Financial Services

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister of Turkey, has an expansive vision of the future of the country’s capital markets. In an April 2013 speech opening the first session of Borsa Istanbul under its new name, he said that the exchange’s restructuring would “reinforce Istanbul’s bid to be a finance centre just like New York, Tokyo and London...

To gain some understanding of the special place that gold holds in the hearts of Turks, one need only visit one of Istanbul’s most famous sites, the Grand Bazaar. Sellers come to cash in their gold jewellery, and buyers leave with anything from gold gram wafers to chunky 100-gram bars that cost more than $5000 a piece. The rest of the bazaar...

It was once thought inevitable that Western multinational banking groups would come to dominate the banking sector in Turkey, as they have in many peer emerging European countries. But five years after the global financial crisis, those groups’ demands for larger acquisitions have hardly recovered, and Turkey’s banking sector is moving on....

The banking sector looked to be starting a maturing process in 2013 as it continued to record solid growth without overheating. Amid abundant global liquidity, a moderate revival of global growth and improving domestic confidence, lending grew at an annualised rate of 16% in the first two months of 2013, roughly matching the pace of growth in...

Restrained by a cautious central bank governor and chastened by rising non-performing loans (NPLs) in the consumer segment, Turkish banks are maintaining a relatively moderate pace of lending growth in 2013. Although global financial conditions loosened dramatically in late 2012 and early 2013, Turkish banks were expected to increase loans by 15...