The position of modern banking in the global economy vastly exceeds the main functionality that banks fulfilled during their 600-year rise since the Medicis: financing trade and warfare and serving as safe havens in times of danger. The expansion of banking and finance into universal socioeconomic denominators has come at the price of intense interdependence with national fortunes and developments outside of the safety and confinements of the bank vault. A few years ago, technology issues dominated many discussions over future banking trends. But talking global about banking today, three universal issues come to the fore that concern bankers and stakeholders, regardless of the development level reached by their national banking sector: crises, concentration of power and convergence of standards. Banking crises are the nightmares of financial stability and big, sector-wide crashes – or, in technical terms, systemic banking crises – tend to occupy media reports and discussions over years.
