Sanjeev Kumar leads a corporate advisory team at RBS designed to maintain the ability to provide large corporates with strategic advice after the bank’s exit from mergers and acquisitions and equity capital markets. He tells The Banker why talk is valuable.

The corporate and investment banking arm of France’s Crédit Agricole has been through several rounds of strategic repositioning and its chief executive says its final shape is now in sight.

Early moves to reduce leverage and cut non-core businesses at Credit Suisse have allowed its investment bank co-head to think carefully about the future of the market, and how to adapt to it.

The creation of a single financial institutions group at Barclays in February 2013 formalised increasingly close co-operation between coverage investment bankers and capital markets practitioners. The co-head of its FIG EMEA capital markets unit tells Philip Alexander how this has been working.

VTB Capital is already established as Russia’s largest investment bank. Bulgarian national Atanas Bostandjiev explains the state-owned bank's plans to expand its activities into new markets.

HSBC China has expanded rapidly since being established in 2007. Its chief executive and deputy chairman, Helen Wong, says it wants to retain its position as the largest foreign lender in China, and boost its ties with Bank of Communications, in which HSBC has a large stake. She insists, too, that the outlook for the country's economy is rosy. 

When Bank of America-Merrill Lynch hired Alexander Wilmot-Sitwell from UBS last year to front its Europe and emerging markets (excluding Asia) operations, it caused a stir. As he explains to The Banker, the move has been mutually beneficial.

UBS undertook one of the more radical post-crisis changes of strategy in 2012, and its head of European advisory, James Hartop, explains how the new structure enables his team to move beyond pure merger and acquisition work.

JPMorgan has sought to maintain hard-won expertise even during the near closure of European equity capital markets in late 2011 and early 2012. Its regional co-head of equity capital markets explains how continuity has set it up well to capture a nascent revival of new issues.

A wealth of opportunities are opening up in Latin American debt capital markets, but Itaú BBA’s head of investment banking is keen to ensure that the bank does not neglect its still-lucrative domestic market while chasing these opportunities.