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The secretive world of private international banking is set to change. Regulatory reform may be slow but it is coming. By Christopher Stoakes.

There can be few industries that have changed as much this decade as banking. And there will be few that will change as much over the next decade.

Bankers are a competitive bunch, though competing to give money away seems an unusual form of behaviour.

Salaries and bonuses paid to workers in the City of London are unfair and unjustified. At least according to the majority present at the Futures and Options Association's third City debate, held last month.

Do you expect there to be further consolidation in the world banking industry?

In Turkey business patriarchs never die, they simply fade away. In the wings their sons - rarely their daughters - prepare to take over, whether they're entrepreneurially inclined or not. But family-owned business heads are increasingly realizing that survival will depend on more formal structures. A few are even putting them in place. Metin Munir reports

The tough route to quality

Investors in Japan's privatized companies are getting worried about the government's attitude towards its former charges. Less than two years after thrashing out an agreement with a number of former state-owned companies about the extent of their pension liabilities, the government has issued a demand for a top-up payment. Several railway companies some already privatized, others slated for privatization have been asked to cough up ¥360 billion ($2.8 billion) by accepting an increase in their pre-privatization era pension obligations.

The financial world will feel better now Korea has got most of its foreign debts rolled over. The bankers who lent Korea the money in the first place declare they have solved the Korean crisis a mere momentary liquidity squeeze and the Asian crisis along with it. The world may believe them for a short while (though it's ironic it should grant credibility to bankers it was their stupidity that let the crisis happen).

European banks are going to get much bigger - much bigger. In the quest for a knock-out market capitalization, Europe's bank leaders are ready to tie the knot with the unlikeliest of partners. The coming wave of mergers involving commercial banks will put the recent consolidation of investment banking in the shade. By Peter Lee.

It has all the makings of a tax haven. It's somewhere people tend to go only on holiday, if at all; it has a population of under a million, and a capital city with just 25,000 inhabitants; it's stable, with a median family income in 1989 of over $28,000. It even has snow-capped mountains.

You could never get them together in one room at the same time. But, using the wonders of technology, Euromoney did the next best thing. We collected the views of seven top European bank chairmen and CEOs on the challenges facing the banking industry, and synthesized them into a virtual roundtable. Garry Evans moderated the discussion.