Full coverage: Finance

Two months into her new job as European Commissioner for Financial Services, Mairéad McGuinness is facing into a potential wave of debt defaults. She wants to see a more sensitive response than the past wholesale offloading of non-performing loans to overseas vulture funds.

Corporate lenders and borrowers are used to British law and the closest alternative from next year will be Irish law. Deal or no deal, we already know some niche markets are ripe for this opportunity.

Wayflyer is growing quickly by financing small to mid-sized e-commerce companies. Last month, QED Investors, which has backed 13 unicorns to date, invested in the Irish company. Is Wayflyer a $1 billion business of the future?

Professor Pinar Ozcan is an Oxford University expert on innovation and fintech. She sets out why the banks are vulnerable to disruption by fintech, why the fintechs have struggled to capitalise, and why there's an opportunity for a new type of company to step in and dominate the industry.

Bundled solutions taking the risk and the upfront cost out of switching to low-energy lighting, electric vehicles or solar panels for businesses are now needed for households. Industry and the new government have been tiptoeing around this model – it is time they take the plunge.

Together with Bertrand Gautier, Paul O'Donnell is Principal of Greencoat Renewables, the listed renewable energy company. They have been on an acquisition spree: twelve wind farm deals since 2017. Here O'Donnell describes Greencoat's long term perspective, the short term impact of Covid-19, and how Ireland hits its 70 per cent renewable energy goal.

Thousands of locked-down local businesses will need finance to prime the pump when they re-open, and recent changes in regulations allow credit unions to lend more to them. These community lenders have cash to lend and may distribute Covid-19 government-sponsored credit.

While exploring the tech industry for the Mapping Multinationals series, Thomas Hubert had to adjust from the real world to understand the sheer volume of financial flows he was looking at. His reporting highlights the need for increased corporate transparency requirements.

Between households and indigenous enterprises, Constantin Gurgdiev does the math on the level of income and credit support required to keep the economy on life support during the crisis – and calls for a whole new form of money printing to finance it.

Last Wednesday was the funeral of a great Irish-American whose story is little known. An investment banker who was near the top of the legendary Allen & Co, Walter O'Hara Jr was a champion of American investment in Ireland who had many links to here.