Banking

Bloomberg Zimbabwe’s central bank has tightened the rules governing the trade of foreign currency by money exchange offices with immediate effect. The rates offered by exchange offices must be 7% above or below the interbank mid-rate, the central bank said in an emailed statement. Failure to comply would result in either heavy financial penalties or license revocation, it said. The ...

Bloomberg Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) promoted Alison Rose to chief executive officer, making her the first woman to run one of Britain’s big four lenders. Rose, the former head of British commercial and private banking at RBS, was seen as being groomed for the role for years. She takes over on Nov. 1, set to be the UK’s ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc has launched a public-relations offensive aimed at leaders in Beijing, reflecting worries that its position as the biggest foreign bank in China is at risk. With controversies such as the US-China trade war and the Hong Kong democracy protests swirling, the effort is aimed at repairing damage from the fallout of its role in the US ...

Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc’s Nigerian unit is joining the rush to grab a larger share of the consumer-banking market in Africa’s most populous nation, targeting a five-fold increase in customers over the next two years. “Retail is where we’re going to see exponential growth,” Lamin Manjang, the chief executive officer for Standard Chartered’s Lagos-based subsidiary, said in an interview. “It’s ...

Bloomberg A public spat between a pair of Swiss banking giants that erupted almost four years ago is now finally ending with a payment. It began in 2015, when Credit Suisse Group AG accused crosstown rival UBS Group AG of unfairly poaching staff from its US private banking business. UBS Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti personally shot back, insisting at ...

Bloomberg Greece plans to provide as much as 9 billion euros ($10 billion) in state guarantees to help its banks reduce a mountain of soured debt weighing on their balance sheets, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The initiative, similar to a successful programme used in Italy, depends on antitrust officials in Europe ruling that it doesn’t ...

Bloomberg As investors were expected to brace for the Federal Reserve’s policy decision on Wednesday, one corner of the foreign-exchange market looks particularly nervous. Overnight volatility for South Africa’s rand rose to as much as 25 percent, the most since August 2018, before paring the steep climb to trade at levels last seen in early May. The rand, which is ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing is considering whether to appoint a new investment banking head after ousting Garth Ritchie during his recent restructuring, people familiar with the matter said. Sewing — who had assumed direct oversight after Ritchie’s departure — thinks it may make sense to relinquish the extra responsibility to focus fully on his CEO ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc is once again defending Libra — this time against fears that the envisioned cryptocurrency could replace sovereign currencies from the US dollar to the Euro and threaten central banks’ control over money creation. David Marcus, the executive leading the project, posted a series of tweets the same day members of the Libra Association met with regulators convened ...

Bloomberg Sweden’s unemployment rate unexpectedly spiked to a four-year high in August, raising questions around the central bank’s plans to hike interest rates and driving the krona lower. The seasonally-adjusted jobless rate jumped to 7.4 percent, much worse than the 6.8 percent reading in a Bloomberg survey of economist estimates. The news, which resulted in a 0.8 percent decline in ...