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How do you combine a career in structured finance with trips to the Cannes film festival and seats at the best soccer matches in Europe? Dorian Klein, managing director of European structured finance at Merrill Lynch in London, makes it part of the job. For the past year and a half his team has worked with intellectual property rights, pulling off a major film rights securitization last year.

ABN Amro's ebullient new chief financial officer was known by colleagues at the Dutch central bank as "Turbo Tommy" for the speed with which he got things done. "His greatest strength is his social intelligence," says a senior central banker. "He's also always open to new concepts and new approaches. If he has a weakness, it is that when he delegates, it is often to himself."

In the eurozone big is beautiful. The potential three-way merger of Banque Nationale de Paris, Société Générale and Paribas is just the latest example of the consolidation that will transform Europe's fragmented and largely unsophisticated banking industry. National borders and regulations have become irrelevant more quickly than anyone had predicted, leaving the way open for huge intra-market and cross-border tie-ups. But as banking goes the way of auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, what role is left for the smaller institutions - the regional specialists and the boutiques?

Issuer: Jazztel

If one institution best demonstrates the effects of the Asian and Russian crises on a bank, ING Barings is it. It's a salutary tale of billion dollar losses, of individuals left to go their own way at the expense of group strategy, of management failures. Now ING Barings has one last chance and it's down to two men to turn it round. Nick Kochan reports.

A revolution in securities settlement will make Emu and Y2K look like child's play. And it will be the death knell of custody as we know it. Increasingly, custodians see their business as information, not safe-keeping. Meanwhile the consolidation continues. James Rutter reports.

During the apartheid years and beyond corporate South Africa assembled unwieldy conglomerates to utilize domestic assets that could not be employed elsewhere. Now an economy that is opening up is going through a process of reshuffling and unbundling, with private-equity firms taking an increasingly important role. Richard Stovin-Bradford reports.

Edson Mitchell is usually credited with Deutsche Bank's rise up the debt-capital markets league tables over the past four years, and not without reason. He was brought in because of his earlier success in turning Merrill Lynch from an also-ran of the US bulge-bracket banks in the mid-1980s into the undisputed leader by 1994, and has turned Deutsche into a leading contender in just four years.

Turkey: Sustaining the unsustainable

EBRD: Losing other people's money

Bond Trading Poll: Emu shuffles the rankings

If you were trying to scupper the career of an over-zealous colleague, this is the sort of financing mandate you might want to throw in their direction: first, make it a commodity deal (preferably not oil which is suddenly showing signs of revival); second, set the deal in a developing country, at a time when emerging markets are out of vogue, and local currency financing is scarce. Finally, throw in a little political difficulty, such as the arrest of a former president, which leads to fighting on the streets and the threat of trade sanctions.