The past year has shown how building a corporate and investment bank more equivalent to its standing in retail could be a vital prop to Santander’s earnings, especially in Europe. Does divisional head José Maria Linares now have the backing to match his ambitions?

Its CEO Max Eppel said the aim is to expand across the Middle East, a region “home to nearly 200 billionaires and more than a million high-net-worth individuals, [but which is] underserved by the multi-family-office market”.

Beyond that, the sky is the limit.

“Our aim is to become a global brand in the MFO space,” he says.

That excludes the fairly saturated North America market, but includes EMEA and Asia, where the firm will provide “a full suite of ESG-compliant, philanthropic, risk management, legal and investment and financial services”.

Euromoney

Those with more money have more of it to lose, so the repercussions of bad investment decisions amplify.

But they typically have access to far better financial help: the best private banks now share with ultra-high net-worth clients the kind of elite in-house wealth advice that was once divulged only to prized global institutions.

So, if something worries the rich enough to keep them awake at night, it should make you sweat too.

Few in the West have spent much time thinking about inflation since the early 1980s – the last time it was in double digits in the United States.

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Many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face the same challenge: they need trade funding, but lack the extensive documentation that helps funders understand the risk profile of their business.

A recent joint Trade Finance Global (TFG)/World Trade Organization (WTO) report raises questions over how to provide a more favourable framework for assessing credit risk through digital innovations, considering the new analytics that are available.

A new gold-linked product being distributed through Indonesia’s postal service raises interesting ideas about financial inclusion, parallel monetary systems, blockchain and Islamic finance.

On April 16, a company called Kinesis soft-launched a physical gold-based digital Shariah-compliant product called PosGo Syariah. It is government-backed and run through the 24,000-location network of PT Pos, the state postal service.

Customers use an app to access PosGold, which gives them digital ownership of gold underpinned by physical metal in a Jakarta vault, together with the opportunity to transfer money between gold and fiat balances.

The platform also offers a payment gateway, E-Wallet service and a gold-based community savings programme for Hajj and Umrah pilgrimage trips.

Kinesis's founder is Thomas Coughlin, a veteran of the investment, funds management and bullion industries, and who has long been a believer in the potential to transform...

There is a well-worn theme in capital markets: at a time when trading has never been faster or more electronic, the execution of primary deals remains archaic. There have been tweaks around the edges, but the fundamental processes have not changed for decades.

Finsmart, a small outfit run by former bankers, is the latest fintech to try to address this. After initial discussions with market participants last year, as well as approaching individuals to come on board as advisers, it has now started development of a new debt capital markets platform, DealPro, and completed a first pre-seed funding round in March.

Finsmart founder and chief executive Sotiris Manderis is a former banker who was most recently a managing director in corporate and institutional digital at HSBC. He says the need for modernization is self-evident.

“I really believe that the whole space of primary capital markets needs streamlining,” he tells Euromoney. “In 2021,...

Please download the submission guidelines and read them carefully. There are changes to this year's submission process for pitches.

Submission deadlines are final. No extensions to the deadlines will be granted in any case. If your submission comes in after the deadline, we will try to consider it, but make no guarantee that we will do so.

PART 2: GLOBAL AWARDSThe global awards will be evaluated separately again this year, with decisions being made public in September. Submission guidelines for the global awards categories will be published online in due course.

More information: Awards dinners | Previous results

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In mid-April, Danish renewables company European Energy tapped its outstanding €75 million hybrid bond, first launched last September, for another €75 million issue priced to yield 5.3%.

That drew healthy demand from Nordic investors attracted by the high income from a green instrument.

Corporate hybrid bonds are deeply subordinated, typically with deferrable coupons and no set maturity, instead incorporating call dates. They stand just above equity in the capital structure and are usually treated as 50% equity by ratings agencies.

“Our problem with big family offices is the people who run them are ex-investment bankers. They charge in, rattle cages, cut fees then last a year or two before they get fired.” 

BNP Paribas’s Instanea instant payments initiation solution is a benchmark for how corporates can benefit from open banking, explains Carlo Bovero, global head of cards and retail payments at BNP Paribas, and Neil Pein, co-global head of Axepta BNP Paribas and head of payments transformation.

The leading FX banks have introduced notable enhancements to their electronic trading platforms in recent months in an attempt to make them more attractive to traders that are still working away from their offices.

After a robust year, China’s securitization market is poised to reach new highs in 2021. Li Zhiming of CICC, the go-to investment bank for securitized products, highlights some opportunities and risks in this fast-growing segment.

The mood music around Deutsche Bank has changed.

For the first quarter of 2021, it delivered its best financial results for seven years, with a pre-tax profit of €1.6 billion (€1 billion after tax), well ahead of analyst expectations, and a return on tangible common equity (RoTE) of 7.4% on a strong common equity tier-1 (CET1) ratio of 13.7%.

Suddenly, management’s aims to deliver an 8% post-tax return in 2022 and then start handing back €5 billion of capital to shareholders look almost conservative, instead of highly ambitious.

One big number and another smaller one stood out.

The investment bank more than doubled its profits compared with the exceptional first quarter of 2020, despite more normal levels of turnover in rates, foreign exchange and emerging markets, businesses for which the bank is renowned.

The implosion of Archegos has ripped away the veneer of conservatism and safety that the family office has long enjoyed. It has also emphasized the lack of clarity about what the industry is and its lack of oversight.

Credit Suisse had a pretty good first quarter – apart from a $4.8 billion loss on exposure to a single client, family office Archegos, which called to mind the old joke about asking Mrs Lincoln how she liked the play otherwise.

In walking analysts through the bank’s results on Thursday April 22, chief executive Thomas Gottstein and finance head David Mathers tried to accentuate the positives.

Admittedly there will be another $650 million charge against Archegos in the second quarter and Credit Suisse is still not in a position to estimate how much its involvement with funds linked to failed lender Greensill will cost.

Wealth management performance was fine, nevertheless, and core investment bank businesses delivered results that would be cause for celebration in other circumstances.

Capital markets revenues surged to over $1 billion, for an increase of more than 500% compared to a weak first quarter of 2020, helped by strength in areas...

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But under chief executive Kentaro Okuda, things had been turning around. Nomura hit – or got very close to hitting – record profits for each of Okuda’s first three quarters in charge and had been expected to announce a fourth, for the full year, on April 27.

“One of them is lying.” This was a Brazilian banker’s summary of the discrepancy between the Brazil’s stock market and its currency. “The question is, which is it?”

Is the Bovespa – trading at record highs – an accurate picture of the country’s financial health? Or is it the currency that is the real indicator – languishing as it is north of $5.50 – a warning that the share prices have dislocated from their economic fundamentals?

Perhaps the country’s deeply real negative interest rates – inflation is over 5% and the Selic is just 2.75% – might be the biggest fraud, artificially pushing stocks higher and the FX lower.

This banker inevitably went on to talk about Brazil’s gushing pipeline of equity issuance – R$100 billion is poised to be issued in the country.

Unless something happens to make markets snap shut soon, 2021 will be another record year – showing that companies are rushing to make hay while the sun shines.

So far,...

The Bank of England (BoE) announced on April 19 a new omnibus account to enable its real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system – which holds accounts for banks, building societies and other financial institutions – to connect to a wider range of payment systems, including those using distributed ledger technology (DLT).

Under the new model, an operator of a payment system can hold money in the omnibus account to fund its participants’ balances with central bank money. This will allow them to offer innovative payment services, while having the security of central bank money settlement.

On the same day, Fnality International, a private consortium supported by 15 leading financial institutions, announced it had applied to the BoE to operate on the omnibus account model, the first in what it hopes will become a network of DLT-based payment systems.

The Japanese bank has spent big money to hire a wealth management team, but spiralling costs and a lack of name recognition in key markets leave many asking: how realistic are its ambitions?

Stephen Bird, chief executive of Standard Life Aberdeen, or Abrdn as it is now to be known, has long been a digital evangelist.

Bird joined the asset manager last year from Citi, where he was chief executive of global consumer banking.

Speaking to Euromoney in 2017, Bird explained: “The journey to becoming a future-proof, truly digital bank is as much about transforming culture as it is about transforming underlying technology.”

He found this out the hard way last month.

2020 was a breakout year for China’s financial and capital markets. The next 12 months could be just as busy, as regulators rush to approve a host of licences lodged by global financial institutions.