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The battles rage for Telecom Italia, Société Générale and Gucci. Europeans have learnt aggressive US-style tactics. Optimists think corporate Europe has woken up after trailing the US for years. But these mega deals are driven by clan rivalry and gigantism, rather than efficiency.

A revolution in securities settlement will make Emu and Y2K look like child's play. And it will be the death knell of custody as we know it. Increasingly, custodians see their business as information, not safe-keeping. Meanwhile the consolidation continues. James Rutter reports.

During the apartheid years and beyond corporate South Africa assembled unwieldy conglomerates to utilize domestic assets that could not be employed elsewhere. Now an economy that is opening up is going through a process of reshuffling and unbundling, with private-equity firms taking an increasingly important role. Richard Stovin-Bradford reports.

The pie may be getting smaller but the top players are taking bigger slices. However, as Jack Dyson reports, the largest foreign-exchange firms are having to work ever harder to carve out a point of difference in a mature market with thin margins. In our eagerly-awaited annual foreign-exchange poll, Citigroup stays ahead of Deutsche by a whisker. Research by Rebecca Cicolecchia.

In the eurozone big is beautiful. The potential three-way merger of Banque Nationale de Paris, Société Générale and Paribas is just the latest example of the consolidation that will transform Europe's fragmented and largely unsophisticated banking industry. National borders and regulations have become irrelevant more quickly than anyone had predicted, leaving the way open for huge intra-market and cross-border tie-ups. But as banking goes the way of auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, what role is left for the smaller institutions - the regional specialists and the boutiques?

Former head of the European Monetary Institute Alexandre Lamfalussy has lent his name as chairman of EuroMTS, the euro benchmark government bond trading system that started trading on April 10, because he strongly believes in what it is trying to achieve: a liquid, efficient and transparent market in euro government bonds. The ultimate prize is the establishment of the euro as a reserve currency to match the dollar. "We've seen an accelerated move to a market-centric system from the bank-centric system that has tended to prevail in Europe," Lamfalussy said in London last month. "I have no doubt that a market-centric system is more efficient, but there's a question whether it is stable." The key to stability, he concludes - for the pricing of corporate as well as public debt - is a liquid and transparent government debt market.

In the 1980s, John Gutfreund was the "King of Wall Street". The soberly dressed former municipal bond trader would arrive at work each morning with a reputed readiness to "bite the ass off a bear".

How do you combine a career in structured finance with trips to the Cannes film festival and seats at the best soccer matches in Europe? Dorian Klein, managing director of European structured finance at Merrill Lynch in London, makes it part of the job. For the past year and a half his team has worked with intellectual property rights, pulling off a major film rights securitization last year.

FX Poll: Life after execution

Custody: Custody is dead, long live custody

FX Poll: Life after execution

Information technology is the catch phrase of the moment. The issues surrounding Y2K, the introduction of the euro and spread of the internet are the bread and butter of an ever-expanding industry. They are also the daily bread of the key figures we invited to participate in our roundtable. What are the new challenges they face and how did they solve the old?