Banking

Bloomberg The bottom line is that the top line stinks. That’s the challenge facing South Africa’s biggest banks as they fight to contain costs that are accelerating faster than revenue. The reasons are pretty much the same: South Africa’s economy hasn’t expanded at more than 2 percent a year since 2013 and unemployment is at 27 percent. In addition, consumers ...

Bloomberg As an activist investor targets Barclays Plc for taking on too much risk, the London-based lender has disclosed how its internal models failed to predict a series of trading losses at its investment bank. Barclays issued a so-called amber alert last year after the issues with its trading arm’s value-at-risk modeling, according to a recent filing. Tests of its ...

Bloomberg BNP Paribas, France’s biggest lender, plans to expand China operations to include brokerage, futures trading and wealth-management ventures, as the bank anticipates further foreign investment flows into world’s second-biggest economy. CG Lai, CEO of BNP Paribas China, said his firm was one of many international players establishing and expanding their presence in the country. The moves come as index ...

Bloomberg Denmark plans to let its financial watchdog impose fines without going via the courts, in order to speed up the process of punishing banks involved in money laundering. The decision, which still needs to be debated in the country’s parliament, is the latest step being pushed by Business Minister Rasmus Jarlov as he responds to a $230 billion dirty ...

Bloomberg Sweden’s government wants to revisit the idea of imposing a tax on the financial industry. Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson says her goal is to have a levy that singles out banks with far more precision than previous proposals. “It should include only the financial sector,” she said in an interview in Stockholm. “We want one that has a more ...

Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has picked a little-known technology firm to help handle payments for its planned credit-card partnership with Apple Inc. The bank struck a deal last year to license payments-processing software from CoreCard Software, owned by Intelligent Systems Corp., to help with its foray into the consumer-card business, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, ...

Bloomberg The new chief of Kazakhstan’s central bank dodged a debt claim in 2014 thanks to a legal system that’s failed to protect lenders from rampant defaults and repeated crises. In 2014, Yerbolat Dossayev and three business partners were given a reprieve on repaying 1.9 billion tenge, then worth $13 million, that they’d personally guaranteed to the central Asian country’s ...

Bloomberg An increasing number of economists see additional stimulus as the Bank of Japan’s next policy step, while they are unanimous in forecasting no change at this week’s board meeting. Some 37 percent of 46 economists surveyed by Bloomberg this month forecast the next policy change will be additional easing, a jump from 18 percent in January. All of them ...

Bloomberg Indian lenders haven’t fully passed on the central bank’s latest interest rate cut to borrowers, pressuring the monetary authority to loosen policy even more to support economic growth. A mismatch between deposits and credit growth, and competition from the government for small-savings mean banks face a high cost of capital, limiting their ability to transmit monetary policy easing. Bankers ...

Bloomberg ING Groep NV reduced its bonus pool by 25 percent after a year marred by a record money-laundering settlement and public discontent in the Netherlands over banker pay. The country’s largest lender paid out 303 million euros ($340 million) in bonuses for 2018, down from 403 million euros the year before, according to its latest annual report. ING said ...