Having enjoyed a highly profitable first half of the year, Turkish banks are now having to change strategy due to US monetary policy and turbulence closer to home.

With Cyprus’s economy moving out of the danger zone, its finance minister is laying the groundwork for a smaller but better regulated banking system.

The rollercoaster ride that Italy's Mediobanca has embarked upon since the crisis hit has seen the bank change its leadership, embrace retail banking, look to shed its equity in a number of leading Italian companies, and seek to no longer tie up its stakes in shareholder pacts. David Lane assesses the impact of these moves.

European securities will soon be settled on a central IT platform – Target2 Securities (T2S) – as part of the European Central Bank's initiative to harmonise post-trade standards. With the first wave of implementation scheduled for 2015, Duygu Tavan investigates how the T2S project is progressing and its consequences for the securities industry.

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.

Lars Millberg, head of transaction banking at SEB's merchant banking division, discusses the importance of innovation, and describes the bank's unique approach to encouraging out-of-the-box thinking among its employees.

Technology provider SAP has built a single-channel, multi-service cloud network that already has the endorsement of numerous large banks. With Swift also exerting its presence in the market, the two business models are not so much mutually exclusive, but supplementary. Welcome to the era of co-operative competition.