The annual Sibos conference provides an ideal opportunity for transaction banking leaders to take stock of an industry that has over the past year seen notable geographic shifts, a greater focus on the client, and a reinvention of market infrastructures.
In the past three years, international equity issuance from African companies has outpaced listings on the continent. This trend looks set to continue for the time being, thanks to the small size of most African exchanges and global investors’ increasing appetite for exposure to the continent.
Intraday liquidity risk management is set to become an increasingly high-profile component of banks’ overall liquidity risk mitigation strategies. Deutsche Bank’s Christian Goerlach, director, cash management FI product, looks at the impact this will have on banks, and the industry at large.
The impact of low interest rates, new EU regulations and the predicted lessening of quantitative easing in Europe and the US mean structured product providers are being called upon to provide innovative solutions to reduce risk in both retail and private banking.
Across all asset classes and from retail to sophisticated clients, new regulations agreed at the international, regional and national level are occupying an increasing share of business managers’ time. The Banker crystallises the latest thinking on the acronyms that are keeping financial market participants awake at night.
With markets lacking a clear directional trend, uncertainty over the scale of global central bank interventions and an ongoing wave of regulatory initiatives, asset allocation must remain highly adaptable. Five European portfolio managers explain their responses to the changeable conditions.
Africa’s agricultural sector may still be underdeveloped, but it is growing as investors increasingly seek to exploit local and regional sources of demand and develop the continent’s processing capacity. A greater provision of banking services is also helping.
One of the few countries to remain largely unaffected by the global financial downturn, Saudi Arabia's economy is growing at a pace and, despite its expansionary fiscal policy, it continues to post a budgetary surplus. It has now started to put this capital to work in tackling pressing social issues, such as its high unemployment rate and housing shortage.
Government spending has kept the Saudi Arabian economy buoyant over the past few years, allowing the country's banks to maintain a healthy profit level in 2012. And their prosperity is showing no signs of waning, with an ambitious home ownership target spurring growth in the mortgage market and momentum building in the small and medium-sized enterprise space.
Saudi Arabia's investment banking industry is gaining momentum, thanks in large part to a region-wide uptick in bond issuance, in mergers and acquisitions and growing demand for project finance. But the evolution of this sector is far from over, as the country's bankers turn their minds to deepening the markets and encouraging the liberalisation of the stock exchange.