Banking

Bloomberg Barclays Plc’s attempts to scale up its cash management business in India via a tie-up with the country’s post office are starting to bear fruit, according to the UK bank’s local corporate banking head. The deal with the 164-year-old mail service, first agreed in 2015, allows Barclays to offer its cash management services via some 8,000 postal branches spread ...

Bloomberg Nigeria’s long-awaited interest rate-cutting cycle risks being short-lived, if it starts at all. Governor Godwin Emefiele said last month the Central Bank of Nigeria may reduce its benchmark from a record-high 14 percent before July if inflation drops closer to single digits. But with fuel costs surging and government spending swelling before next year’s election, he may struggle to ...

Bloomberg How have the mighty fallen. A year ago foreign funds including Franklin Templeton Investments were piling into Indian bonds. A record-long slump has now prompted the nation’s biggest bank to say enough is enough. India’s 10-year bonds dropped for a seventh month in February, the longest-losing streak in data compiled by Bloomberg starting in November 1998. Government-run lenders such ...

Bloomberg Mark Carney is calling for greater regulation to bring the era of cryptocurrency “anarchy” to an end. “The time has come to hold the crypto-asset ecosystem to the same standards as the rest of the financial system,” the Bank of England governor said in a speech at Bloomberg’s European headquarters in London. Carney, who is also head of the ...

DUBAI / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s planned $16 billion syndicated loan, one of the largest ever in emerging markets, will cut the kingdom’s cost of funding by paying banks much less than on previous borrowings. The ministry of finance said on Twitter that it would offer banks a margin of 75 basis points over the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) for ...

Bloomberg Who’s afraid of Jerome Powell? Not emerging markets. Stocks, bonds and currencies in developing nations did tumble with global markets after the US Federal Reserve chairman’s comments this week spurred bets for four interest-rate increases in 2018. Conventional wisdom holds that the quick increase in borrowing costs will diminish risk appetite and end a two-year rally in emerging-market assets. ...

Bloomberg If you ask stock strategists, European banks are no longer a unanimous buy. Deutsche Bank AG lowered its recommendation on lenders to underweight, citing weaker economic momentum and falling German bond yields. The downgrade comes two weeks after a strategist at HSBC Holdings Plc said the bank has been cutting its position on European financials, predicting US 10-year Treasury ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Baroda’s South African unit has been in possession of the “proceeds of crime” linked to a dairy farm project that involved the politically connected Gupta family, said Thato Ntimutse, a lawyer for the National Prosecuting Authority’s Asset Forfeiture Unit. While India’s Bank of Baroda has tried to stop the state from freezing 30 million rand ($2.5 ...

Bloomberg For all his influence on the wider European economy, Mario Draghi is finding out that he has little sway in fixing a much more local problem. Almost two weeks after a member of his Governing Council was briefly detained for bribery and extortion, the European Central Bank president still has few options available to address a lingering crisis that ...

SYDNEY / Reuters A first sale of green Islamic bonds by Indonesia could help open the door for more crossover deals across Asia, as religious and environmentally-minded investors find a middle ground in the sukuk funding format. Last week, Indonesia became the first Asian sovereign to sell green sukuk, raising $1.25 billion via a five-year deal, alongside a $1.75 billion ...