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We know that the cloggies of ABN Amro and ING Barings are deadly rivals the world over and eat each other's client lists for breakfast. In Almaty, Kazakhstan, that competition extends to the bankers' leisure time. And these aren't even Dutchmen, they're Kazakhs. They issue mad challenges to each other: downhill racing, skeet shooting, computer warfare, it's all in a day's fun.

Middle East: Arab banks lay regional plans

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.

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?

Why did Morgan Stanley Dean Witter decide in January to move the irrepressible Riccardo Pavoncelli from head of European debt capital markets to head its European media industry group.

French banking has arrived at a turning point. In the past the government would have stepped in to resolve the takeover battle between Société Générale, Paribas and Banque Nationale de Paris. But this time it looks likely that shareholders will determine who triumphs. Rebecca Bream reports.

M&A: Europe plays the takeover game

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".

ABN Amro's ebullient new chief financial officer was known by colleagues at the Dutch central bank as "Turbo Tommy" for the speed with which he got things done. "His greatest strength is his social intelligence," says a senior central banker. "He's also always open to new concepts and new approaches. If he has a weakness, it is that when he delegates, it is often to himself."

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.

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.

If one institution best demonstrates the effects of the Asian and Russian crises on a bank, ING Barings is it. It's a salutary tale of billion dollar losses, of individuals left to go their own way at the expense of group strategy, of management failures. Now ING Barings has one last chance and it's down to two men to turn it round. Nick Kochan reports.