Search results for

Managing director, nCoTec

Managing partner, European Digital Partners

Local banks are now in foreign hands. Farewell to the domestic bank! Deutsche Bank has transformed itself. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter builds on its successful franchise. BSCH flies the flag for the Spanish. Ben Beasley-Murray, Simon Brady, Brian Caplen, Chris Cockerill, Antony Currie, Anja Helk, Peter Lee, Julian Marshall, David Shirreff.

President, Island

Citibank

This year's awards for excellence are a final farewell to domestic banking. Definitions of domestic or foreign have acknowledged that while local banks may have the best retail and local currency wholesale operations in a country, foreign institutions, with a handful of branches, often offer the best in cross-border financing and transaction services. Consolidation will ensure this year will be the last in which this distinction has any meaning. By Simon Brady.

Goldman Sachs

Trade finance debt totals $3 trillion a year.

Last year it was equities. Last winter it was bonds. Now this summer foreign exchange, by far the largest market, finally embraces e-commerce. Single-dealer platforms will still be needed, but might only account for 25% of the volume. The seven-bank consortium behind FXall.com has grabbed all the headlines this month, but it is already a year or more behind two independent ventures, and years behind State Street’s FX Connect, which since April has allowed other dealers on to the system. Why has it taken so long for forex bankers to accept the multi-bank approach, and what are the consequences of leaving it this late? Antony Currie investigates

Marcelo Barboza is chief operating officer of InvestShop.com, Brazil's biggest financial services site with 165,000 registered users and 2 million page views a month.

Few people expect a large bank to carry enough capital to meet every conceivable financial and operational catastrophe - except perhaps Daniel Zuberbühler, director of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission. In recognition of this, regulators and bankers are wrestling with the question of who should provide liquidity if a "too-big-to-fail" bank gets into trouble and threatens dislocation of the financial system?

South Africa has had its share of wars, protests and punch-ups: Boer against Brit, black against white and black against black. But a scrummage between white-collar corporations was something new. Starting last September a war of attrition involving some of the country’s most influential power brokers dominated the banking sector. The issue: should two successful South African banks, Standard Bank Investment Corporation (Stanbic) and Nedcor, follow the global fashion and merge – or were they already an optimal size? One said they were, the other said they weren’t. A bewildered finance minister ended up making the decision for them. This June, he pulled the fighting packs apart. Chris Cockerill reports