Banking

Bloomberg The African Development Bank plans to increase its loans to Nigeria by more than $2 billion next year with investments in energy, infrastructure and agriculture, its President Akinwumi Adesina said. “The total portfolio we have in Nigeria is $6 billion,” Adesina said in a Jan. 18 interview in Abuja, the capital. “We expect that by the year 2019, we ...

Bloomberg Foreign-currency trading on Egypt’s interbank system has climbed to $14.5 billion since the November 2016 decision to float the currency, central bank Governor Tarek Amer told Bloomberg. Bank trading in dollars — almost non-existent before the float — had reached $9 billion in September. The 60 percent rise since then reflects growing confidence in the economy after reforms aimed ...

Bloomberg Europe’s financial technology startups are on hiring mode, fighting each other – and the incumbents — in what one executive described as a “war for talent.” Payments company GoCardless Ltd., which employs 170 people in London, will open a Paris office in February, said chief product and technology officer Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas. Online lender LendInvest Ltd. said it will make ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG investors were left underwhelmed by the bank’s first share buyback since the credit crisis and rejigged financial targets. The stock declined the most since July after the Zurich-based bank downgraded a key profitability target, as well as paring back forecasts for its asset- management business and net new money at its combined wealth-management unit. The bank ...

Bloomberg The Central Bank of Nigeria won’t hold its rate-setting meeting scheduled for Monday and Tuesday because lawmakers have yet to approve monetary policy committee members, leaving the body unable to form a quorum. The bank will “maintain key monetary policy variables” at levels decided in November, Governor Godwin Emefiele said in an emailed statement, effectively leaving the key interest ...

Bloomberg When euro-area finance ministers launch the process to find a new European Central Bank vice president, they won’t be flooded with nominations. So far, only Spain has said it will put forward a candidate to replace Portugal’s Vitor Constancio, whose term expires at the end of May, with Finance Minister Luis de Guindos the most likely nominee. The meeting ...

DUBAI / Reuters National Bank of Kuwait (NBK), the Gulf Arab state’s largest commercial lender, reported a 5.4 percent rise in fourth-quarter net profit, in line with analysts’ forecasts, according to Reuters calculations. The bank made a net profit of 80.0 million dinars ($266.3 million) in the three months to December 31, compared with 75.9 million dinars a year earlier, ...

Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc and the US Justice Department, announcing last week that the bank would pay $100 million for front-running client currency orders, left one thing unstated — the name of a big client the bank’s traders defrauded. That unidentified victim was London-based insurer Prudential Plc, according to court records and testimony in a related case and a person ...

Bloomberg The design for a new class of safe financial assets intended to strengthen the euro area will be published imminently after almost a year of delay, according to officials familiar with the matter. The report, commissioned by European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, will offer a plan for bundling government debt from the bloc’s 19 nations into a security ...

Bloomberg Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Randal Quarles, the central bank’s supervision chief, shared a laundry list of ways to make regulation less burdensome for Wall Street — including streamlining capital rules, overhauling post-crisis trading limits and making major changes to how the agency conducts stress tests. “Confusion that results from overly complex regulation does not advance the goal of a ...