Western Europe

The French investment bank is taking a bet on a double-edged blockchain technology to stay ahead of both the tokenization and sustainability trends.

The recent spate of deposit flight that spread panic through the banking systems of the US and Europe opens a chance for non-bank lenders to seize more of the core businesses that banks want to retain. Central bank emergency measures may have prevented the crisis from spreading, but a new phase of disintermediation has begun.

The chair of Ping An Asset Management has called again for the break-up of HSBC and spin off of its Asia assets. His argument is a strong and valid one; his problem is that none of the bank’s other main shareholders seems to care.

Standard Chartered’s new chief sustainability officer is not shying away from the reality of what the energy transition looks like in emerging markets.

A flurry of collaborations and the acquisition of Nivaura’s technology is putting NowCM in a key position in the digital capital markets ecosystem. Its focus on real-time issuance and its ownership of a regulated marketplace may have just become even more relevant.

With the advent of its strategic alliance with Japan’s Mizuho Financial, Lombard Odier now has wealth management tie-ups in seven Asia countries, with the promise of more to come.

Twinco Capital facilitates access to sustainable funding by focusing on pre-production finance.

Rising interest rates have driven demand for more efficient liquidity structures.

As soon as the ink was dry on the agreement to take over Credit Suisse, UBS chairman Colm Kelleher rushed to bring ex-CEO Sergio Ermotti back to run the bank and the deal. Execution risk is off the charts, and the nerves of shareholders, employees and taxpayers are jangling.

Pure-play Swiss private bank Julius Baer has had to reconfigure its business model for the 2020s. Chief executive Philipp Rickenbacher talks to Euromoney about why scale and nurturing talent are key to the long-term success of a firm that does just one thing and one thing well: serving wealthy private clients.

The Credit Suisse deal may have merely accelerated Hamers’ anticipated departure.

The failure of venture capital’s favourite bank is bad news for a sector reliant on new injections of cheap capital to sustain loss-making growth.

What will UBS’s post-merger sustainable finance strategy look like?

First Abu Dhabi Bank’s recent interest in a bid for Standard Chartered and an ill-fated investment in Credit Suisse by Saudi National Bank have put the spotlight on Middle East banks as potential acquirers of international firms.

It has been over a decade and a half since a Chinese financial institution bought or invested in a Western counterpart. Beijing sees the West’s banking system as incomprehensibly chaotic and messy, and its own – albeit flawed – as a bastion of stability.

Hong Kong conference moves along. Nothing to see here.

Recent events call into question most of the core assumptions behind the rules designed to keep banks safe through a liquidity squeeze.

Will the fall of Credit Suisse be a seismic moment for private banking? Probably not – the reality is that wealthy clients need their financial advisers too much. Wealth is flighty for sure, but it usually alights nearby at a more stable lender.

UBS’s integration of Credit Suisse will be a long and uncertain process, but keeping the latter’s Swiss universal bank may mean the deal eventually comes good.

Bankers have been at pains to stress how different the world is today from the dark days of 2008: higher capital; more liquidity; lower credit risk and all that. But while individual banks may be safer than they were, collectively they arguably now face a worse existential crisis. Societies face awkward questions about how they value the utility of the banking sector – and how they should pay for it.

UBS shareholders might find plenty not to like in what seems at first glance like a great deal. The bank is making itself more complex at a time when creditors and investors put a premium on simplicity and focus.

Big foreign-exchange banks are focussing on enhanced functionality to promote greater use of single-dealer platforms.

HSBC’s global head of trade finance talks about how the bank has built 'the trade finance platform for the future'.

Michael Klein can’t be expected to ‘devote significant time and attention’ to the unlikely prospect that UBS will allow a CS First Boston spin-off without being paid. Greensill-style invoices for Klein’s theoretical future services could be the answer.

Solar thermal technology could offer cheap carbon-free heat for manufacturers. But tech developers are stuck in a financing gap between venture capital and project finance that will be harder to fill after recent bank failures.

Credit Suisse came out of the global financial crisis in better shape than many peers. But fragility was never far away – in the years that followed its fortunes would swing back and forth, sometimes violently. Here is the bank’s route to 2023, explained through Euromoney’s own coverage.

Unfortunately, while the SNB can provide ample liquidity that Credit Suisse doesn’t really need, it cannot provide the trust and credibility it sorely lacks.

The decision by its Japanese owners to relist ARM, the UK’s great technology success story, in the US instead of London was inevitable after years of decline and the hammer blow of Brexit. Deregulation might further accelerate its collapse, even as the City wins a boost from new technology bringing the vast pool of retail money into equity capital markets.

Banks like Santander, BNP Paribas and SocGen see auto finance and the future of mobility as critical pieces of their overall group strategies. But as mobility becomes an increasingly fractured business, what does the auto finance bank of the future look like?

HSBC runs towards the storm as others are fleeing it.