The Deals of the Year winners from Asia-Pacific.

Mobile money, including banking and payments, is encroaching into the everyday life of the consumer. Monetising the business is still proving difficult, but thanks to the abundance of products available already, tangible business models are slowly emerging.

Taiwan's rising prominence as an offshore renminbi centre reached a milestone earlier this year when the Bank of China opened a clearing bank in Taipei. But with Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent London and Singapore, already working as offshore renminbi hubs, where will Taiwan fit in?

Despite its isolationist circumstances, North Korea has been developing an informal market economy on the back of its highly educated labour force. But the state's ambivalence about foreign investment and its geopolitical intransigence make it difficult to know how far the inroads made by outside investment can reach.

A new prime minister and Bank of Japan governor, both apparently working in concert, could signal sustained weakness for the yen. But there are some tough psychological barriers to breach.

Senior figures at the Asian Development Bank explain why their priority is to ensure that the continent's growth benefits all of its population, countering the rising levels of inequality in the region over the past 20 years.

With a significant unbanked population and the world's second largest number of mobile connections, India is a prime market for mobile banking. But, unlike other mobile banking markets, it is adopting a bank-led rather than telecommunications-led approach, with the largest institutions already rolling out services and the country's regulator keen to use it as a tool to improve financial inclusion.

Singapore's big three lenders may still be dominating the top positions in the Association of South-east Asian Nations ranking by Tier 1 capital by a considerable margin, but Thai and Malaysian banks now occupy six of the top 10 spots, while Indonesia's institutions are recording the region's strongest profitability ratios.