Banking

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co.’s foreign-exchange business cut 22 salespeople, according to a person briefed on the matter, the latest casualties of a slump in market activity. Affected employees worked in locations including St. Louis and Atlanta, where the bank is consolidating operations elsewhere, the person said. Some staff are being moved to other offices, while others leave the company, ...

Bloomberg SBM Holdings Ltd., the Mauritius lender that bought two Kenyan banks within months of each other, expects the combined operations to make a profit within a year. The second-biggest lender in the Indian Ocean island-nation is expanding in East Africa’s largest economy to use it as a hub for the rest of the region as part of a broader ...

Bloomberg State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender by assets, joined its private peers in shrugging off losses as investors believe the lenders have finally got a handle on bad loans. SBI’s shares surged to a six-week high after it reported a record loss on Tuesday, weighed down by a doubling in provisions for soured debt. A similar contrarian ...

Bloomberg A former Deutsche Bank AG executive, Nizar Al-Bassam, is suing the German lender to reclaim bonuses totaling about 4 million euros ($4.7 million) following a probe into hiring practices in Russia and the UK. Al-Bassam, a former head of corporate and debt capital market finance for central and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said he believed the ...

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive Officer Tim Sloan said the firm is ready to increase lending for car sales after pulling back last year, and it’s now looking with consternation at the commercial real estate market. In auto lending, “we’ve pulled back enough and now we’re going to be growing that business again,” Sloan said in an interview ...

Bloomberg Investors are decamping Canadian banks ahead of earnings season, with six straight weeks of outflows from the largest exchange-traded fund tracking the industry. The BMO Equal Weight Banks Index ETF saw a record C$263 million ($204 million) leave the fund between April 2 and May 11, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. But the fact that the iShares S&P/TSX ...

Bloomberg Ghana’s central bank is lining up investors for lenders willing to combine their operations in an unprecedented push to force consolidation and strengthen the industry, according to people familiar with the matter. Investors from local pension funds to foreign private-equity firms are on standby to pump cash into the system as lenders scurry to bolster their capital levels, according ...

Bloomberg As China’s crackdown on shadow banking shrinks smaller banks’ valuations relative to larger peers, the outlook is dimming for the country’s regional lenders queuing up to list their shares. Small bank shares have been slipping relative to China’s lending giants like Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. and Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. due to their deeper involvement ...

Bloomberg Vietnam Orient Commercial Joint Stock Bank expects its market capitalisation to rise to $1 billion after its planned listing on the country’s benchmark bourse during the second half of the year, according to Chairman Trinh Van Tuan. The 22-year-old bank, also known as OCB, plans to list 750 million shares on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange late ...

Bloomberg Northern Europe’s claim for a turn at leading euro-area monetary policy in the era after Mario Draghi advanced over the weekend as two of its contenders dropped hints that they’re waiting to be asked. The signals from Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann and outgoing Finnish Governor Erkki Liikanen are the most explicit so far in the race to succeed the ...