With the deadline for the Single Euro Payments Area looming, there is much speculation over who is actually ready to migrate, with many small and medium-sized enterprises lagging behind and businesses of all sizes struggling to implement systems for direct debits.

After a deep recession and housing bust in 2008 and a number of subsequent corporate governance crises, Lithuanian banks are finally returning to a steady footing, helped in no small measure by the presence of risk-averse Scandinavian lenders in the country.

A new inflation targeting framework, efforts to improve the supply of credit and the implementation of Basel III all pose challenges for the Bank of Russia, as well as opportunities to modernise the country's financial system.

With inflation still high following a financial crisis in 2011, there are growing signs that Belarusian banks may need to brace for a further round of currency depreciation and asset quality deterioration.

European securities will soon be settled on a central IT platform – Target2 Securities (T2S) – as part of the European Central Bank's initiative to harmonise post-trade standards. With the first wave of implementation scheduled for 2015, Duygu Tavan investigates how the T2S project is progressing and its consequences for the securities industry.

With its sovereign rating downgraded and its banks maintaining heavy losses, will Slovenia’s strategy of creating a bad bank and recapitalising its lenders pay off? And how can banks escape the poor lending culture that brought them low in the first place? 

Technology provider SAP has built a single-channel, multi-service cloud network that already has the endorsement of numerous large banks. With Swift also exerting its presence in the market, the two business models are not so much mutually exclusive, but supplementary. Welcome to the era of co-operative competition.