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Elias Neocleous The Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) has announced a new accelerated procedure in order to expedite the examination and determination of pending applications for authorisation.

Daniel Futej Rudolf Sivák An amendment to the act on public procurement came into force on November 1 2015. One of its goals is to make public procurement transparent through the creation of a register (the Register) of beneficial owners – those who take part in public procurement. Public procurement is particularly understood to mean the procurement of goods and services by governmental agencies, municipalities and other authorities that are publicly financed. The Register should allow identification of the real owners (beneficial owners), and not just the ostensible (paper) owners, of entities that participate directly or indirectly in the public procurement process. The Register does not apply to other forms of governmental expenditure, such as state subsidies, transfers of state property, contributions from European funds, or claims made against the government.

Your average private bank? Underwriters in Asia are fed up with inflated orders. The practice itself – which sees investors request more securities than they actually want, knowing the bookrunner won't fill their entire order – is not isolated to Asia's primary markets. But with a relatively large proportion of the region's wealth controlled by high-net-worth individuals, the private banks that steer these empires are emerging as the prime culprits.

If there's one thing to take from Europe's various capital market initiatives over 2015 – most notably, the Capital Markets Union – it's that the continent's financial infrastructure needs work. Europe's new single securities settlement platform, Target2-Securities (T2S), has been hailed as one of many solutions to that problem. A €1 billion ($1.5 billion) project run by the European Central Bank, T2S provides the post-trade IT system that underpins Europe's single capital market. And while its potential to boost efficiency and reduce costs shouldn't be underestimated, the project's first few months have been marred by technical issues and severe delays. "There's definitely questions over the complexity of the system," says Godfried de Vidts, chairman of the European Repo Council. "The amount of delays and teething problems so far is not surprising, and I think we can expect a lot more of that in the future."

An unlikely source of issuance in Europe's growing contingent convertible (CoCo) market in 2015 was Greece. And the next 12 months could lay the foundations for more.

India has stepped up its game to compete with China in internationalising its currency, with Prime Minister Modi recently announcing a government-backed railway's listing of a rupee-denominated bond on the London Stock Exchange.

In terms of sovereign debt, one country to watch is Argentina. "Argentina will come back to the market next year which will be interesting," says Antonia Stolper, partner at Shearman & Sterling.

The region’s best female lawyers and the firms paving the way for meritocracy in the legal profession were celebrated in Hong Kong on November 11

Securitisations as a whole might be marred by EU regulatory clashes, but commercial mortgage-backed deals (CMBS) are set to broaden their footprint across the continent. And their tranches will blur the boundary between loans and bonds.

The motives behind the European Commission's (EC) Prospectus Directive (PD) have never been questioned. The goals of reducing the costs and burden for companies producing prospectuses, and the headaches for investors wading through them, are faultless.