Sector - Bank-to-Bank Services

New CEO at Euroclear

Settlement group hires head of HSBC Securities Services.

Institutions focus on new banking relationships

Global financial institutions hope to establish new transactional banking relationships over the next year.

Drugs and NPLs: a view from Moscow

Evgeny Gavrilenkov, chief economist at Troika Dialog, explains why the non-perfoming loan 'crisis' in Russia may not be such a crisis after all, and uses a new poll on drug addiction in Russia to support his intriguing argument.

Banks race to raise billions in new capital

US banks are scrambling to raise billions of dollars in equity, in order to pay back funds they have borrowed from the US government. Investors, meanwhile, have regained faith in financial stocks.

Living on the hedge

The credit crunch has led to a steep drop in volume on many western derivatives market, and to calls for tougher regulation. But in the EMEA region, derivatives markets are just getting going, writes Liz Salecka.
 

African Banking Awards: The Age of Expansion

emeafinance’s inaugural African banking awards come at a very exciting time for African banks, as banks raise large amounts of capital on domestic and foreign equity capital markets, and use it to finance aggressive regional expansion plans.

emeafinance announces Africa banking award winners

emeafinance has announced the winners of its inaugural Africa banking awards. The awards recognise the best banks throughout Africa, over the last exciting 12 months for the continent.
The awards generated a great response, with banks from all over Africa sending in submissions. emeafinance chose the winners based on key indicators such as market share, key deals, strategy, profitability, return on equity, and cost/income ratio.
You can read a full write-up of the awards here.
The winners are:

Turkey’s strengthened banks unfazed by rising risks

Boosted by a wave of reforms and foreign investment, Turkish banks are confident that they can weather the current climate of slowing growth and rising interest rates and resume their rapid growth. Of course, there will be winners and losers. And privatisation is still to come, writes Bernard Kennedy in Ankara.

Global and domestic markets may be dragging their feet, but Turkey’s banks have a spring in their step.
Between December 2006 and March 2008, the 50 banks – including the four small but burgeoning ‘Islamic’ participation banks – opened 1,100 new branches and took on 23,000 extra staff. These figures represent a 15% expansion. Hundreds more branches are planned.

Kuwaiti banks: Flying a crowded nest

As new players enter the Kuwaiti banking market and the central bank tightens lending rules, existing domestic players are increasingly
looking abroad, writes Clare Dunkley.

In contrast to the catchphrase once used to advertise the UK’s TSB – “the bank that likes to say ‘yes’” – the Central Bank of Kuwait (CBK) has traditionally been viewed as the bank that likes to say the opposite. Thus the Kuwaiti financial sector is typically regarded as either the GCC’s most carefully regulated and stable, or most over-scrutinised and restrictive. But from both perspectives, it is a market in a state of almost unprecedented flux, with new rules being imposed, new institutions entering the marketplace, and established players taking advantage of more than five years of economic boom and hence ballooning profits to spread their wings overseas – escaping both the fierce competition and the draconian referee.

Hungary's government hangs on

Despite the collapse of the ruling coalition, investors are hopeful the Hungarian government can stick to its fiscal austerity plans and weather the global credit crunch, writes Kester Eddy in Budapest.

The right-wing opposition and its supporting media in Hungary love the word ‘crisis’; they have been using, or misusing it for years in their regular analysis of the government’s performance, highlighting, for example, economic growth of just 1.3% last year, the lowest for over a decade and inflation pushing towards 7%.

Dmitri Medvedev's to-do list

Dmitri Medvedev once told emeafinance's editor he didn't see anything particularly urgent to do if he became president of Russia. Now he is president, we ask what are the top ten issues that urgently require his attention.

I first saw Dmitri Medvedev speak at the World Editors Forum in Moscow in 2006. He had recently been made deputy prime minister, and was obviously being groomed as a possible successor to President Putin.