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When a bank is huge in a particular market, the cost can sometimes be a lack of agility. Success can breed complacency, and a market-leading position might lead to a certain absence of ingenuity and a danger of getting set in one’s ways. Citi, this year’s – and last year’s – overall Euromoney Cash management poll winner, runs no risk of hubris despite its vast scale and huge commercial success.

The CDS market is trying to withstand the strain of three almost simultaneous counterparty defaults.

Just a few months into the chief executive role at Westpac, Gail Kelly has bought out her former employer, St George Bank. A convinced advocate of the power of branding, Kelly has pledged that St George will retain its identity. Chris Wright spoke to Kelly about the prospects for the combined entity.

Even Kazakh bank employees are joining investors in a flight to quality away from the sector. BTA Bank and Kazkommertzbank are overwhelmed by foreign debt too eagerly lent out at home and only Halyk is in good shape. Although there are still a few potential foreign buyers nosing around Kazakh financial assets, Raiffeisen for one has decided that its ambitions in the country will be best fulfilled through a greenfield operation. Elliot Wilson reports.

Insurers troubles spill over causing retail panic.

Mian Mansha owns one of the best banks in Asia but his ambitions reach much further. He plans to create a new holding company and list his various interests on the LSE. And he hopes to expand his business base across Asia and into the Middle East and emerging Europe.

JPMorgan stopped counterparty trading with Citadel last month in protest at the $20 billion hedge fund’s recent hires of the bank’s staff. Employees at JPMorgan were told to stop trading stocks, bonds and currencies with Citadel. However, the dispute lasted only 24 hours. Both parties declined to comment but sources say relations between the two firms began to sour in March, when Patrik Edsparr left JPMorgan to run Europe and fixed income for Citadel. There have been several other hires from JPMorgan since that time, more lately Brian McDonald, formerly a managing director and senior portfolio manager with the US bank’s ABS Principal Investments Group. The final straw, though was the hire of Greg Boester, an adjustable-rate mortgage securities trader with the bank.

The growth in Islamic finance has slowed with the deepening credit crunch but the Saudi Binladin Group has raised the first sukuk for the world’s most holy boom town: Mecca.

It will take months if not years before we know with any certainty who the ultimate winners from the financial crisis will be. But having purchased the US businesses of Lehman Brothers it seems that Barclays Capital will be among them.

Having brushed with Indonesian politics, Gita Wirjawan knows how dirty it can be. Business development has more to offer his country, he reckons, hence his Indonesia-centric private equity business Ancora, which is attracting investors from the wider Muslim world. Eric Ellis reports.

A week after Lehman Brothers collapsed, the United Arab Emirates central bank announced a new credit line of a dirham equivalent of $14 billion. Was it a signal to investors that the federation would not sit by and watch as the economy of Dubai – its second-biggest constituent – went into free fall?

Anybody throwing a superficial glance at Eric Daniels’ CV in June 2003 could have been forgiven for erroneously assuming that his appointment was a signal that Lloyds had tired of its conspicuous failure to tie up a merger with a European partner, having rediscovered an appetite for international expansion towards the end of the 1990s.