The sale of both its Greek subsidiary and its financial products division is intended to leave the family-owned EFG Group as a pure private banking operation.

Erste Bank Group’s CIO and head of group organisation and IT, Christian Gosch, explains how the bank has modernised and standardised its core banking networks to optimise its operating model across central and eastern Europe

The global financial crisis caused many corporates to review their treasury operations, with a large number reducing banking partners and signing up to shared technology platforms. Such changes, combined with the introduction of new regulations, such as the Single European Payments Area, have left many banks rethinking their global transaction services.

Ongoing economic and regulatory uncertainty is playing to the advantage of established international financial centres, particularly London, which, despite the recent Libor scandal, has been named the most attractive financial centre in The Banker’s 2012 global asset management survey.

A decade-old political vision to create a harmonised payments scheme across Europe is finally nearing its deadline. But the prospect of a Single European Payments Area never seemed so threatened by economic volatility or so opaque in regulatory direction.

Market reforms are flooding the financial sector and banks are facing the challenge of managing their liquidity more efficiently. But the industry remains divided on best practice approaches to intraday liquidity management.

A covered bond placed with a yield well inside the Italian government provides a reassuring signal that the country’s largest bank by assets, UniCredit, has a viable funding plan to ride out the sovereign crisis.

As the economic scales tip in favour of emerging economies – particularly those in Asia – it seems increasingly likely that one of the region's leading financial centres will steal the status of global wealth management capital from Switzerland. The question is, which city will it be?