Both Santiago and São Paulo are making significant strides towards becoming Latin America's foremost asset management hub. The Chilean capital has extensive experience, while the Brazilian metropolis already boasts the sixth largest asset management industry in the world. However, both are seeing their progress stunted by regulatory and taxation issues.
A decade-old political vision to create a harmonised payments scheme across Europe is finally nearing its deadline. But the prospect of a Single European Payments Area never seemed so threatened by economic volatility or so opaque in regulatory direction.
Hong Kong is the world’s offshore centre for the renminbi, and now other international centres are joining the Chinese currency’s path to internationalisation. But as additional pools of liquidity are being created, will the new centres dilute the existing offshore liquidity and create separate puddles rather than one large pool?
As the economic scales tip in favour of emerging economies – particularly those in Asia – it seems increasingly likely that one of the region's leading financial centres will steal the status of global wealth management capital from Switzerland. The question is, which city will it be?
The Swiss National Bank has been the most aggressive central bank in a developed economy when it comes to seeking to stop its safe haven status from driving excessive currency appreciation, but many other such institutions are using other, more varied techniques.
Despite facing crisis conditions in 2011, the Belarusian economy has proven to be remarkably robust, boasting plenty of untapped potential, and there are hopes that its privatisation process will lessen the dominance of large state-owned companies on the country's business landscape.
Aside from global economic woes, perhaps the biggest challenge facing the transaction banking sector at present is a regulatory onslaught of unprecedented proportions. The Banker examines some of the major legislative headaches facing the sector.