The European Central Bank has made clear that it would look favourably on big bank mergers to create stronger pan-eurozone lenders. But M&A between large lenders in different eurozone states is still stalling through financial and political fragmentation – despite hopes for a closer union after Brexit and the war in Ukraine.

Riley Moore frames his decision to place BlackRock and four major US banks on a list of financial institutions that are restricted from business with West Virginia as a move to get back to banking basics.

Moore tells Euromoney that the banks – Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo – are mounting a concerted campaign against fossil fuel companies with their endorsement of environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards that reduce financing to firms such as the coal miners that remain active in his state.

“My goal is that they all act like banks and assess risk and capital and not take politics into consideration,” Moore says. “How in the world could they all (fossil fuel firms) have the same risk profile?” he asks.

Societe Generale and software firm Kyriba have announced that they are developing a treasury management solution that will include payment automation and fraud management functionality.

It will be available on SG Markets, the French bank’s digital client portal for corporates, and will be launched during the fourth quarter of 2021, initially for the French market.

The deal comes almost two years after Citi made a similar investment in treasury automation with integration platform developer Cashforce. At the time, the bank’s global head of treasury advisory referred to an increasing appetite within corporate treasury for integrated decision support tools from their banks.

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China’s qualified domestic limited partnership scheme, which lets foreign asset managers raise money onshore in renminbi to invest offshore, is taking shape – but it is complex. Euromoney has some tips designed to stop you wasting time and money.

Euromoney's Awards for Excellence are the awards that matter to the banks and bankers who matter. They were established in 1992 and were the first of their kind in the global banking industry. This year we received a record number of pitches for the Country and Regional Awards for Excellence - more than 1,000.

The development of the global green, social, sustainability and sustainability linked bond (collectively known as sustainable bonds) market has been nothing short of phenomenal. Global sustainable bond volumes have risen at a compound annual growth rate of 64% between 2015 and 2020, to end last year at $573bn in deal flow, according to HSBC.

The numbers are only growing rapidly, with volumes hitting $552bn by the end of June 2021 – easily on track to surpass last year’s issuance.

Asia Pacific borrowers have been a big part of the growth story. Sustainable bond volumes last year in the region jumped an impressive 200% year-on-year. While sustainable bond deals from mainland China – both in the domestic and international markets – fell about 12% last year to $31.3bn-equivalent, the way forward is bright, given volumes by end of June 2021 already stood at $29.3bn.

It’s not just a numbers story – particularly when it comes to mainland China.

Chinese...

Ping An’s domination as a financial services group in China has catapulted it into the global limelight, but Richard Sheng, board secretary and brand director, says its culture is what makes it important

Access our industry-leading global and regional risk tables

Download country risk ratings and scores in Excel format

Weekly round-up emails providing fresh insights on current affairs

Monthly updates on scores and trends impacting global and regional risk

Explore historical progress of country risk survey data since 1993

Access our industry-leading global and regional risk tables

Download country risk ratings and scores in Excel format

Weekly round-up emails providing fresh insights on current affairs

Monthly updates on scores and trends impacting global and regional risk

Explore historical progress of country risk survey data since 1993

Money market funds (MMFs) have had a rocky ride of late, with Refinitiv Lipper data for the week to July 14 showing outflows of $18.6 billion globally.

The only places where even the smallest yields are achievable are sterling and US dollar denominated funds.

Euro-denominated funds have been in a negative-yielding environment for more than six years through a combination of European Central Bank (ECB) buying of corporate paper, the huge increase in excess liquidity at the ECB and credit spreads being at their lowest levels since the middle of 2007.

In July, Investec released its latest GP Trends survey based on responses from 219 private equity professionals, mostly based in the UK, North America and mainland Europe, with 11% in the rest of the world.

It confirms the optimism evident in record-breaking deal activity.

“Private equity had raised a lot of money and was behind the curve in deploying it,” says Jonathan Arrowsmith, co-head of private equity at Investec. “Funds started to invest in the second half of 2020, and that dynamic is still very much in play.”

Fully 97% of respondents expect returns from investments made this year to exceed or at least match those made in 2020. This optimism comes even when prices are a lot higher. Competition to buy assets is intensifying, including from public market investors in IPOs, special purpose acquisition companies (Spacs) and industry consolidators.

Arrowsmith says: “Covid has separated the wheat from the chaff among targets. There has always...

One of the more notable stories of the big US bank quarterly earnings seasons this year has been loan loss allowances. The reserves that the banks had ramped up in the early days of the pandemic are starting to be released.

Taken in aggregate, loan loss allowances at Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo soared from $57.5 billion on January 1, 2020, to about $101 billion six months later, a rise of 75%.

And there they peaked, sitting at the same level through the third quarter of the year.

The numbers were dominated by the money centre banks, and JPMorgan more than most. Fully one-third of the increase – some $14 billion – was built at JPMorgan alone. The next biggest contributors were Wells Fargo, at 24%, and Citi, at 21%.

Since then, starting in the fourth quarter of 2020 but gathering pace in the first half of 2021, much has been made of the fact that banks are releasing those reserves,...

Ng Yu Zhi claimed he had a get-rich-quick scheme for the ages. It was so, so easy, he allegedly told investors. He would buy physical nickel from Poseidon, an Australian Securities Exchange-listed company, at a discount; then he would sell it to a buyer at a profit.

Investors would fund the purchases, and would receive handsome rewards from the resulting profits.

The potential returns: how does 15% a quarter sound?

If something appears too good to be true, it usually is.

Poseidon Nickel told the ASX on May 4, in an official statement, that it had never had a sales agreement with Ng or his companies, Envy Global Trading and Envy Asset Management. BNP Paribas Commodity Futures Limited, which Ng had claimed was a buyer of the nickel, has also said it had nothing to do with Ng or Envy; indeed, that particular arm of BNP was no longer operational at the time Envy’s statements said it was transacting.

But from 2016 to 2021 the two Envy companies...

SMBC’s tie-up with Jefferies is only the latest in a series of acquisitions, partnerships and initiatives it has undertaken from India to South Korea to Wall Street. Now, says president and chief executive Jun Ohta, it is time to make them work.

Citi has 13 Asia and EMEA consumer businesses up for sale. The first to be sold, to NAB in Australia, creates a template Citi would love to see used in later deals.

Digitisation and the advanced digital technologies at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution will not only enhance the efficiency and connectivity of global supply chains, but also hold the potential to enhance sustainability across these arterial networks.

This is a hugely important benefit for companies as they seek to align their business processes and practices with an improved sustainability agenda, informed at the highest level by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and national policies or regulations. Organisations like DBS have further sharpened definitions to ensure a robust taxonomy and common framework.

Regulators, investors, end-customers and various other stakeholders are driving an increased expectation from companies to adhere to better business practices with measurable sustainable outcomes.

By leveraging digital solutions to aid visibility and transparency of both supply chains and adherence to sustainability...

The New Development Bank will add at least four new member countries next month, with the likes of Bangladesh and Egypt leading the charge to join. A concerted focus on ESG and more private-sector lending are also on the cards for the Shanghai-based multilateral.

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The New Development Bank will add at least four new member countries next month, likely to be led by Indonesia. A concerted focus on ESG and more private-sector lending are also on the cards for the Shanghai-based multilateral.

One of the least surprising findings of the third annual GTreasury/Strategic Treasurer treasury technology survey report, published in late July, was the continued high level of adoption of new technologies, with growth fuelled by smaller corporates.

However, this commitment contrasted with respondents’ desire to hold onto older data formats, such as MT940 and BAI2, rather than adopting newer, enriched versions that use XML.

Just over half (56%) of the corporates surveyed offer XML formats such as CAMT, with a further 11% planning to do so during the next 12 months.

However, almost one third (31%) had no plans to implement the enriched data format, even though it makes it easier to decipher critical transaction information by enabling systems to parse these details into separate fields, expediting processing and routing.

When journalists James Eyers and Jonathan Shapiro set about writing a book on Australian payments phenomenon Afterpay, they recognized there was a danger of being overtaken by events.

“We knew writing a book about such a rapidly evolving subject was always going to leave us exposed to the risk that we’d be caught out by a dramatic plot twist,” they wrote on Saturday to mark the launch of their book this week.

They got that right.

On Monday morning, Afterpay announced it was being acquired by Square, the US payments business founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, in a A$39 billion ($29 billion) deal, the largest transaction in Australian M&A history. Forty-eight hours is a long time in the world of fintech biographies, it seems.

At the end of June, Singapore conglomerate Keppel Corporation announced a new $1 billion euro commercial paper programme through arranger and dealer DBS.

It sounds run-of-the-mill, but for the debt capital markets (DCM) in Asia, and across the world, this may prove to be hugely significant.

Keppel will be the debut corporate issuer on DBS FIX Marketplace, which the bank calls Asia’s first fully digital and automated fixed income execution (FIX) platform.

Through it, issuers can directly connect with investors if they wish.

China’s lenders are keen to go green, as Ping An Bank chairman Xie Yonglin tells Euromoney. Regulators want that, too – but embracing ESG in a country still in thrall to dirty industry is easier said than done.