If banks really do want to resuscitate personal mobile banking – and they’re spending huge sums doing so – they should look to the internet-based web service to prevent customer angst at the sky-high mobile phone charges. By Chris Skinner.

Merrill Lynch’s singleness of purpose played a vital part in the Royal Bank of Scotland-led consortium’s takeover of ABN AMRO. And nowhere more so than in the Fortis rights issue, the biggest ever in dollar terms, which tipped the scales against all predictions. Edward Russell-Walling reports.

A range of exciting mergers and acquisitions are proceeding among banks unaffected by subprime concerns.

Bank rules are a key reason behind the upset in financial markets and the advent of Basel II will do little to improve the situation.

Taking a global perspective is vital to learn lessons from financial market turbulence and find the right approach to move forward in the future, says Jaime Caruana.

Jan Cienski in Prague reports on Erste Bank’s hugely successful expansion into the countries that once formed the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

French finance minister Christine Lagarde talks to Courtney Fingar about the tax and labour reforms being pursued by the Sarkozy administration.

BBVA may have grabbed the headlines for missed acquisitions but a bank that posts 20% a year profits growth, that pays a top return on equity as well as being a byword for prudence cannot be all bad, as Karina Robinson discovers.

Ferenc Gyurcsany, Hungary’s prime minister, tells Karina Robinson how he plans to rein in public spending yet confound the polls and get re-elected .

Although biology is a well-known science, there is a lesser-known science with the a deceptively similar name: buyology. I created this science for banks to deal with the new world of ‘freakonomics’, where everyone is struggling to understand the methods to get customers buying and, in its purest form, buyology is defined as: the science of understanding business relationships.