Welcome to the largest edition of The Banker ever produced in nearly 80 years of publishing history. At 328 pages, our July issue is a veritable gold mine of articles, interviews, facts and figures. Taking pride of place is, of course, our annual Top 1000 ranking of world banks.
The Top 1000 has become the benchmark of bank ranking and July is our most requested issue. Stocks dwindle fast and we advise you to look after this copy carefully … or watch it disappear into a colleague’s briefcase.
The Top 1000 itself reveals a banking world in which profits are soaring and the largest five banks in the world are putting some distance between themselves and their contenders in terms of Tier 1 capital. The entrance threshold for the Top 1000 has also increased by 16.3% to $200m. For more analysis on the Top 1000, see our lead Comment on page 8 and editor-in chief Stephen Timewell’s introduction on page 208. The Top 1000 research was led by research editor Terry Baker-Self and his team, Beata Ghavimi and Matthew Dickie. Congratulations to them for producing one of the most detailed breakdowns available on the banking sector.
While the Top 1000 celebrates banking success, elsewhere in the magazine we explore banking challenges. Regulation is a vexed question for bankers and this month correspondent Nick Kochan asks whether the UK’s FSA really is the ideal global model. He explores the issues with FSA chief executive John Tiner. We also look at the controversy surrounding the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) as part of our capital markets coverage.
Karina’s Kolumn features an interview with the CEO of Lloyds TSB, Eric Daniels; Viewpoint deals with cross-border M&A and is contributed by the Dutch finance minister, Gerrit Zalm; Agenda allows John Winter, Barclays Capital’s head of debt capital markets, to explain its proposition; Tech vision is an interview with the CIO of Caixa Galicia, Jose Valino; and Raiffeisen International CEO Herbert Stepic explains his bank’s eastern Europe strategy in our regional section. In our CFOs and corporate treasurers round table, we have comment from Kurt Block, the CFO of BASF; Zeinal Bava, CEO and CFO, of Portugal Telecom; and David Swan, group treasurer of BAT, among others.
As always, our country coverage takes The Banker to the places that other magazines don’t reach. This month we look at Trinidad, the Baltics, Russia, Romania, India, Taiwan, Paraguay, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Egypt. Of particular note is the report on Afghanistan filed by our special projects editor, James Eedes, from Kabul. Despite the country’s difficulties, he discovered investment opportunities are available for the far-sighted.
The Banker’s July issue is accompanied by four special supplements: Equity derivatives in the ascendancy; Reforming Russia’s banks; Taiwan – a new learning curve; and Reinventing the bank.
