Banking

Bloomberg Banco Santander SA, Spain’s biggest bank, reported lower first-quarter profit as revenue slumped in its home market and operations aboard were hit by currency effects. Net income fell 5 percent to 1.63 billion euros ($1.84 billion) from 1.72 billion euros a year earlier, the bank said on Wednesday. That beat the 1.5 billion-euro average estimate in a Bloomberg survey ...

Beijing / Bloomberg A Chinese bank head signalled confidence that the government will loosen requirements for lenders’ bad-debt provisions, a move that could help them to report larger profits. A reduction in the coverage ratio to about 120 percent to 130 percent of existing non-performing debt would be “reasonable” and “possible,” Wang Hongzhang, the chairman of China Construction Bank Corp., ...

  Bloomberg Scandinavia’s biggest bank said profit plunged 28 percent last quarter as revenue sank after negative rates and market selloffs created an inhospitable environment for the industry. Nordea Bank AB reported net income of 782 million euros ($884 million), missing the 792 million-euro estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Net interest income slipped 7 percent while total operating income ...

  Prague / Reuters Czech lender GE Money Bank set the pricing range for its initial public share offer, potentially Prague’s biggest in eight years despite the valuation falling below some expectations, and said it would change its name to MONETA Money Bank. GE Money, which is being sold by GE as the US group moves away from financial activities, ...

  Hong Kong / AFP Standard Chartered has announced on Tuesday first quarter profits slumped 64 percent year-on-year as revenue for the period also plunged, following a turbulent 2015 in which the troubled bank announced it would axe thousands of jobs. The Asia-focussed bank said profits for the first three months fell to $539 million from $1.49 billion in the same ...

  New York / AFP Goldman Sachs has officially launched an online bank targetting households and small businesses as it expands from its Wall Street base and aims for the masses. The online-only GS Bank permits consumers to open an account for as little as $1, a big shift for a financial powerhouse that has built itself around serving billionaires and ...

  Tokyo / Reuters Japanese government bonds (JGBs) stayed firm on Tuesday, with prices of superlong JGBs rallying after strong results of the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ’s) buying operations. The central bank offered to buy 450 billion yen ($4.06 billion) of JGBs in the 5- to 10-year zone, 220 billion yen of JGBs in the 10- to 25-year zone and ...

  Reuters SWIFT, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day, warned its customers that it was aware of “a number of recent cyber incidents” where attackers had sent fraudulent messages over its system. The disclosure came as law enforcement authorities in Bangladesh and elsewhere investigated the February cyber theft of $81 million from ...

  Bloomberg A suite of euro-area data will provide Mario Draghi with his first simultaneous dispatches from both fronts in his struggle to boost inflation—showing how he still has a fight on his hands. Gross domestic product numbers, in a newly accelerated publication just one month after the first quarter ended, will coincide with the usual end-of-the-month inflation statistics to ...

  Bloomberg Citigroup Inc. has named Piers Davison head of its financial institutions group’s investment banking for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Davison joins Citigroup from JPMorgan Chase & Co. where he was most recently in charge of U.K. FIG, and was the head of banks for EMEA, Citigroup said on Monday in a memo, which was obtained by ...