South Africa

South Africa's banking system is awash with inconsistencies. While the country's largest banks work towards implementing the advanced internal ratings-based approach to Basel II, vast swathes of the population do not have access to banking services at all. South African investors face tight controls on what they can invest in, with strict limits on the amount of cash they can invest offshore. Yet the country has a small but growing hedge fund sector. And while South Africa's high-net-worth and retail investors were at the vanguard of structured product investment in the late 1990s, the market has remained virtually dormant for the past five years, bucking a global trend of rising structured product investment.

At the heart of South Africa's banking system lies a handful of world class financial institutions. The likes of Absa, FirstRand, NedCor and Standard Bank have kept pace with many of the world's most sophisticated banks in their Basel II implementation efforts to date. In fact, the recent acquisition of Absa by the UK's Barclays Group has prompted the bank to push for the advanced internal ratings-based approach, as opposed to the foundation approach. The rest of the country's top-tier banks