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Is the end of an era nigh in Italy? Investors thought so in mid-April, after the 92-year-old éminence grise of Italian finance, Enrico Cuccia, was admitted to hospital with a respiratory illness. Shares in Mediobanca rose in the expectation that the old man's departure would bring long-overdue reform at the shady merchant bank.

Insurer Allianz has a headache in the wake of the scrapped merger between Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank. The deal, which Allianz did much to engineer, would have given the Munich group the dream solution to its strategic problems in its home market. It still has plenty of strings to pull in the inevitable round of banking M&A moves to come. Allianz harbours a secret wish to resurrect the deal but is more likely to get an inferior version: Dresdner-Commerzbank.

The nature of bond trading is changing, with more emphasis on good credit advice and the need to provide liquidity for clients. But the usual suspects still rule the game, with a few notable improvers, according to Euromoney’s annual bond-trading poll.

Is Robert Fleming worth $7.78 billion? Possibly, but at this price its new owner, Chase Manhattan, is going to have to work hard to extract value from the UK-based asset management and investment banking firm.

Leading European technical analyst Graham Bishop has blasted off from his Salomon Smith Barney launchpad into cyberspace. After 17 years with the US investment bank in London, GrahamBishop.com goes online this month with a website providing analysis of economic and structural developments in the European financial markets.

Chief executive, EO

For 20 years, ever since Euromoney began its annual foreign exchange surveys in 1979, Citigroup came top. Now Deutsche Bank has dislodged it by a convincing margin. While critics accuse Deutsche of buying its way into the business with huge salaries, the real reason is its global markets model that brings together commercial and investment banking. Over the past year interbank forex flows fell while M&A and institutional business grew, favouring investment banks and those that combine both functions. Philip Moore reports; research by Andrew Newby.

Euromoney FX poll 2000: Deutsche topples Citi

KBC Bank of Belgium and Dutch ABN Amro have not had an easy time in Hungary. After KBC took a strategic stake in Kereskedelmi és Hitelbank (K&H) in 1997, the bank lost Ft8.3 billion ($12.58 billion) in 1999. ABN Amro's Hungarian subsidiary was in the red by Ft19.8 billion last year despite a $96 million capital injection.

Deutsche Bank has the biggest market share in Europe, and nearly took Dresdner Bank’s slice too. But the frontier of the custody market is a moving target, and so is the associated risk.

A bank called the Bank for Foreign Economic Affairs of the USSR does not at first glance appear to have a very promising future. Even its chairman describes it as an ugly animal that probably has no equivalent anywhere in the world. All the same Andrei Kostin, boss of Vnesheconombank, as it is better known, has high hopes for it.

Moscow head, EBRD