Banking

Bloomberg Smartphones have made taking a photo and checking fantasy football scores a breeze, but inputting credit card details on that small screen can still be frustrating enough that many shoppers just give up, costing retailers billions. Now, the world’s biggest card networks — a group that includes Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover Financial Services — have joined forces ...

Bloomberg Hostility and discrimination await women daring to encroach upon the male-dominated world of economics and central banking, according to papers presented at a European Central Bank conference. The research shows that the much-celebrated rise of Christine Lagarde — a lawyer and politician, not an economist or central banker — to become the ECB’s first-ever female president is atypical for ...

Bloomberg Three words — whatever it takes — defined Mario Draghi’s time as European Central Bank president, but he’s prouder of another number: 11 million jobs. Hardly a public appearance goes by without Draghi mentioning employment growth in the euro zone as a justification for the extraordinary monetary stimulus he’s pushed through since 2011. The focus on jobs might be ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG is cutting about 40 jobs in the Asia-Pacific region as part of a global push to trim costs and combine its trading units, according to a person familiar with the matter. The staff reductions are roughly split between UBS’s markets and investment-banking teams, with a majority at the level of vice president or below, the person ...

Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co says the money-market stress that sent short-term borrowing rates surging last month is likely to get much worse despite the Federal Reserve’s attempts to inject billions of dollars into the financial system. The Fed has offered overnight loans and started buying up to $60 billion of US Treasury bills a month in an effort to ...

Bloomberg The head of Facebook Inc’s Libra project said that it could use cryptocurrencies based on national currencies like the dollar, rather than the synthetic one it initially proposed, Reuters reported. David Marcus, who oversees the Libra initiative for Facebook, told a banking seminar hosted by the Group of 30 in Washington that Facebook is open to looking at alternative ...

Bloomberg Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (OCBC) aims to expand its lending to environmentally-friendly projects after this year building the biggest exposure to green loans among its Southeast Asian peers. The bank has built a team of five to focus on sustainable financing after foraying into green loans last year and is looking to add bankers, said Mike Ng, the Singapore bank’s ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank (ECB) officials must bear in mind their previous premature interest-rate hikes and the market turmoil around the US Federal Reserve’s tapering of bond purchases when they eventually start to tighten monetary policy, Bank of Finland Governor Olli Rehn warned. “The core inflation rate remains low and clearly below the ECB’s price-stability target,” Rehn wrote in a ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc may partially exit stock trading in some developed Western markets as part of a cost-cutting drive by Noel Quinn, the interim chief executive who wants the top job on a permanent basis. Equities sales and trading units in France, Germany, US and the UK are likely to be scaled back, according to people familiar with the ...

Bloomberg Japan has various ways to deploy fiscal stimulus if economic conditions warrant such action, according to Finance Minister Taro Aso. The nation’s economic fundamentals remain stable for now, but the government continues to use fiscal stimulus in a nimble manner, Aso said at a press conference in Washington, where the Group of 20 nations’ finance ministers and central bank ...