July/August 2020

July/August

This year's Awards for Excellence recognise the pivotal role banks have performed throughout the pandemic to address the impact on clients, both financial and emotional.

Bill Demchak, CEO of PNC Financial Services, has spent years building the firm into a formidable force; its exit from BlackRock now sees it on the cusp of a new era.

Attorney Mel Georgie Racela runs the Anti-Money Laundering Council Secretariat in the Philippines, one of two agencies tasked with getting to the bottom with the country’s involvement in the Wirecard scandal. He talks to Chris Wright.

Forget cashless banking and the shift to digital, what coronavirus really seems to have accelerated is the alarming desire of many investment banks to become less vampire squid and more friendly dolphin.

The country’s response to the scandal is a chance to show good governance.

Everyone wanted radical change at Commerzbank, except the bank itself.

Investors should stop pretending to care about ESG risks.

Goldman Sachs has launched its transaction services business in the US, trusting that its superior tech will be enough to beat the incumbents.

It has become almost fashionable to write off the city. There are important reasons to believe it will endure.

The Covid-19 crisis will accelerate monetization in the Gulf and see Abu Dhabi companies take equity stakes in the emirate.

The New Development Bank, born in Shanghai 2015 to help the five ‘Brics' countries, has had a good pandemic, disbursing $4 billion in emergency funding and printing a maiden US dollar bond. Its future plans: more capital, more members and a better credit rating.

Nationalist desperation to get ahead in fintech surely explains some of the spectacular regulatory failure in the Wirecard accounting scandal.

The awkward truce in Brazil between XP Inc and Itaú broke down in a very public way in June.

The US investment bank is finally enjoying the fruits of a decade of investment in Asia. It has spent big to hire the bankers and analysts it needs to drive deal activity in China, Japan and Australia. Now the hard part starts – making money.

The country is losing the war on the coronavirus, as well as wasting the ensuing digital payments opportunity eagerly grasped by others in Latin America.

Hedging may look expensive for businesses that have seen their revenues cut heavily by Covid-19 prevention measures, but removing hedges for currencies to which they have limited exposure may prove even more so.

Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon’s decision to back a rival to Democratic politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may come back to haunt him.

Director Luc Jacquet hopes to fund his next project, to be filmed in the Galapagos Islands, through a securities token offering launched from Monaco.

A complex investment in Wirecard by Deutsche Bank veterans now working at SoftBank has effectively compounded the eventual embarrassment for Germany Inc from the failure of the online payments firm.

Just like the global financial crisis, Australia is emerging from Covid-19 more strongly than the rest of the developed world. Investment banks here have never been busier, raising huge sums of equity from one of the world’s largest asset pools. In the first of a two-part series on Australian investment banking, we look at the work that came out of a global pandemic.

Hedge funds have profited handsomely from the boom in equity capital markets, but retail buyers haven’t been completely excluded.

The long lines that have appeared outside reopened retail stores will not be enough to stave off the inevitable crisis in commercial real estate.

Claudio de Sanctis says that the new unit he heads is the next step on Deutsche Bank’s journey to global scale in wealth management.