From foggy to cloudy

Ethereal. Ephemeral. Elusive. ETP, perhaps. Questing for upcoming banking-sector development opportunities in 2018 brings a whole palette of e-words to mind, including the “e” in ETP (electronic trading platform), but not the favorite e-word of marketers and their PR minions: exciting.  It seems that development opportunities in the banking sector are increasingly scarce, partly, of course, because good opportunities are by definition those that are not obvious to all, but also because the business of banking is facing new pressures all around. Before the decade is out, 2017 and 2018 might count among years that drove this point further home. Earlier in the 2000s, during the quasi-mythical days before the Great Recession, development logics for large Lebanese banks seemed compelling. One strong strategy calculation for a growing top bank was to go cross-border, leverage your comparative advantage of the sophistication of Lebanese financial industry knowledge in conjunction with your cultural