Bloomberg Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Ltd, the world’s largest lender by assets, posted a 5.8% increase in third-quarter profit amid a deepening economic slowdown. Net income for the three months through September rose to 83.8 billion yuan ($11.8 billion) from 79.2 billion yuan a year earlier, the Beijing-based lender said in a filing. ICBC led the nation’s ...

Bloomberg The Competition Authority of Kenya gave Nigeria’s biggest lender the go-ahead to acquire 93.57% of Transnational Bank Ltd, as consolidation in the East African nation’s banking industry gathers pace. Access Bank Plc’s purchase follows the merger of NIC Group Plc and Commercial Bank of Africa Ltd, and KCB Group Ltd’s acquisition of National Bank of Kenya Ltd earlier this ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG has cut about two dozen jobs in Europe over the last two weeks as Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti restructures the investment bank after a poor performance this year. At least 10 of the cuts came at the equities trading division, people familiar with the matter said. Five positions were eliminated in Zurich, including three managing ...

Bloomberg State Bank of India (SBI) Ltd posted a bigger-than-expected profit in the fiscal second quarter as asset quality improved. Shares jumped. Net income more than tripled to 30.1 billion rupees ($424 million) for the three months ended on September 30 from 9.4 billion rupees a year earlier, India’s largest lender said. Analysts had expected a profit of 22.9 billion ...

Bloomberg A senior Chinese foreign-exchange regulatory official called for “special attention” to be paid to blockchain as the nation looks to gain advantages from digital finance. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange is looking to use blockchain and artificial intelligence in cross-border trade finance and macro-prudential regulation, Lu Lei, deputy director of the regulator, said at the Bund Summit in ...

Bloomberg Weeks after Armand Wahyudi Hartono became the vice president director of Indonesia’s largest non-state bank, he noticed how staff were leaving half-empty glasses of water after work. The next morning, he restricted the amount of drinking water available at PT Bank Central Asia’s (BCA) headquarters. Such stringent cost control is just an example of how the lender has managed ...

Bloomberg PG&E Corp cut power to more than 2.5 million Californians in the state’s largest deliberate blackout ever. As of midnight local time, the bankrupt utility giant had shut off the lights to 877,000 homes and businesses in 38 counties across Northern and Central California, including parts of Oakland and Berkeley, but sparing the city of San Francisco, as it ...

Bloomberg China’s Tesla Inc fans expecting to get the new, locally built Model 3s on the cheap were just dealt a surprise. Tesla said its China-made vehicles will start at $50,000 in the country, only about 3% less than what the most basic imported models have been going for, after the US company decided to include the Autopilot driver-assistance software ...

Bloomberg The global economic conjuncture is creating an unfavorable environment for investments and international trade, but nobody is expecting an economic crisis in the short term, Spanish Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said. “I just came back from IMF, World Bank and G20 meetings. There is concern for the global slowdown, but no one sees a crisis in the short term, ...

Bloomberg A group of prominent economists from the US and China called for the world’s two largest economies to abandon their trade war and agree to a new path forward that would give both countries more latitude to both pursue their own domestic economic policies and hit back at those that hurt them. In a joint statement issued in China, ...