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UniCredit stole a march on its banking rivals in late June with the signing of an agreement to buy at least 85% of Kazakhstan’s fifth-largest financial services provider, ATF Bank. The roughly $2.2 billion transaction will catapult the Italian bank to the top of the foreign bank pile in the oil-rich central Asian republic, with UniCredit leapfrogging such rivals as Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and ING, which all have long-established operations in the country.

On his return to the firm, John Mack demanded a complete overhaul of the MSIM division. That required taking risks and laying bets, but the latest results suggest the division is back on track and might be building a formidable business. Peter Lee reports.

Optimism that the launch of collateralized foreign exchange obligations (CFXO) would attract a new range of participants to the market (see Structured products: CFXOs bring in new investors, Euromoney June 2007) now looks well founded. Merrill Lynch says that it attracted more than €1 billion ($1.34 billion) for its recently launched CFXO, which is managed by Crédit Agricole Asset Management. "The deal went much better than we even expected," says Atanas Bostandjiev, managing director and head of structured rates and FX marketing, EMEA, at Merrill. "The roadshow in Europe alone raised the global target. Compared with CDOs that have been launched on non-traditional assets, this has been excellent."

All the global players have a presence in Australia, which is the fourth-largest asset management market in the world. Chris Wright looks at their strategies.

The ability to hold a tune may not be top of the list of talents required to succeed in the cut-throat structured finance industry – but that could all be set to change. Not many sectors of the capital markets industry can boast their very own band but the ABS market can: the painfully entitled D’Leverage.

The sheer size and influence of sovereign wealth funds is attracting attention – not all of it positive.

Commodity debate: Finding the diamonds in the dust

Wall Street investment bankers were agog at the news. Could it really be that Jimmy Quigley, debt capital markets legend and icon of Merrill Lynch’s dominance of the primary bond markets in the 1990s, had become an accountant?

The buzz surrounding the launch of the new Q-WIXX CDS trading platform suggests that it is one of the most eagerly awaited, and supported, product launches in years.

John Bock has joined Bank of America as a vice president in FX electronic trading services. Bock, who is based in New York, joins BoA after 17 years at Goldman Sachs, where he was most recently managing e-FX order flow. He reports to Harry Moumdjian.

Deutsche added new option functionality to its autobahnFX platform last weekend. These include an expiry blotter that lets clients exercise/expire all of their positions online. Deutsche says that it now benchmarks these against a fix, which it says reduces user workload by automating much of the process. The bank has also added functionality in its option streaming window, plus more currency pairs, including USD/TRY.

Yalda Toutounich is believed to have left her role in Middle East and North African sales at Barclays and headed off across Canary Wharf to Citi. At the time of writing, neither bank could confirm the move.