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With the euro and Y2K safely hurdled, the securities industry is sizing up straight through processing as the next obstacle to creating a more efficient global market. The unification of exchanges and clearing and settlement platforms, which should enable this to happen, remains stymied by political manoeuvring. But market forces, aided by technological advances are set to force change. While the front offices of investment managers have been eagerly seizing the distribution opportunities presented by the internet, their back offices have plenty of catching up to do. Those that rise to the challenge will pull ahead of the pack. Julian Marshall reports

It may be 148 years since their troops last fought each other in combat and nine years since they buried their economic differences to form Mercosur, but rivalry between Argentina and Brazil still runs deep. These days South America's two superpowers fight proxy wars over credit ratings, GDP growth rates - and of course football.

Most chairmen in the last few months of their tenure might be forgiven for winding down their workload and brushing up on their golf swings.

London's Hilton Hotel was running at full capacity this June with 800 delegates from some 60 countries attending Euromoney's Global Borrowers and Investors Forum.

Banks have become more assured of their internal risk management, and more worried about an external shock, such as an equity market crash, a downturn in asset quality, or getting their e-commerce strategy wrong. That is the finding of Banana Skins 2000, an annual survey of what most scares banks, their observers and regulators, conducted by the London-based Centre for the Study of financial Innovation, with technical help from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Euromoney Institutional Investor plc picked the toughest piece of coast in Britain - 56 miles of the lizard peninsula, from Falmouth to Penzance in Cornwall - to run as its charity leg in the 100-day round UK Island Race. The team of 22 ran stints of four to seven miles each to cover the distance, and raised several thousand pounds for 10 separate charities.

One of the sicker developments of the internet age is the so-called celebrity dead-pool, sites where those with nothing better to do speculate online about the next world famous figure to suffer an untimely end, winning points based on the accuracy of their predictions adjusted for varying odds to reflect celebrities' ages and life-styles.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter

Chase

Deutsche Bank

HSBC

CSFB