Banking

  DUBAI / Reuters Al Rajhi Bank, Saudi Arabia’s second-biggest bank by assets, aims to take advantage of opportunities arising from the country’s economic diversification plan to boost its share of corporate lending, its CEO said. Al Rajhi, Saudi Arabia’s biggest Islamic lender, is one of the dominant players in the kingdom’s consumer banking market, but has only around a ...

  Bloomberg DBS Group Holdings Ltd. chief executive officer signaled that the Singaporean bank may be past the worst of its problems from loans to troubled oil and gas-services companies. While the sector is “still challenged,” the formation of new nonperforming assets and bad-loan charges for the industry are expected to be “significantly lower this year,” Piyush Gupta told reporters ...

  Bloomberg ABN Amro Group NV, the state-controlled Dutch lender, reported a 23 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit, helped by higher net interest income and lower provisions set aside for risky loans. Underlying net income, which strips out one-time items, rose 333 million euros ($352 million) from 272 million euros a year earlier, the Amsterdam-based company said in a statement ...

  Bloomberg India may cut the amount of capital it plans to inject into state-controlled lenders this fiscal year by as much as 78 billion rupees ($1.2 billion) because of slow loan growth, people with knowledge of the matter said. The government, which had promised to inject 250 billion rupees into the lenders in the year ending March 31, has ...

  Bloomberg The Bank of England (BOE) said it won’t pull its new plastic banknotes from circulation following controversy over the use of animal fat in their production. The central bank will keep the polymer five-pound ($6.22) note and will issue the new ten-pound bill as planned in September, it said in statement Wednesday. The BOE said it gave “careful ...

  Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG raised some of its senior Asia-Pacific investment bankers’ pay last year by as much as 15 percent after the firm boosted advisory revenues in the region, according to people familiar with the matter. Average total 2016 compensation, including bonuses, for high-performing managing directors at the bank was between $1 million to $1.5 million, said ...

  Bloomberg They’re doing much better than the US and Europe. Many hailed Zeti Akhtar Aziz’s 16-year tenure as governor of Malaysia’s central bank as a triumph for gender diversity in Southeast Asia. Turns out it wasn’t such a rarity. Women have become uniquely well represented throughout the region’s central banks, the latest available data show. They account for almost ...

  AP / Bloomberg Credit Suisse more than halved its fourth-quarter loss compared with a year earlier, the bank said on Tuesday, amid a “challenging” global market and continued cost cuts, after striking a multibillion-dollar settlement with U.S. regulators. The Zurich-based bank said it had set aside about $2 billion in the quarter to help pay for what became a ...

  Bloomberg The rupee’s sharpest rally in almost a year is giving India’s central bank scope to take out an insurance policy for what could be a tumultuous 2017. A resumption of stock and bond inflows and a budget viewed as fiscally prudent and pro-growth spurred a 1.9 percent gain against the dollar in the last three weeks, the best ...

  Reuters Standard Chartered will consider whether it can restart correspondent banking relationships with Sudan following the proposed lifting of U.S. sanctions, a senior executive said. Anurag Bajaj, who oversees the British-based lender’s correspondent banking business, where it provides services for other banks, said the bank was reviewing the implications of last month’s move by the outgoing Obama administration to ...