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?

Huge fines, criminal investigations and public opprobrium are the consequences of big anti-money laundering failures at banks, but what about the regulators? The reluctance of fellow EU supervisors to criticize one of their own in Denmark has heightened doubts about Europe’s AML framework.

Regulators, politicians, competition authorities and central bankers have all been outlining objections to the Libra project from the first day Facebook announced plans to let its 2.4 billion users exchange payments in a new virtual currency. Don’t be taken in. Facebook wants the burden of compliance with all those KYC, AML and CFT rules. Being able to identify what its users are paying for is a treasure trove. The banking system and the world’s central banks, as the more enlightened already see, had better gear up for new competition.

Legal hurdles await race for European equivalents to UK AML partnership between banks and police.

Private banks across the world are changing fast, placing greater emphasis than ever on a host of key factors. The best wealth managers are busy boosting inclusivity, emphasising technology and security, and ensuring they are on-point when it comes to meeting compliance needs.

Introduction of the GST and demonetization mean Jaitley had a far bigger impact on Indian finance than his single term as minister would suggest.

Other players are expected to follow Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas in introducing algos designed to source both internal and external liquidity for FX NDFs, despite limited liquidity in many non-deliverable currencies.

European firms are looking in-house and building up more engaged buy-side analyst teams themselves, according to new research.

Danske Bank’s compliance head Philippe Vollot is on a hiring spree, but parts of its international network might still be too risky.

The regulators want overnight rates to become the norm in all markets after Libor – that could be wishful thinking.

As it presses ahead with restructuring, Deutsche will exit cash equities, cut back in rates and centre itself on a traditional corporate banking business. CEO Christian Sewing calls it the most radical transformation the bank has undertaken in decades.

For 22 years, he has led banking in Austria and across CEE at the helm of Erste Bank. Even as he nears retirement, he is pushing to transform Erste into a ‘financial health company’. Euromoney’s Banker of the Year for 2019 talks about this vision and how digital transformation is at its heart.

Europe’s economy depends in large part on 25 million SMEs, most of them unrated, that will suffer reduced availability and higher cost of credit thanks to Basel III output floors.

A new bookbuilding platform is at the heart of an attempt to unbundle a process that some feel is no longer able to serve growth companies in need of capital.

The insolvency and bankruptcy code is supposed to do wonderful things for India, but a leftfield decision on creditors this week will have a number of unhelpful side-effects.

Libra is designed to improve on the slow, costly and painful process of transferring money across borders through the banking system, but Facebook faces a long fight to launch it.