James Eedes quizzes chief financial officers and, on page 30, corporate treasurers about the hot financial topics as well as the prevailing economic environment and reasons for optimism.

As the Basel Committee releases the new Accord rules, Accenture, Mercer Oliver Wyman and SAP provide analysis of a research project on the implementation of Basel II. In this first section, they consider banks’ progress and the bumpy road ahead of them.

Although the proposed new accord is an important improvement on Basel I, it fails to create a supervisory regime that embodies a credible and strong market discipline, says Harald Benink.
John Hawke: “We have really no sound basis whatsoever for assessing capital impact”

Compliance with Basel II has the potential to bring improved financial performance to an organisation but only if it is applied uniformly across the whole organisation, says Jason Kofman.

Why do experts fail to predict company failures such as Parmalat, Enron and WorldCom? To find out, The Banker invited credit and rating analysts and auditors to a roundtable discussion to explore the issues. The discussion got quite heated as the finger was pointed at the various parties and a proposal to change the way underwriters get paid was put up for debate