to Ravi Menon – the managing director of financial regulator the Monetary Authority of Singapore – is to plan well, act decisively and, above all, listen.

It has just received a very public vote of no-confidence from non-bank liquidity providers, but concerns around transparency are yet to outweigh the perceived benefits of last look.

The bid by HKEX for the London Stock Exchange is bold and has scale on its side, but faces regulatory barriers – and the fact the LSE has a different idea of what an exchange should look like.

A push into the regional mid-markets, as well as the international subsidiaries of those clients, is a useful driver of market share at a time of uncertainty.

It is less than two and a half years until Libor, the benchmark on which trillions of dollars-worth of financial instruments are based, will disappear. That is a hopelessly ambitious timetable in which to complete what has been called the largest financial engineering project in history. Even if chaos is averted, the way in which banks lend, and indeed how corporates borrow, may never be the same again.

Banks are caught in the middle of regulatory pressure from above and corporate inertia from below when it comes to transitioning away from Libor, but they are the lynchpin on which the whole process depends.

Clubby governance structures in the EU are obstructing the fight against money laundering.

As Europe’s financial conduct authorities get tougher, banks will be even less likely to support trade between the EU and states that are small and poor.

European banks are trying to put a devastating series of money-laundering scandals behind them, but the crisis is far from over. The extra costs it implies are hitting them at the worst possible time, while the damage to their reputations will be even harder to repair.

Money-laundering scandals have dealt another blow to the reputation of Europe’s financial architecture. Does the EU stand any chance of convincing the rest of the world that it is getting tough on financial crime and fixing the leaks in its system?