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The rumblings about what various countries will do with their currency reserves are continuing.

Glenn Phillips has left Citi, where he was a director running the bank’s FX option correlation books, and rejoined JPMorgan, which he left a few years back to follow Marcus Browning to Merrill Lynch. Sources say Phillips wants a new challenge and he will trade agricultural commodity options at JPM. He reports to Will Shropshire.

MIG Investments has appointed Howard Friend as chief technical analyst. Friend, who has lots of experience, is a member of the Market Technician’s Association and holds the Chartered Market Technicians designation.

BlackRock announced it has executed a purchase agreement to acquire Barclays Global Investors, making the resulting company, BlackRock Global Investors, the world's largest fund manager.

Euromoney's 40th anniversary gives us a chance to look forward. We profile the firms and the individuals who will help to write a new and successful chapter in global finance. We’ve picked out old firms sticking to what they have always done best and whose time has come, or those adapting to new times; or relatively young businesses with a new offering, or a new take on an old one.

Founded in 2006 with registered capital of Rmb5 trillion ($730 billion) and headquartered in Tianjin, Bohai Bank was the first national joint stock bank to be set up in China since 1996. As the city of Tianjin and surrounding Binhai New Area are a model for the Chinese government to test financial reforms, so Bohai represents an opportunity to see what a built-from-scratch, home-grown bank can do to support the country’s growth. Management say their aim is to support the region’s growth by providing a full range of banking services to its companies; the bank also formed a strategic alliance with a separate investment banking arm and is looking to increase revenues from fee-based products. The bank’s largest stakeholder is a local government investment entity, with Standard Chartered holding a 19.9% share from the bank’s inception. Bohai’s management say that they have learned much from their foreign stakeholder about risk management and corporate governance, and that their bank’s lack of bad loans and legacy problems means they are well placed to provide a new model of banking for China. While they have yet to be tested by the economic downturn, the early signs were good: net profits rose 178% in 2008 to Rmb127 million.

Global reach and capital remain king.

The world has changed: so must banks.

We must apply the lessons of the crisis.

The 2009 guide to Technology in Treasury Management (PDF)

The Japanese M&A boutique GCA won mainstream attention – and third place on the year’s league table – in 2007 when it advised on two of the biggest deals Japan’s financial sector had ever seen, Citi’s acquisition of Nikko Cordial and Mizuho’s merger with Shino Securities. While both deals had their subsequent problems, it was the fact that this small boutique, founded by Nobuo Sayama and Aki Watanabe in 2004, had beaten much more established players to the mandate that caught the industry’s attention. In 2007, GCA went a step further by buying – they say merging with – US peer Savvian. Critics at the big foreign M&A franchises in Tokyo sniped that the plan wouldn’t work, that GCA had only won the big financial sector mandates because their clients didn’t want to hand sensitive business to their real rivals, that the boutique’s value is in its partners and that the deals would dry up.

Putting the teeth into corporate governance.