Banking

Bloomberg Bitcoin climbed towards $40,000 in a rally that helped the market value of digital tokens scale a new peak. The largest cryptocurrency rises as much as 4.3% to $39,499 on Saturday, taking it closer to early January’s record of almost $42,000. The value of more than 6,000 tokens tracked by CoinGecko hit an unprecedented $1.22 trillion. The jump comes ...

Bloomberg Westpac Banking Corp. is working with JPMorgan Chase & Co. as it prepares to kick off a formal sale process for its life insurance business as soon as this month, according to people with knowledge of the matter. AIA Group Ltd., Dai-ichi Life Holdings Inc. and Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Co. are among the firms that have been approached ...

Bloomberg BNP Paribas signalled higher revenue and potential share buybacks this year after reporting weaker-than-expected trading results and a slowdown at fixed-income business. The French bank posted an uneven fourth-quarter performance that saw net income and provisions beat estimates, while overall revenue and trading came in below expectations. While the lender signaled an uncertain outlook as the pandemic continues to ...

Bloomberg India’s central bank is under pressure to step in to keep yields in check after the government surprised bond markets with a bigger-than-expected borrowing plan. That puts the burden on Governor Shaktikanta Das to calm bond traders when he meets to decide policy on Friday. He’s already had to assuage them that a recent measure to mop up excess ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG saw revenue from fixed-income trading rise by about a fifth in the final quarter of last year, a bigger jump than most of its Wall Street rivals as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Christian Sewing increasingly leans on the unit to drive growth. The bank’s traders generated approximately 1.4 billion euros ($1.7 billion) in the period, a ...

Bloomberg Australia’s central bank will extend its quantitative easing program by a further $76.2 billion and doesn’t expect to increase interest rates until 2024, following in the footsteps of global peers in moving to stamp out premature tapering speculation. Governor Philip Lowe left the key rate and three-year yield target at 0.10%, the Reserve Bank said in a statement on ...

Bloomberg For the first time since 2017, Bank of America Corp. (BofA) clients with $561 billion combined say Bitcoin is the world’s most crowded trade as speculative euphoria hits Wall Street. Investors surveyed by the investment bank see signs that long positions in the largest digital currency are reaching unprecedented levels, while retail traders and institutional names join the crypto ...

Bloomberg India’s banking regulator has appointed an external firm to audit the technology infrastructure of the country’s biggest private-sector bank, a rare move that follows a penalty for repeated outages. HDFC Bank Ltd. will “extend its cooperation” to the auditor, the Mumbai-based lender said in an exchange filing on Tuesday. The bank will pay for the audit, it said. The ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc will establish an office to spearhead its strategy in China’s fast-growing Greater Bay Area, stepping up its bet on the world’s second-largest economy. Daniel Chan, currently head of business banking at HSBC in Hong Kong, was named head of the unit, which will oversee the strategy to “capture opportunities” in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau, the ...

Bloomberg Tanzania’s central bank ordered the nation’s lenders to deal with souring loans and slash costs, threatening jobs in the latest industry reforms announced by President John Magufuli’s government. Bank of Tanzania gave lenders until the end of 2022 to reduce their cost-to-income ratios to below 55% and to cut non-performing loans to below 5% of their books, according to ...