Banking

Bloomberg Hong Kong urged all banks to “strongly encourage” staff in client-facing roles or support functions to get vaccinated as the city struggles with local resistance to its free rollout. Banks should “identify and draw up a list of designated staff expected to receive inoculation,” Hong Kong Monetary Authority Deputy Chief Executive Arthur Yuen said in a circular to financial ...

Bloomberg A hot equity market in India is prompting HDFC Bank Ltd to try to muscle in on the action as companies raise record levels of funding. The government has flooded the market with money in response to one of the world’s worst outbreaks of coronavirus, pushing stocks to dizzying levels and helping companies to boost capital buffers. Despite being ...

Bloomberg The Kazakh bank that received one of the country’s biggest bailout packages in recent years has paid out about $430 million in dividends, including from profits booked before the rescue. First Heartland Jusan Bank, known as Tsesnabank before it was bought by a fund set up by leader-for-life Nursultan Nazarbayev, resumed payouts in 2020, regulatory filings show. In 2018 ...

Bloomberg Bank of Baroda plans to raise 50 billion rupees ($690 million) from sales of shares and bonds after posting an unexpected loss in fourth quarter. India’s state-run lender’s borrowing plan includes raising as much as 20 billion rupees through a sale of shares and up to 30 billion rupees via bonds that qualify as capital, according to an exchange ...

Bloomberg A proposal by the Swedish central bank intended to address liquidity shortages in the country’s corporate bond market has been met with disbelief by a number of asset managers. The Riksbank last week repeated its call to improve the market’s functioning but added a new demand: revise the regulatory framework so corporate bond funds “cannot offer daily redemptions,” according ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s virtual banks are facing years of red ink on the bottom line after making limited inroads against their brick-and-mortar rivals in the financial hub. The two leading digital banks so far, Mox Bank Ltd, backed by Standard Chartered, and ZA Bank Ltd, bankrolled by China’s ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance, predict they will start breaking even by 2024 ...

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG is grappling with how to keep top bankers from fleeing to competitors and drastically reducing risk as new Chairman Antonio Horta-Osorio seeks to recover from a series of scandals. The lender is cutting ties with SoftBank Group Corp, a backer to Lex Greensill’s collapsed supply-chain finance empire, and it’s temporarily barring clients from withdrawing all ...

Bloomberg The Federal Reserve has privately told Deutsche Bank AG that its compliance programs aren’t up to snuff, signalling that the scandal-plagued bank is failing to adhere to a number of past accords with US regulators. The Fed’s recent warning came in an annual regulatory assessment that said Deutsche Bank hadn’t improved its risk management practices despite being under confidential ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) will consider climate change in its monetary policy discussions, Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said in his clearest signal yet that the central bank is looking to support the battle against global warming. “We have a great interest” in climate change and its impact on the economy and the financial system, Kuroda said in an interview ...

Bloomberg The Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) monetary policy is appropriate given there’s no great risk of spiralling inflation, its President Thomas Jordan said in an interview with Schweiz am Wochenende (SamW). “We think the risk of inflation is moderate in Switzerland,” he told the newspaper in an interview. “The strong currency acts as a damper on inflation, the franc is ...