Banking

Bloomberg Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. (OCBC) is in talks with companies including Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. about seeking one of the city-state’s planned virtual bank licenses, according to people familiar with the matter. Singapore’s second-largest bank would take a minority stake in any virtual-banking joint venture and sees it as a way to tap new customers and markets. For example, Singtel might ...

Bloomberg The global hunt for yield is a boon for Chinese banks raising capital via perpetual bonds. Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. sold 85 billion yuan ($12 billion) of perpetual bonds last week at a coupon of 4.39%, the lowest level since lenders first started selling the debt instruments in January. Total sales of the bonds, which lack a maturity ...

Bloomberg Guaranty Trust Bank Plc will consider acquisitions outside its home market as Nigeria’s biggest lender by market value seeks to expand on the rest of the continent. The Nigerian multinational financial institution, which already has offices in 10 countries outside Nigeria, is looking to East Africa for growth, Chief Executive Officer Segun Agbaje said on a call with investors ...

Bloomberg A senior official at the European Central Bank (ECB) warned that banks embracing external data storage and other digital technology need to face an uncomfortable truth: there’s a good chance they’ll get hacked. “There will be accidents, especially in the cloud,” Korbinian Ibel, a director general at the ECB’s supervisory arm, said in an interview. “It’s not that clouds ...

Bloomberg The Indian rupee’s outperformance against more export-dependent currencies such as the Korean won has likely come to an end, with JPMorgan Chase & Co. seeing risks shifting to the downside. While JPMorgan had favoured the rupee since the US-China trade war took a turn for the worse in May, it now expects the currency to show higher beta to ...

Bloomberg Germany’s central bank warned that Europe’s largest economy could be about to tip into recession, adding to the pressure on policy makers to ramp up support. The Bundesbank said in its monthly report that German output will remain “lackluster” in the third quarter and “could continue to fall slightly”. That would be a second straight quarter of contraction — ...

Bloomberg Australia’s central bank (RBA) is ready to cut interest-rates further if evidence suggests this would boost the economy, and said it reviewed global experience with unconventional steps when policy makers met two weeks ago. The Reserve Bank noted few signs of inflation pressures emerging in the economy and warned entrenched expectations of weak wage growth could crimp household spending, ...

Bloomberg Danske Bank A/S is getting rid of thousands of job titles as the lender rebuilds its image after a year of scandal and losses. With the Copenhagen-based bank’s new chief executive officer, Chris Vogelzang, reviewing operations after starting in June, the number of job titles will fall to around 400 from roughly 3,600, according to Finansforbundet, the finance industry’s ...

Bloomberg Complex instruments used by hedge funds to bet on borrowers going bust and linked to “extremely immoral actions” by the Vatican, can actually improve the health of financial markets, according to Bank of England staff. Bonds insured by credit-default swaps are likely to trade more frequently than securities not covered by these derivatives, according to research by Robert Czech ...

Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co. plans to host a conference call on Tuesday to help clients make sense of markets after a week of wild swings for stocks and bonds. “In the wake of a rather violent decline in yields, inversion of the curve, and volatility in equity markets, we consider the role of poor liquidity and systematic flows in ...