The impending liquidity regulation's demand for greater transparency and reporting, combined with the need to more fully optimise available funds, has led to an increased focus on risk across the inter-bank market. Here, Les Gosling, head of EMEA at TwoFour, discusses how banks can best meet their obligations and the benefits that can be gleaned from effective management of nostro accounts.

This year's EuroFinance conference on Liquidity and Cash Management for European Companies takes place in Amsterdam, early modern Europe's wealthiest trading cities claiming the world's first full-time stock exchange, and capital of a country which many economic historians regard as the first thoroughly capitalist country in the world. FX&MM reports.

At the time of writing, as the great and the good headed home from Davos World Economic Forum, bankers have indicated that they may agree to far-reaching reforms whilst financial regulators warned that they could take drastic action to take some of the risk out of the financial industry. As to how this reflects - and indeed impacts - on the markets going forward, Drew Hillier speculates that we may not be going forward at all, merely differently sideways... tempered with an overwhelming feeling that as far as a recovery is concerned, we have yet to fully ascertain if the wheels may be either half on or half off!

2009 is the year that the Direct Debit scheme for the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) was partially launched. For 2010, the payments industry is putting its hopes in a mandatory end-date coming from the European Commission. For FX&MM, Frances Maguire reports.

When it comes to SEPA and the PSD, it really is no exercise in hyperbole to describe Tony Richter as something of a guru. He has been running both projects for HSBC over the past two years, honing the complex system that promises a harmonised European payments arena.