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Jean-Claude Komarovsky, to get Black Knight's major shareholder off his back, goes to the fountainhead of retail distribution - Mrs Watanabe's playschool in deepest Japan.

GE Capital Services earns 37% of General Electric's profits, so it's anything but strategically insignificant. Right now its generals are engaged in a big push in Europe - it's taken over 34 businesses in two years. The strategy is to revive run-down assets by reshaping them with the company's "non-bank bank" formula. But purchases of traditional banks in eastern Europe are unnerving analysts. Can GECS be as successful with these as with British and French acquisitions? Brian Caplen reports.

The Bank of China aims to be a major international player by the year 2010. But it faces many challenges, not least of which is the transformation of a large proportion of its international profit - from Hong Kong - into domestic profit in less than 500 days. Sophie Roell reports on the bank's efforts to expand its areas of expertise, introduce tighter controls and achieve real independence.

Why Achilles heel? Because the Bonn government - once the single-minded champion of European economic union - is paralyzed by problems in its own backyard. It has pumped billions of Deutschmarks and man-years of management into its five new Länder, but they show little sign of surviving without life-support. And Germany's slide into recession, in the west and the east, could jeopardize an early move to European economic and monetary union. David Shirreff reports.

Inside London's St Paul's Tavern, Billy Whitbread sups his first pint. He thinks it highly hopped and attenuated - a process whereby you get as much alcohol out of the sugar solution as possible. "It's Gales or Pedigree," he concludes, verging finally on the former, because Pedigree "has more of an effect on my head".

An island powered for success The combination of American know-how and Asian can-do has turned Taiwan into one of the world's leading producers of computer-related electronics. And, despite the Beijing factor, medium- and long-term prospects are excellent. But the island needs to raise investment in R&D to stay ahead of the competition, as Nicholas Bradbury reports.

No-one believes that investment bank research is fully independent. As competition and costs escalate, the pressure on analysts to hawk deals and withhold negative views is intensifying. While some analysts get rich in the new environment, many have quit, and investors have turned to their own and third-party research. Michelle Celarier reports.

The banking sector has been at the leading edge of economic reforms throughout the economies of central Europe. For most of the more developed markets, striving to join the European Union has given them a focus to get their banking sectors in order, and fast. The majority of countries in the region have created sound legislative frameworks based on international banking principles and double-tier banking systems around the core of a broadly independent central bank. However, the hard work is by no means over. The difficult task has been to make sure that the banks that have been created are able to survive and operate according to commercial principles and, ultimately, to stand on their own feet.

Chairman John Reed's successor could be any one of half a dozen managers running the new streamlined Citicorp - Reed is giving nothing away about his favoured choice. But this group is fast changing the culture of the "largest small bank in the world" as it retools its approach to branded products and global coverage. Peter Lee reports.

Indonesia's banking sector is currently in a state of flux. Deregulated in 1988, it expanded beyond expectation, but is now set to consolidate. Tighter regulation, tough economic measures, bad loans and lower bank lending are forcing private banks, in particular, to be more entrepreneurial. By James Sinclair.

Asset swaps have grown rapidly in recent years mainly because of banks' excess liquidity and their need for floating-rate assets. But what happens when interest rates rise and banks start to increase lending again? That would either give the asset-swap market a big boost, or kill it - depending on who you ask. Rupert Gordon-Walker reports.

Charlotte-based Nationsbank is now hot on the heels of Chase/Chemical and those global investment banks in Europe. But is the full-service ideal right for a house that grew by opportunistic acquisition, mostly of distressed or damaged goods? Philip Eade reports.