David Mann, Standard Chartered’s global chief economist, plots the year ahead for banks around the world.

Deciding whether or not to hedge against foreign exchange risks is a lot like deciding about insurance: by the time you realise you need it, it might be too late, too expensive, or both.

Across the globe, cities are growing at an unprecedented rate and are now home to the majority of the world’s population. By 2050, it’s estimated that two out of three people worldwide will live in cities.

Various programmes designed to facilitate foreign investment have boosted financial market reform in China, and the internationalization of the renminbi. As bond market liberalization nears completion and the onshore stock market opens up to foreign ownership, corporate and investor interest in the Chinese currency is picking up.

Standard Chartered is sponsoring a series of Euromoney webinars to tackle the latest challenges and opportunities in the global financial markets. Register below to join our next webinar discussion covering global economic growth in 2019.

Accessing restricted FX markets can be a considerable challenge for corporates and investors. Many markets still require local institutions to support trades despite an increasingly globalised world. After a year of trade tensions and rising geopolitical uncertainty, this is unlikely to change any time soon.

The world’s energy companies are recasting their activities not only to reduce their carbon emissions but also to diversify into forms of energy that don’t produce emissions at all.

In this podcast episode Euromoney will examine what the energy industry can learn from the Ørsted story.

A series examining how sustainable finance solutions may help us address the crisis our planet faces.

Financial services and public sector development organisations are turning to innovative technology to secure access to financial aid.

A series examining how sustainable finance solutions may help us address the crisis our planet faces.

The growing use of application programming interfaces (APIs) is challenging how businesses communicate and how client solutions are developed and delivered. APIs enable new solutions that address demands for personalized services and immediate fulfilment – driving industry innovation, disruption and connectivity.

As global economic growth slows, Asia’s high-growth markets look especially appealing to debt investors.

With a select group of economies likely to grow at 7% into the 2020s, investors that take a long-term view can make the most of the opportunity.

As Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries strive to diversify their economies away from oil, capital markets have become unexpectedly valuable partners.

Discussion around digital assets is taking the industry by storm and growing at an unprecedented pace. But as the world embraces the next iterations of technology in banking and capital markets, questions arise. Do we have clear definitions and understandings of these digital assets? How do differing definitions by regulators lead to challenges and conflicts? Have we accounted for the different risks that this technology brings about? Our webinar will find out.

As trade friction between China and the United States escalates, the situation is having the unintended consequence of benefiting certain countries. We take a look at who these ‘winners’ are and how treasurers are managing the disruption.

How blue financing can support the fight against climate change

There is an increasing sense of urgency about putting the global economy on a path towards sustainable development.

A series examining how sustainable finance solutions may help us address the crisis our planet faces.

A series examining how sustainable finance solutions may help us address the crisis our planet faces.

A series examining how sustainable finance solutions may help us address the crisis our planet faces.

The trade war between the United States and China reignited in May, when the US government increased tariffs on Chinese goods and began to target individual companies. What will come next? Which sectors are most exposed? Is there anywhere safe for global investors? The latest webinar between Euromoney and Standard Chartered will find out.

Treasury management is on the brink of a transformation. Emerging new technologies and accelerating transaction speeds are driving treasurers to overturn traditional operating models, extricate themselves from day-to-day processing and engage more directly with their businesses to drive growth.

Standard Chartered is sponsoring a series of Euromoney webinars to tackle the latest challenges and opportunities in the global financial markets. Register below to join our next webinar discussion covering global economic growth in 2019.

It is a well-known maxim that regulation and technology are the co-drivers of change in the financial industry.

Sourcing and supply strategies have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, with companies across industries taking a more strategic approach to procurement in view of shifting ecosystems.

Digitization is radically changing the way we communicate, transact and share information, transforming business models and customer expectations. However, underpinning the business models of both the past and future is the processing and financing of trade transactions.

Standard Chartered is sponsoring a series of Euromoney webinars to tackle the latest challenges and opportunities in the global financial markets. Register below to join our next webinar discussion covering the potential for fintech disruption in securities services.

Standard Chartered is sponsoring a series of Euromoney webinars to tackle the latest challenges and opportunities in the global financial markets. Register below to join our next webinar discussion covering the potential implications of US-China trade war.

Today’s modern treasurer plays a key role in creating structures and processes that ensure the continued availability of working capital across their supply chains

Financial inclusion enables and empowers people and communities, and can help drive economic growth by bridging economic opportunities and outcomes. Increasing financial inclusion for individuals and small businesses is an objective for policymakers, governments, banks and corporations alike. Payment innovations such as mobile money solutions have proved a catalyst for greater financial inclusion over recent years, but there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, and challenges and complexities remain. Continued progress in mobile money, and by extension financial inclusion, requires greater cooperation on multiple fronts, involving governments, regulators, telecoms, banks and fintechs.

Proliferation of bank accounts, unreconciled suspense entries and fragmented liquidity are challenges for both domestic and international corporations. Virtual accounts tied with automated liquidity management structures provide a scalable way for treasurers to automate processes and simplify liquidity management whilst concurrently reducing physical bank accounts and streamlining resourcing.

Standard Chartered Bank are sponsoring a series of Euromoney webinars on DCM & securities services tackling the latest industry challenges. Sign up below.

International investors are increasing their exposure to China, our latest survey finds.

Technology has always played a critical role in the evolution of securities services, from streamlining and reducing risk from our processes, to creating new products and generating enhanced value from data.

Chinese regulators have taken major steps to open up the onshore renminbi bond market to foreign investors, including launching the landmark Bond Connect scheme. But many foreign fund managers are still taking a gradual approach to the market, preferring to invest in short-term deals from high-rated issues. This webinar explores the opportunities for foreign investors - and asks when they will make the most of their access to China's bond market.

The Belt & Road initiative is proving to be a win-win situation for both China and Africa, creating a foundation for the next level in Sino-African economic ties.

In the past two years, Standard Chartered has conducted the RMB Investors Forum survey to monitor investor sentiment about China access. This infographic highlights the key results for 2017

More and more investors are looking favourably on sukuk as an asset class

Initiated by China, the Belt & Road was to promote free trade and connectivity between Asia, Africa, and Europe via a huge infrastructure investment

In the search for investment yield, one asset class that is expected to grow significantly in the coming years is global local currency bonds, with recent macro conditions set to spur new demand.

A full quarter has elapsed since Bond Connect was launched, and the mood remains confident.

China is keen on deepening its bond footprint, and the world should take notice.

This year marks a decisive year in the global economy, and the transaction banking industry that facilitates it. In every region, we have seen how eCommerce, new technology and changing regulations are prompting new business models, faster or real-time payment methods and changing customer expectations, both at a consumer and corporate level. While the underlying trends may be similar, however, the implications for transaction banking in each region are quite different, demanding a multi-faceted approach to address the distinct strategic challenges and opportunities.

Asia’s high-yield bond market has had an impressive year so far – and it’s set to continue.

Standard Chartered Bank are sponsoring a series of Euromoney webinars on DCM & securities services tackling the latest industry challenges. Sign up below.

Malaysia’s infrastructure financing market is well ahead of many of its peers, proving time and again that it can support greenfield financing when many other countries are still focused on funding pure brownfield projects.

Cyber security is a growing problem as the frequency and diversity of attacks continues to increase. While many attempts are rebuffed by existing defences, the number of successful recent attacks has elevated cyber security to a critical risk that is beginning to feature regularly in C-Suite strategic discussions.

Standard Chartered recently chaired a panel discussion themed Charting The Future Growth Of Risk Management And How To Manage A Longer Custody Chain. Not surprisingly, an area of initial discussion focused on the somewhat complex and convoluted web of intermediaries, technologies, jurisdictions, processes and costs sitting between the beneficial owner or investor and the securities issuer that exist in this cycle.

India has undergone significant structural changes in recent years and it is presently one of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Standard Chartered Bank are sponsoring a series of Euromoney webinars on DCM & securities services tackling the latest industry challenges. Sign up below.

Analysis of headline GDP figures in Africa would presuppose a region going through a period of prolonged stagnation, with growth slowing down to 2.2% in 2016 (1) off the back of falling commodity prices and tighter Chinese economic conditions - but this needs to be put into proper context. Nigeria and South Africa are the two biggest regional economies and the main bulwarks behind the continent’s growth, and both markets have contracted. Slowdowns in these two countries tend to have a disproportionate weighting on the overall region’s growth figures.

Middle class savers are looking for long-term return solutions to insulate their savings but the artificial suppression of interest rates by central banks has constrained their options. Low rates of interest paid on cash deposits held in bank accounts is forcing people to identify new means by which they can grow and complement their existing income and savings.

The latest access channel between the Hong Kong and China financial markets went live on July 3 with the launch of the northbound Bond Connect – connecting international investors with the China Interbank Bond Market (CIBM). Previous China market access platforms – such as Stock Connect – have typically started slowly as investors exercise initial caution, before attracting proper momentum.

China has never been more important to foreign investors and the pace of liberalization in the country’s financial markets continues to accelerate. With MSCI’s inclusion of China A-shares into its emerging markets index and the launch of Bond Connect, we are nearing a critical point in the journey towards the complete opening of China’s financial markets to global investors.

For the second time in a little under two months, an audacious hack of major institutions spanning vast geographies was executed by cyber criminals. Companies operating in around 64 markets were breached as a result of malware, causing enormous cost and delays to their operations.

The sukuk market continues to expand, but some significant challenges remain for both investors and issuers wanting to access the Sharia-compliant market which are arguably holding it back from faster growth.

Chinese real estate firms have been the source of many of Asia’s high yield deals in the past few years. The landscape is changing, however, due to a complex mix of Chinese regulatory efforts to make domestic capital markets more accessible for issuers, prolonged renminbi volatility that has lowered the appeal of dollar funding, and increasingly stringent rules set by China’s National Development and Reform Commission that control offshore issuance by domestic firms. The NDRC recently went as far as naming and shaming issuers circumventing such procedures. At GlobalCapital's roundtable, held in Hong Kong at the end of May, hosted by Standard Chartered, leading market experts discussed the evolution of Greater China high yield, the challenges posed by ever lower yields and what the future drivers of issuance will be at times of rising policy uncertainty.

Standard Chartered Bank are sponsoring a series of Euromoney webinars on DCM & securities services tackling the latest industry challenges. Sign up below.