Banking

Bloomberg Catalonia’s biggest banks are getting closer to leaving the politically volatile region as customers signaled that a declaration of independence would prompt them to pull their deposits. Banco Sabadell SA confirmed it will move its headquarters to the Spanish city of Alicante, while CaixaBank SA’s board will consider transferring its registered office to the Balearic Islands, said a person ...

Bloomberg Singapore and Thailand are in discussions about connecting their national digital payment systems to forge an unprecedented regional alliance, as officials step up efforts to curb the use of cash. The link would bring together Southeast Asia’s first national digital-payment platforms, Singapore’s PayNow and Thailand’s PromptPay, said Naphongthawat Phothikit, director of payment systems policy at the Bank of Thailand. ...

Bloomberg Leverage debt guidelines set up to help prevent a rerun of the financial crisis are losing adherents under the Trump administration. With the say-so of the Treasury Department, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is among underwriters of leveraged buyouts arranging deals that skirt guidance designed to contain excessive leverage that left banks with more than $200 billion of unsellable LBO ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government tapped Rajnish Kumar to helm State Bank of India (SBI), handing him the task of curtailing a surge in bad debts at the nation’s biggest lender. Kumar, who has headed the state-run bank’s domestic lending business since November 2015, was elected chairman on Saturday as Arundhati Bhattacharya’s four-year term ends, the government said in ...

Bloomberg With just four words, Mark Johnson allegedly passed a secretive signal to fellow HSBC Holdings Plc currency traders to launch a buying spree of pounds: “My watch is off.” The bank’s former global head of foreign exchange alerted the traders around the globe via phone calls and chat messages, prosecutors at Johnson’s fraud trial say. The gambit in December ...

Bloomberg Egypt’s central bank will increase the reserve requirement for lenders next week, potentially paving the way for cutting interest rates even as it battles soaring inflation triggered by a sharp currency devaluation. The reserve ratio, used to control money supply, will increase to 14 percent from 10 percent from October 10, the regulator said. It said the measure was ...

Bloomberg Malaysia, and to a lesser degree Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, remain more exposed to exchange rate risk than other developing economies in East Asia and the Pacific as global financial conditions tighten, the World Bank said. Companies and banks in these countries have sizeable external debt, although foreign exchange reserves currently appear adequate, the Washington-based multilateral lender said ...

Bloomberg India’s sovereign bonds dropped, reversing earlier gains, after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) kept interest rates unchanged as expected and lowered the proportion of deposits that lenders must invest in specified securities such as government notes. The benchmark repurchase rate was left at 6%, with five on the six-member monetary policy committee voting for no change. The outcome ...

ZURICH / Reuters The number of banks in Iran should at least halve over the next six years, with closures and mergers needed to modernise an industry laden with toxic loans, one of the country’s top bankers said on Tuesday. Parviz Aghili, chief executive of Middle East Bank, estimated at a conference in Zurich that a full re-organisation of the ...

RIYADH / Reuters The Saudi central bank has received three applications for banking licences and processing them is at an advanced stage, central bank governor Ahmed al-Kholifey told a news conference on Wednesday. Kholifey did not name the applicants. Another central bank official said no more bank mergers were expected. Alawwal Bank and Saudi British Bank agreed in April to ...