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An insider explains the Indonesian finance minister’s ire with JPMorgan

The country’s new minister of finance has ambitions to build factories, cut taxes and combat corruption. His background as an entrepreneur and banker may mean his plans can get off the ground.

The country’s last administration borrowed heavily from banks to sustain inefficient state-owned energy companies at the expense of the private sector – can the newly elected government repay the debt and get banks lending again?

Aval may be the leading banking group in Colombia and central America because of its sprawling structure, but could there be efficiencies available from rationalizing its operating model?

Beehive and Eureeca are using online crowdfunding to raise debt and equity for small businesses in the Middle East. Becoming regulated will allow them to grow rapidly. In time, they could eat the banks’ lunch, or the banks just might swallow them.

The liquidity issues that have plagued the Kingdom’s banks for months appear to have abated. But a persistently low oil price and the impending generational reform programme mean that Saudi Arabia’s financial sector still faces some big challenges.

After being bailed out with €7 billion, KBC has bounced back to become one of western Europe’s most profitable banking groups. Much of the credit goes to Johan Thijs. But is the real test of his bank/insurer model yet to come?

Moldova is troubled even by the standards of eastern Europe, but at the central bank Sergiu Cioclea, a former BNP Paribas corporate financier, is trying to bring order to his home country’s chaotic banking sector.

Middle Eastern governments and companies rose to the financing challenge set by falling oil prices in 2016, rethinking their operations, cutting costs and turning to the international bond markets in committed fashion to plug funding gaps. Issuers in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries raised $66bn last year, and this year’s first quarter total of nearly $25bn suggests issuance will be similarly high in 2017.  At GlobalCapital’s roundtable in Dubai on March 27, hosted by Standard Chartered, leading participants discussed the steps needed to take the region’s debt capital markets from nascent to mature, to ensure that they can continue to function, whatever happens to the oil price.

Whip-smart M&A boutiques and upstart full-service investment banks are making waves in India, profiting from the retreat of global investment banks. But how much further can they go?

The ECB’s inflation outlook in March gave hope that, after a year in intensive care, European banks are recovering. There is a sense that Basel risk-weighting rules pose less of an immediate danger, while peak regulation has passed. Is European banking cured or only in remission?

Alibaba, Alipay, Ant Financial – by now everyone in banking knows the triumvirate of brands that have transformed financial services in China, and the domestic story is only the start. Going global will be Ant Financial’s biggest-ever test, with tougher markets, tighter regulation and a whole new world of risk management. But it is nothing if not ambitious.