Banking

  Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc surged in London trading as first-half loan impairment charges fell by a third, signaling further progress in Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters’s plan to turn around the bank a year into his tenure. The shares were briefly halted after jumping as much as 11 percent, after provisions for bad loans declined to $1.1 billion in ...

  Bloomberg The Bank of England’s corporate-bond purchase program, announced on Thursday, has been met by skepticism from some credit market analysts, who say precedents across the Channel don’t bode well for the program’s ability to stimulate issuance. While credit market observers reckon the BOE’s corporate-bond program will engineer a modest reduction in borrowing costs across the sterling bond market ...

  Washington / Bloomberg Goldman Sachs Group Inc. agreed to pay $36.3 million over allegations that former employees obtained confidential documents from the Federal Reserve in a settlement that requires the bank to beef up its policies to prevent another lapse. The Fed is also pursuing a $337,500 fine and a permanent banking ban against a former Goldman Sachs managing ...

  Nairobi / Bloomberg KCB Group Ltd., Kenya’s biggest bank by assets, boosted first-half profit by 14 percent as earnings from lending increased and after setting aside less money for credit-related losses. Net income in the six months through June rose to 10.5 billion shillings ($103.6 million) compared with 9.2 billion shillings a year earlier, the Nairobi-based lender said in ...

  Bloomberg TIAA is in talks to buy EverBank Financial Corp., the largest Florida-based lender by deposits, for about $2.5 billion as it seeks to expand in internet banking, according to Reuters. The deal would add to TIAA’s wealth-management business and give the financial-services firm, led by former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson, a platform for providing personal and ...

  Sydney / AFP Australia’s largest banks will have to face a parliamentary committee for an annual grilling to “drive cultural change”, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Thursday as he addressed public disquiet about their behaviour. The country’s “big four” lenders — among the developed world’s most profitable — have been under scrutiny in recent years amid allegations of ...

  Hong Kong / AFP HSBC said on Wednesday net profit plunged in April-June and that the bank was heading into “a period of heightened uncertainty” after Britain voted to leave the European Union. Profit after tax sank 40 percent on-year to $2.61 billion, the firm said in a statement, but assured it had weathered the Brexit storm “securely”. The firm ...

  Paris / AFP French bank Societe Generale said on Wednesday its second-quarter earnings rose 8.1 percent from a year earlier, bolstered by the sale of its shares in Visa Europe. The bank reported a 1.5 billion euro ($1.7 billion) net profit for the period, higher than the 1.4 billion euros predicted by economists in a survey by FactSet. Selling its ...

  London / AFP The Bank of England (BoE) is expected to slash interest rates to a record-low 0.25 percent this week and could pump more stimulus into the economy as it battles the fallout from Britain’s vote to leave the EU, economists say. The announcement, due Thursday after the British central bank’s latest monetary policy meeting, would take rates to their ...

  Nairobi / AFP Kenya’s banking industry last year recorded the first decline in profit since 1999 as costs outpaced income in the wake of two failures and more onerous regulations. Pretax profit across the sector declined 5 percent to 134 billion shillings ($1.3 billion) in the 12 months through December, according to the central bank’s Bank Supervision Report, released in ...