Banking

  Reuters Aktif Bank, Turkey’s largest privately-owned investment bank, received regulatory approval to sell up to $120 million via Islamic bonds, or sukuk, in what could be a rare deal in the international sukuk market. Turkey has seen steady issuance of sukuk from the government and the country’s Islamic banks, known domestically as participation banks, but corporate issuance remains rare ...

  Bloomberg UniCredit SpA, Italy’s biggest bank, expects an 11.8 billion-euro ($12.6 billion) net loss for 2016 after setting aside more money for bad loans and booking one-time charges related to its turnaround plan. UniCredit took an additional charge of 1 billion euros, on top of the 12.2 billion euros announced December 13, as it booked a higher writedown of ...

  TOKYO / AP Japan’s central bank upgraded its outlook for growth in the coming year on Tuesday but hedged its bets by keeping its lavish monetary easing unchanged. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) cited easy lending conditions, rising exports and stronger government and corporate spending, in part linked to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, as reasons to expect more robust ...

  Bloomberg UniCredit SpA dropped in Milan trading after it said the European Central Bank had demanded an improved plan for dealing with bad loans by the end of February. The bank’s strategy for shoring up its finances may not adequately address the ECB’s concerns about credit quality, according to a filing on Monday detailing UniCredit’s plans for a 13 ...

  Bloomberg Citigroup Inc. plans to exit the mortgage-servicing business by the end of 2018 to focus on making new loans. The bank reached an agreement to sell the servicing rights on Fannie Mae- and Freddie Mac-backed loans with $97 billion of outstanding balances to New Residential Mortgage LLC, New York-based Citigroup said Monday in a statement. The bank also ...

  Bloomberg Central bankers may do well to pay less attention to the bond market and their own forecasts than they do to newspaper articles. That’s the somewhat heretical finding of a new algorithm-based index being tested at Norway’s central bank in Oslo. Researchers fed 26 years of news (or 459,745 news articles) from local business daily Dagens Naringsliv into ...

  Bloomberg The head of Bank of Montreal says Canada’s biggest financial institutions are actively grooming women to become chief executive officers, ending centuries of male rule at the country’s top lenders. “There are five large Canadian banks,” CEO Bill Downe said in an interview. “I think it’s inevitable.” Canada’s biggest banks have never had a female CEO, reflecting the ...

  Bloomberg China’s central bank has ordered the nation’s lenders to strictly control new loans in the first quarter of the year, people familiar with the matter said, in another move to curb excess leverage in the financial system. The new guidance from the People’s Bank of China puts a particular emphasis on mortgage lending, the people said, as authorities ...

  Bloomberg Intesa Sanpaolo SpA’s fund-management arm expects rising inflows to boost assets to about 400 billion euros ($430 billion) as it expands its institutional client base, adds commercial offers and widens its distribution network. Eurizon Capital SGR SpA plans to expand its European staff by about 3 percent this year from the current 550 employees, partly by hiring teams ...

  Bloomberg Italy’s 20 billion-euro ($21.4 billion) government rescue fund is sufficient to recapitalize the country’s troubled banks, and about a third of money will be used for Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, Bank of Italy governor Ignazio Visco said. “This measure is an important one for Italy as it emerges from the crisis that buffeted its economy ...