Peter Lee

Editorial director

Peter Lee is editorial director. He joined Euromoney straight from Oxford University in 1985, and has written about banking and capital markets ever since, being appointed editor in 1999. He became editorial director of Euromoney in May 2005.

RECENT STORIES

BANKING

Regulators set to raise capital requirements on banks

Even before this year’s banking failures, the coming of Basel IV was already set to hike bank capital requirements – and so further boost SRT trades.

Peter Lee, June 02, 2023
CAPITAL MARKETS

Royal London deal shows appetite for tier-1

Bankers are hopeful that they may soon be able to issue new AT1 deals again as the secondary market recovers from the Credit Suisse write-down.

Peter Lee, May 31, 2023
CAPITAL MARKETS

Bond investing heads back to the old normal

Inflation is not beaten and rates may rise further. But high-grade bonds can still provide steady income and low risk, playing a new old role in investor portfolios.

Peter Lee, May 24, 2023
FINTECH

Canton Networks offers glimpse of regulated finance on blockchain

Leading firms join a new network of networks, but crypto natives see just another walled garden.

Peter Lee, May 15, 2023
BANKING

UBS lays out some first plans for Credit Suisse

UBS will face pressure to spin off Credit Suisse’s Swiss bank and may yet lose more private-banking assets. Coping with this will make managing down illiquid and hard-to-value markets positions look easy.

Peter Lee, April 26, 2023
CAPITAL MARKETS

Soaring cost of bank capital will drive boom in SRT trades

The cost of regulatory capital associated with lending will keep rising after the recent scare over deposit flight and the coming credit downturn. The solution for banks is to reduce risk-weighted assets on their balance sheets by buying protection from credit funds eager to diversify away from leveraged loans.

Peter Lee, April 25, 2023
BANKING

Can direct lenders now take a serious bite out of the banks?

The recent spate of deposit flight that spread panic through the banking systems of the US and Europe opens a chance for non-bank lenders to seize more of the core businesses that banks want to retain. Central bank emergency measures may have prevented the crisis from spreading, but a new phase of disintermediation has begun.

Peter Lee, April 20, 2023
BANKING

UBS bets on Ermotti to pull off the deal of the decade

As soon as the ink was dry on the agreement to take over Credit Suisse, UBS chairman Colm Kelleher rushed to bring ex-CEO Sergio Ermotti back to run the bank and the deal. Execution risk is off the charts, and the nerves of shareholders, employees and taxpayers are jangling.

Peter Lee, March 30, 2023
OPINION

Credit Suisse and UBS: The new risks

UBS shareholders might find plenty not to like in what seems at first glance like a great deal. The bank is making itself more complex at a time when creditors and investors put a premium on simplicity and focus.

Peter Lee, March 20, 2023
OPINION

Credit Suisse cannot be allowed to fail

Unfortunately, while the SNB can provide ample liquidity that Credit Suisse doesn’t really need, it cannot provide the trust and credibility it sorely lacks.

Peter Lee, March 16, 2023
CAPITAL MARKETS

Can London recover as a centre for capital raising?

The decision by its Japanese owners to relist ARM, the UK’s great technology success story, in the US instead of London was inevitable after years of decline and the hammer blow of Brexit. Deregulation might further accelerate its collapse, even as the City wins a boost from new technology bringing the vast pool of retail money into equity capital markets.

Peter Lee, March 15, 2023
OPINION

SVB: We saved the banks – was it worth it?

It is not clear how the SVB collapse will change banking; but it is clear that the lack of supervision of smaller banks allowed systemic risk to spread worryingly fast.

Peter Lee, March 14, 2023
FINTECH

Antony Jenkins says 10x can help banks exit their technology museums

The former Barclays chief executive is set to scale up the core banking-technology provider that aims to do banking 10 times better.

Peter Lee, March 09, 2023
FINTECH

UBS invests in regtech expanding into wealth management

Droit helps traders decide in milliseconds if deals comply with the ever-changing rules and aims to do the same for wealth managers.

Peter Lee, March 07, 2023
CAPITAL MARKETS

Has tokenization’s time finally come?

Tokenization is spreading fast. Regulated finance is finally embracing blockchain technology just as most cryptocurrencies stand revealed as overleveraged Ponzi schemes. The institutional herd is moving, but can the blockchains they are shifting onto bear the load?

Peter Lee, March 03, 2023
OPINION

This is the wrong moment to cut EU bank capital rules

EU banks have been lobbying regulators to ease up on capital rules, warning that they will become permanently uncompetitive with US peers. Investors may be set to close that valuation gap for them.

Peter Lee, February 17, 2023
OPINION

Credit Suisse warns of substantial loss in 2023

While the bank plans to spin off its troubled investment bank, the new worry is whether and how soon it can repair the wealth management business.

Peter Lee, February 09, 2023
CAPITAL MARKETS

HSBC Orion tokenizes commercial bank money and sterling bonds

New platform acts as central account keeper under Luxembourg law for first ever sterling bond deal on blockchain.

Peter Lee, February 08, 2023
BANKING

Iwoca sees surging demand as banks retrench from SME lending

Private credit funds are committing more to specialist non-bank lenders such as iwoca, seeing big potential in small business credits, even if NPLs are set to climb.

Peter Lee, February 01, 2023
FOREIGN EXCHANGE

Capitolis sets new records in FX derivatives compression

Some leading FX banks have struggled to stay competitive in forwards, swaps and swaptions thanks to SA-CCR rules, but compressing portfolios helps.

Peter Lee, January 26, 2023
CAPITAL MARKETS

PrivEx brings syndicated loan-trading platform to Europe

While big US banks edge slowly towards exchange-like trading of loans, a group of market veterans have tested a system in Asia and will soon launch in Europe.

Peter Lee, January 25, 2023
OPINION

The SEC charging Genesis and Gemini with selling unregistered securities is a big moment for crypto

The billionaire Winklevoss twins and DCG CEO Barry Silbert have been squabbling over $900 million of frozen customer assets. The SEC has just banged their heads together.

Peter Lee, January 13, 2023
OPINION

How inconvenient of Silvergate to survive crypto deposit run

The regulated US bank lost 70% of its deposits in a few weeks. But while that run shows the risks of banking the crypto industry, the key lesson is how it is still standing.

Peter Lee, January 10, 2023
OPINION

Traditional finance regulators ignore crypto cries for help

Crypto promoters now want traditional financial market regulators to save them; those regulators would rather deliver the final blow.

Peter Lee, January 05, 2023
CAPITAL MARKETS

Sovereign issuers may crowd corporates out in January bond sales

The ECB is barely half way through raising rates. Quantitative tightening will further raise the cost of debt in 2023, and is set to test bond market capacity.

Peter Lee, December 20, 2022
FINTECH

Does DeFi still have a future in regulated form?

As the crypto edifice teeters, there is still one last chance for decentralized finance. If it can encode regulatory compliance into real-world financial assets issued in tokenized form and then trade, clear and settle in seconds at negligible cost and low risk, it might just survive.

Peter Lee, December 15, 2022
OPINION

UBS’s uneconomic call cheers AT1 market

AT1s rallied on news that UBS will redeem a key deal in January. But with refinancing costs higher than coupon re-sets, the pressure now passes to other big banks.

Peter Lee, December 14, 2022
CAPITAL MARKETS

After a banner year for Middle East IPOs, VC is the big opportunity

Noor Sweid, founder of Global Ventures – a young Dubai-based venture capital fund with $200 million of AuM – sees company founders with great businesses starved of finance.

Peter Lee, December 09, 2022
OPINION

Depositors pull their money from Credit Suisse

Credit Suisse directors may sigh with relief that shareholders have approved the latest capital raise, but they are already guiding to yet another big loss.

Peter Lee, November 23, 2022
BANKING

Credit Suisse’s David Mathers: ‘Banks need to build scale in fewer markets’

After 12 years of near continuous restructuring and capital raising at Credit Suisse, the longest-serving chief financial officer of any G-Sib bank offers a few parting lessons.

Peter Lee, November 17, 2022