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BNP Paribas COO Philippe Bordenave tells Euromoney that the bank is putting digitization at the heart of its new strategic plan.

BNP Paribas said on Tuesday it wanted to be the ‘bank of the future’; it probably won’t be the last to do so, but it is certainly very far from being the first.

Just as concerns grow that central bank monetary policy is under threat of becoming politicized, there are also fears that politics is corroding the objectivity of rule makers, putting the stability of the financial system at risk.

Some of Europe’s biggest banks have joined behind KBC’s blockchain prototype to help SMEs increase trade across the continent.

CLSA has always had a unique position in Asian finance – to its competitors it has been a curiosity, but one secretly admired for its independence. Three years after its purchase by Citic Securities, it’s now the means by which the Chinese brokerage aims to take on the world. Outspoken CEO Jonathan Slone insists the firm will flourish while keeping its identity. Can he make it happen?

When Austria’s Hypo Alpe Adria collapsed after the financial crisis, it left a network of small Balkan banks – private equity firm Advent International has taken up the challenge of turning them into a profitable franchise, rebranded, root-and-branch reformed and under new management. CEO Ulrich Kissing is open-eyed about the challenges Addiko Bank faces.

There’s plenty wrong with post-crisis US bank regulation, but as the new US administration looks to roll back Dodd-Frank, its protectionist instincts might start a global race to the regulatory bottom.

John Laurens leans back in his chair and looks out across the Singapore skyline. “Everything in the world has changed so much over the last 100 years, but there are fundamental aspects of trade finance that remain stubbornly anchored to the past,” he says. “Sure, there are new platforms and technologies but, fundamentally, documentation that is still in use today would be familiar to people in the 19th century.” For some banks and their clients, such familiarity might seem a comfort. But it clearly makes DBS’s head of transaction banking uncomfortable. Innovation for DBS is a matter of survival. And in the world of transaction banking the bank is aiming to be one step ahead of its rivals, two steps ahead of its clients and, as far as possible, in front of the disruption that is coming to this most traditional form of banking.

Many banks pay lip service to innovation, but none has embedded it as deeply into its operations as DBS.

There may be yet some good news for UK based financial services in the wake of Brexit, if the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (Econ), a powerful committee within the EU Parliament, gets a draft resolution now being considered through to a plenary vote in its current form.

The rally in bank stocks seen after Donald Trump’s election victory had stalled by the time of his inauguration as president on January 20. Fourth-quarter results from US banks were also announced in January, giving bank heads a chance to pitch their prospects relative to competitors.

The long-awaited addition of hedging functionality to online trading application MetaTrader 5 (MT5) appears to have convinced at least retail FX customers that, seven years after its launch, it might at last be time to trade up their trading platform.