Banking

  Bloomberg The biggest Nordic bank just won approval to convert its subsidiaries into branches in a move that gives local regulators less say over their systemically important financial institutions. This week, the governments of Denmark and Norway said Nordea can convert subsidiaries (supervised locally) into branches (overseen from Sweden). The restructuring creates branches across the Nordic region that in ...

  Reuters Kuwait’s central bank has issued new governance rules for Islamic banks, including requirements for external sharia audits, as regulators seek more transparency and accountability in the sector. Regulatory scrutiny over Islamic banks has been building as they now hold around a quarter of total banking assets in the Gulf, while in Kuwait that figure stands at around 40 ...

  Milan / AFP Stock in Monte dei Paschi di Siena tumbled on Wednesday as investors feared that the troubled Italian bank’s efforts to find billions of euros quickly are all but doomed. BMPS, the world’s oldest bank and Italy’s third-biggest, is racing against the clock to raise five billion euros ($5.2 billion) by the end of next week or ...

  New Delhi / AFP India’s central bank on Wednesday rolled back an order restricting deposits of banned rupee bills into bank accounts, after the move sparked a huge public backlash. Prime Minister Narendra Modi unleashed chaos last month with his shock move to withdraw high-denomination 500 ($7.50) and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation, in an effort to tackle widespread ...

  Luxembourg / AFP The European Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that Spanish banks must reimburse clients who had signed mortgage contracts that unfairly prevented them from benefiting from a steady drop in interest rates. The decision by the Luxembourg-based court caused shares in Spanish lenders to fall with small lender Liberbank leading losses, down over ten percent in ...

  Bloomberg Turkey’s central bank unexpectedly kept all of its three main interest rates unchanged, and said a “cautious monetary policy” would be maintained as it assesses the impact of a weaker lira on inflation. The lira reversed gains. The bank kept one-week repurchase, overnight lending and borrowing rates unchanged at 8 percent, 8.5 percent and 7.25 percent respectively, it ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business For the third consecutive year, Global Investor, the leading international publication specialising in asset management, named Barclays the ‘Wealth Manager of the Year’ in the Middle East. The award, which was announced during the 2016 Global Investor/ISF MENA Awards ceremony in Dubai, reflects Barclays’ long-standing position as a leader in the Wealth and Investment Management ...

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG, the lender pulling back from some trading businesses, is beefing up its Asia-Pacific equity-derivatives unit as it looks to capitalize on expected demand for quantitative strategies from local investors. David Bruchet, formerly of Societe Generale SA, will join the German bank in Hong Kong as an index equity-derivatives trader at the end of January, said ...

  Bloomberg Qatari banks Masraf Al Rayan QSC, Barwa Bank QSC and International Bank of Qatar (IBQ) QSC are in talks on a three-way merger as consolidation accelerates across the Middle East’s banking industry. The potential combination would create the largest sharia-compliant bank in Qatar and the third largest such lender in the Middle East, with assets worth more than 160 ...

  Tokyo / AFP The Bank of Japan on Tuesday lifted its view of the economy for the first time in over a year, as the sliding yen boosts exports, offering some hope for Tokyo’s stuttering growth programme. Policymakers held fire on further stimulus and said they would maintain a plan to keep the yield on government 10-year bonds around ...