UK banks, asset managers and individuals see better returns from dumping UK stocks and investing elsewhere, but the impact eventually becomes ruinous.

The UK government wants to invigorate the UK stock market and sell its stake in NatWest. The bank’s private banking arm wants to boost its investment almost anywhere else.

BBVA’s bid for Banco Sabadell didn’t appear to be going well when its share price slumped after the announcement. Then Sabadell rejected the offer despite the substantial premium to its own share price.

Twenty-five years ago in Spain, ING launched a branchless bank – still its biggest greenfield retail operation. Euromoney asks Iberia chief executive Ignacio Juliá Vilar what still makes it stand out from both incumbents and newer arrivals.

UOB’s acquisition of Citi’s consumer assets in four southeast Asia markets strengthens its status in one of the world’s fastest growing regions. The Singapore lender’s CEO Wee Ee Cheong talks to Euromoney about why this matters and what comes next.

SocGen has trader trouble again.

Several Chinese bubble-tea makers are looking at Hong Kong IPOs. When high-end tea maker Nayuki listed three years ago investors drank it up, but the deal now trades 90% below its listing price. Can a new group of issuers revive the market?

As mandated real-time payments loom, Europe’s banks and other payment providers must look at modernising legacy infrastructure.

Corporates’ longstanding complaint on banks’ payments offerings is that they don’t know what they are being charged for but suspect it is too much. Airwallex now provides an alternative at global scale.

BBVA could have bought Banco Sabadell much more cheaply in 2020. Sabadell’s CEO César González-Bueno has since turned his bank around. But BBVA’s return to the negotiating table comes at a time when European banking may be moving to a new and more confident phase.

Exactly one year ago, San Francisco-based First Republic Bank was sold by regulators amid a US regional banking crisis. Citizens Financial Group, which had seen the sale as a chance to turbocharge its private banking ambitions, lost out to JPMorgan. But far from being the end of the story, that failed bid was just the beginning. Within weeks the bank had announced First Republic’s Susan deTray as the head of its new private bank, a unit that is now at the heart of a fast-growing wealth franchise.

Restructuring HSBC, like painting the Forth bridge, is a never-ending job. While Noel Quinn has done well, the board must not make another ham-fisted transition.

A lack of consensus on whether recent under-performance of Asian currencies will impact China’s willingness to let its own currency weaken is leading to disparate views on near-term valuations.

Recently rebranded and expanded, Wealth at Work is Citi’s most dynamic generator of wealth revenues. Its leader, Naz Vahid, sits down in New York with Euromoney to explain her vision for its future.

As banks focus more on climate adaptation across their businesses, are they conceding that mitigation efforts are futile?

The body responsible for settling about $6.5 trillion of global daily FX trades has decided against extending its deadlines to accommodate non-US participants who still want to use its next-day settlement service. But it expects the impact to be limited – far too limited to justify the complexity that a change would impose on its members.

The two European banks are both trying to de-emphasise their investment banks and want to build up areas where they see weakness. Barclays is later to this party than Deutsche, but both will have found encouragement in the first three months of 2024.

Digital negotiable instruments offer the prospect of improved working capital and better liquidity, but they face implementation challenges.

Direct lenders to risky borrowers take comfort from their seniority in the creditor hierarchy. But stressed borrowers could jeopardise this as they struggle to attract new funding.

The Brazilian neobank is growing its number of clients faster than perhaps any financial institution on earth. Combine this with static unit costs and the operational leverage potential is big. CFO Guilherme Lago explains how its business model is now focused on the next five to 10 years as open banking generates unprecedented price transparency, customer portability and opportunity.

The standards-setter has come under fire for announcing plans to allow companies to offset Scope 3 emissions as part of net-zero targets. But this kind of compromise has always been inevitable.

A private credit market growing so fast, away from the oversight of bank regulators, may be a new source of systemic risk. With smaller investors taking greater exposure to an asset class whose high returns and low losses look almost too good to be true, there could be trouble ahead.

Junior bankers should relax about the threat to their jobs from AI and lean into opportunities to bluff their way to Wall Street glory.

Intesa Sanpaolo’s Isybank is the latest in-house neobank to run into trouble. But the desire to migrate core-banking systems onto the cloud is still encouraging other banks to follow this strategy.

Quarterly survey reveals that UK finance professionals may be feeling more upbeat about prospects, but that this is yet to translate into a willingness to take greater risk onto balance sheets.

A move back up in rates is creating a PR battle among Wall Street banks. JPMorgan was punished for a cautious outlook, Goldman Sachs promoted strong fixed income trading results and Bank of America projected a Zen approach to rate moves.

UK fintechs attracted more investment than all European rivals combined in a tough funding market last year, but a broken IPO market leaves them with nowhere to go.

China’s Project Whitelist, launched at the start of the year, exists to ensure bank funding for property development. But it is there to protect projects, not the developers behind them.

Rumours that FAB is in exploratory talks with a Turkish lender, together with hopes for a big-ticket IPO, point to optimism despite the dire outlook on inflation.

Previous changes of policy direction have left analysts undecided on whether to attribute recent sharp corrections to the renminbi reference rate to accident or design – or even a combination of the two.