London, amid the gloom of the global credit crunch, one topic is sure to bring a smile to the faces of the City's down-trodden bankers: Islamic finance. While the sukuk market is as quiet as other bond markets this year, City players are still positioning themselves in expectation of a prolonged boom in Sharia-compliant financial products. The Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah predicts that global sharia financial assets will grow by 20% per annum from US$900bn to US$2trn by 2010. And a lot of that business is going through London.

Economic downturn and the credit crunch will hit banks IT budgets’ this year, but banks worldwide will still spend more money on new technologies and services across all regions than any other sector, according to recent research by Gartner.

Banks in Western Europe and North America will remain the biggest spenders in 2008, but financial players in the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe also have sizeable IT budgets to spend, says the research company.

It caused a certain amount of surprise in financial circles when Lado Gurgenidze was made prime minister of Georgia in November 2007.

Gurgenidze is a well-known figure in east European finance – a former head of CIS corporate finance at ABN Amro, who then re-located from London to Tbilisi in 2004 to become CEO of the Bank of Georgia, which he turned into the country’s leading private bank and the only Georgian company to list on the LSE. The company is the pride of Georgia, having attracted over 200 institutional investors, and appreciated over 1000% since flotation.