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Awards of Excellence

It's a sign of the times when a bank gives up a banking licence to a department store and buys a life insurer. But that's what ING Barings has done in Chile. Focused on corporate finance, ING Barings decided it didn't need a banking licence and approached local retailer Falabella about a deal.

The savage drop in oil prices and a populist presidential candidate have given investors in Venezuela the jitters. But, as Bill Hieronymus reports, the scaremongering might just be going too far.

Awards of Excellence

In these acquisitive times, a bank needs to find a cost-efficient means of funding its ambitions. In the recent takeover squabble for Belgium's Générale de Banque, ABN Amro suggested that it would issue $1 billion worth of preferred stock in order to help fund its, ultimately unsuccessful, bid.

This autumn, after the annual IMF/World Bank meeting is over, the men and women responsible for raising money for six of the smaller states in the euro zone will hold a private meeting in Portugal to discuss ways of ensuring that their interests are given as much weight as those of the area's largest sovereign borrowers. They will try to build a coordinated approach on issues such as a euro-zone borrowing calendar and establishing common standards for primary dealers. In the longer term some bankers believe they will be able to plan joint bond issues for more than one country in the same way that German Länder have made joint borrowings.

Crossing capital market boundaries

When Nicholas Brady left the US treasury department at the end of the Bush administration, it was something of a no-brainer to figure out what to do next. Why not invest in the Latin American countries that his work in developing Brady bonds had helped get on the track to privatization? Starting up in 1994, his company, Darby Overseas Investors, raised $150 million for a private equity fund, one of the first of its kind for Latin America.

Awards of Excellence

The leveraged buy-out market in Europe has doubled every year since the mid-1990s. Some market participants doubt that resources and expertise are sufficient to maintain this heady pace. Nevertheless business should continue booming as European monetary union takes effect and US firms are beginning to take an interest. Rebecca Bream reports.

Hans de Gier, chairman and chief executive of Warburg Dillon Read, didn't mince words at the grand opening of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in Canary Wharf on June 1. Batting third in an impressive line-up of speakers, he warned that the FSA's approach to regulation risked "embodying the worst of both worlds: high-level principles interpreted and applied separately from detailed rules designed on a one-size-fits-all basis".

Can Europe produce a top-tier global investment bank? The British have proved they can't. BZW and NatWest Markets were disasters and though they have spawned successful offshoots, Barclays Capital and Greenwich NatWest are to British investment banking what Greg Rusedski is to British tennis - technically British, actually North American. Bob Diamond and Tom Kalaris are ex-CSFB and JP Morgan respectively, and NatWest bought Chip Kruger and Gary Holloway's Greenwich Capital whole.