Banking

Bloomberg China will now permit foreign companies to access its $27 trillion payments market, which will further open up the world’s second-largest economy. Foreign players can start applying for payment licenses and will be treated the same as local firms, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement on Wednesday. Applicants must set up local units, establish payment infrastructure ...

Bloomberg Hoist Finance AB of Sweden is gearing up to buy non-performing credit portfolios from Greek banks as they prepare to offload loans that soured during the country’s debt crisis. “There’s been a lot of talk about Greece for a long time, but now it’s actually happening,” Klaus-Anders Nysteen, the chief executive officer of Hoist, said in an interview in ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank is on a slow walk towards concluding four years of quantitative easing, and that challenge might look easy compared with what comes next. While policy makers are comfortable with market expectations for bond purchases to end this year, the bigger specter of 2019 looms large. That’s when the Governing Council might dare to actually withdraw ...

Bloomberg Nordea Bank AB may be cutting thousands of jobs to go digital, but in its wealth management business, it’s hiring. The bank, which is moving its headquarters to Finland from Sweden for regulatory reasons, has hired about 75 people over the past year to help run its $400 billion wealth unit, according to its head, Snorre Storset. “Wealth management ...

DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s central bank has instructed banks to change the way they calculate their loan-to-deposit ratios, giving greater weight to long-term deposits in order to permit more lending, according to a report on the Maaal financial news website. The new rules, set to come into effect in early April, will introduce a weighting system for calculating a ...

Bloomberg China’s incoming central bank governor, Yi Gang, signalled that he’ll push to maintain the course of financial liberalisation set by his predecessor Zhou Xiaochuan. The National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, voted to approve President Xi Jinping’s choice for governor of the People’s Bank of China. Liu He, Xi’s top economic adviser, was named as a vice premier, indicating that ...

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc. wants to achieve parity between male and female managing directors at its markets business in Asia within three to five years, joining banks worldwide in stepping up efforts to close a longstanding gender gap. The New York-based bank has a long way to go. Though women make up about half the 60,000 Citigroup workforce across all divisions ...

Bloomberg A weekend selloff cryptocurrencies subsided, with Bitcoin rallying from a six-week low before Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors discuss digital assets in Buenos Aires. Bitcoin traded at $8,235 as of 11:20 a.m. in Hong Kong, up 12 percent from its low reached over the weekend, according to prices on Bitstamp. Traders are watching this week’s ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank officials told investors from around the world that they’re right to bet on a gradual reduction of monetary stimulus in the euro area. On the eve of a Group of 20 meeting of finance chiefs in Buenos Aires, Governing Council members Klaas Knot and Francois Villeroy de Galhau expressed confidence that inflation in the 19-nation region ...

Bloomberg The record-beating rally of European cyclical stocks is heading for a pause. That’s according to Deutsche Bank’s head of European equity strategy Sebastian Raedler, who argues that equities geared to the economy will underperform defensive peers by about 10% through mid-year. Sectors like banks and miners — which last year benefited from investor optimism over growth — will bear ...