Banking

  Bloomberg Sam Woods, head of the Bank of England’s (BOE) Prudential Regulation Authority, said UK supervisors plan to ease capital demands on smaller banks to make it easier for them to compete against larger lenders. Writing in the comment pages of the Financial Times, Woods said the authority is adopting a new approach that will help even out disparities ...

  Bloomberg Intesa Sanpaolo SpA climbed in Milan trading after abandoning the idea of a joint business model with an insurance company as Chief Executive Officer Carlo Messina doesn’t see sufficient value in merging with Assicurazioni Generali SpA, Italy’s biggest insurer. The country’s second-largest bank said that after studying a possible combination under the bancassurance model, it now plans to ...

  Bloomberg One of the smallest parts of Standard Chartered Plc, the UK bank with operations sprawling across Asia and Africa, has become one of its biggest losers. Losses at the unit that houses the Standard Chartered Private Equity business, or SCPE, more than doubled to $650 million in 2016 as its investments lost value, the London-based bank said. The ...

  Bloomberg Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Britain’s largest taxpayer-owned bank, laid out a plan to cut costs by 2 billion pounds ($2.5 billion) over the next four years as it posted its ninth straight annual loss and delayed profitability targets. The net loss widened to 6.96 billion pounds in 2016 from 1.98 billion pounds a year earlier, the ...

  Bloomberg Bank of Ireland Plc will hold off paying its first dividend since the financial crisis until next year, as the lender manages a pension deficit and boosts its capital levels. Bank of Ireland, based in Dublin, said underlying profit for 2016 dropped to 1.07 billion euros ($1.13 billion) from 1.2 billion euros a year earlier. Four out of ...

  Bloomberg Max Koep, Deutsche Bank AG’s head of equities for Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has taken a leave of absence, according to a person familiar with the matter. Koep may not return, said the person, who requested anonymity speaking about personnel matters. The firm has been cutting as much as 17 percent of its ...

  Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc. handed a surprise gift to bondholders in Canada this week by redeeming debt sooner than investors had expected, and some money managers are betting that other banks will follow its lead. The New York-based bank said that it was redeeming all of its $380 million in subordinated notes maturing in April 2022 for a ...

  Bloomberg Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the country’s largest lender by assets, raised its dividend after posting first-quarter profit that beat analysts’ expectations, led by higher wealth-management earnings and a surge in trading revenue. Net income for the period ended Jan. 31 rose 24 percent to C$3.03 billion ($2.31 billion), or C$1.97 a share, from C$2.45 billion, or C$1.58, ...

  Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc posted annual profit that missed analyst estimates as the bank took losses on a private-equity business it’s shutting down and said efforts to clean up conduct issues affected performance. The shares fell as much as 5.4 percent. Pretax profit for 2016 was $409 million, compared with a loss of $1.52 billion a year earlier, the ...

  Bloomberg Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce climbed in Toronto trading after posting fiscal first-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates and raising its dividend for the ninth time in 10 quarters. CIBC shares advanced 2.1 percent to C$120.62 at 9:52 a.m., the best performance in the eight-company S&P/TSX Composite Commercial Banks Index, which gained 0.4 percent. The stock is trading ...