Banking

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 Nordea Bank Abp is planning to allocate a lot less capital to its wholesale unit after acknowledging its performance has been “unsatisfactory.” The cuts will form a key plank in a strategy shift conceived by the bank’s new chief executive, Frank Vang-Jensen. After less than two months on the job, he’s made clear he wants to squeeze much deeper ...

Bloomberg Sam Kendall, a senior UBS Group AG executive who until recently oversaw its investment-banking arm in the Americas, is leaving the firm to pursue other interests, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Erica Chase, a representative for the bank, declined to comment. A UBS employee for more than two decades, Kendall last year assumed oversight of the ...

Bloomberg ICICI Bank Ltd, India’s second-largest private lender, posted a lower than expected profit due to a one-time income tax adjustment. Net income fell 28% to 6.55 billion rupees ($98 million) for the three months ended on September 30 from 9.1 billion rupees a year earlier, the lender said on Saturday. The profit compared with analysts expectation of 13.8 billion ...

Bloomberg Visa Inc had to shell out more money to entice banks to issue their cards on the company’s network. The firm set aside $1.69 billion in incentives for banks during its fiscal fourth quarter, a 13% increase from a year ago, that topped the $1.51 billion average of analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The world’s largest payments network — ...

Bloomberg Mobile payment startup Stripe began operations in Mexico, after the launch of a similar central bank-backed system aimed at boosting the amount of digital payments used in the nation’s cash-heavy economy. Stripe, used by companies including Uber Technologies, touts a key difference between it and CoDi, as Banxico-backed cobro digital is known: Its users can make and take payments ...

Bloomberg Jane Fraser ascended to the No. 2 job at Citigroup, putting her in position to succeed Chief Executive Officer Michael Corbat and become the first woman to lead a major US bank. The behemoth lender named Fraser as president and handed her responsibility for consumer banking, one of its thorniest turnaround efforts in recent years. Corbat moved to keep ...

Bloomberg With the costliest UK banking scandal fading into memory, a Brexit deal looking more plausible than it once did and trading likely to surprise on the upside, British lenders are going into earnings season with the wind in their sails for once. That doesn’t mean the numbers won’t have ugly spots. Third-quarter results, which kick off this week, are ...

Bloomberg The US House passed legislation to strengthen anti-money-laundering rules, moving closer to a victory for Wall Street banks. The bill, HR 2513, which passed 249-173, would make it harder to use anonymous shell companies to break the law. A similar bill in the Senate has yet to get a committee hearing, which would be the next step before a ...

Bloomberg Deal volumes in India are set to surge as embattled founders sell businesses to tide over a cash squeeze, according to Axis Capital Ltd, the investment banking unit of one of India’s largest private-sector lenders. “As the funding situation erodes, founders are selling businesses to deleverage, or are raising equity to gain an edge over the competitors,” Chirag Negandhi, ...