Banking

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 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 ...