Banking

Bloomberg Siam Commercial Bank Pcl, Thailand’s second-largest lender, is going digital and slashing branches and headcount in a bid to survive competition from emerging financial players. “Even though we are a large bank, we think of it as do or die,” Chief Strategy Officer Arak Sutivong said in an interview, referring to a $1 billion technology investment program and its ...

Bloomberg Traders have been taking some profits on their long positions in the Norwegian krone this week, but the latest inflation data has given them a reason to rethink. Norway’s February headline inflation beat the highest analyst estimate and rose above the central bank’s recently lowered 2 percent target, triggering a rally in the currency of 0.7 percent against the ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan stayed the course with its monetary stimulus at Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s final policy meeting before his new term begins next month. BOJ kept its yield-curve control settings and asset purchases unchanged, a result forecast by all economists surveyed by Bloomberg. And with inflation still far from the BOJ’s target, Kuroda made it clear that the ...

Bloomberg Central bankers around the world are grappling with the prospect of a global trade war sparked by US President Donald Trump’s plan to slap tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum. Here are extracts of some of the recent comments by central bank officials: AUSTRALIA Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe, whose economy ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank officials considering when to end their bond-buying program have a new reason to move carefully: US inflationary pressures are helping to push up euro-zone borrowing costs. President Mario Draghi and his colleagues spent years insulating the single-currency area from global financial markets as it recuperated from a double-dip recession, debt crisis and brush with deflation. Now ...

Bloomberg Malaysia’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged as expected, after inflation eased and an early rate hike this year helped to bolster the currency. Bank Negara Malaysia left the overnight policy rate at 3.25 percent, it said in a statement in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday, as predicted by all 17 economists in a Bloomberg survey. As one ...

FRANKFURT / Reuters BlackRock, George Soros and big sovereign wealth funds are among investors expressing interest in buying stakes in the initial public offering of Deutsche Bank’s asset management arm, a person familiar with the matter said. The sovereign funds include Singapore’s Temasek, the person said. Deutsche Bank is finalising plans for the IPO of the asset management business, known ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump’s trade policy has Thailand worried. Trade and geopolitics are the key risks for Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy, Bank of Thailand Senior Director Don Nakornthab said in an interview in Bangkok. Exports of goods and services account for about 70 percent of Thai gross domestic product. “Trade politics is the most important risk for our economy as ...

Bloomberg Few countries conjure up images of financial ruin like Iceland. Its economy was famously gutted in 2008 when its over-sized banks all collapsed within weeks of each other. A decade later, the island nation is still trying to crisis-proof its financial system. A key goal is to shield banking operations that are vital to the economy, such as deposit-taking, ...

Bloomberg Federal investigators are seeking to question the chiefs of India’s biggest lenders as they widen their probe into the $2 billion fraud at Punjab National Bank. The Enforcement Directorate has written to the heads of 31 banks asking to meet officials about the fraud, according to people familiar with the matter. The investigators will start with state-run PNB on ...