Banking

Bloomberg Banco Santander SA intends to close about 450 branches in Spain this year, more than one in 10, as the lender steers customers into digital banking to cut costs and bolster profitability. “Spain’s financial sector is facing a period of major change,” Country Head Rami Aboukhair told employees in an internal memo announcing the closures. “The current economic context, ...

Nicosia / AFP Bank of Cyprus, the bailed-out eurozone country’s largest lender, has announced plans to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange and to delist from the Athens market. The move reflects the bank’s ambitions of raising its “visibility and share liquidity” on a major European exchange, BoC said in a statement. The announcement came on the same ...

BLOOMBERG BNP Paribas SA and UniCredit SpA are closest to running into regulatory restraints on making payouts on securities, including their riskiest bonds, among the European banks followed by analysts at CreditSights Inc. If BNP were to run up losses that consumed capital amounting to 1.05 percent of assets weighted by risk, that would crimp the Paris-based lender’s ability to ...

Tokyo / Reuters Global banking regulators will avoid forcing banks to set aside money to cover the risk of higher interest rates, two people with direct knowledge of their deliberations said, easing concerns among some banks about the potentially high costs of holding government bonds and long-term loans. The Basel Committee, a body of banking supervisors from nearly 30 countries, ...

Bloomberg State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender, announced loan rates based on marginal cost of funds as the nation’s central bank pushes for faster pass-through of cuts in its borrowing benchmark. The Mumbai-based bank set charges for seven maturities, varying from 8.95 percent for overnight lending to 9.35 percent for three years, a statement posted Monday on its ...

Bloomberg Banque International Pour l’Afrique au Congo (BIAC) limited cash withdrawals after a rearrangement of credit lines from the central bank in the Democratic Republic of Congo forced the lender to shut its branches last week. BIAC, as the bank is known, negotiated an emergency credit line with the Banque Centrale du Congo of as much as 16 billion Congolese ...

Frankfurt / AFP The German central bank, or Bundesbank, is worried that private savers may soon face negative interest rates on their bank accounts, board member Andreas Dombret warned in an interview. “The banks and savings banks I speak to want to do everything to avoid that,” Dombret told Der Spiegel news magazine in its online edition. “But the longer ...

Bloomberg PT Bank Mandiri, Indonesia’s largest bank by assets, will tackle rising bad loans as its top priority this year while setting a longer-term target to expand business abroad, said new Chief Executive Officer Kartika Wirjoatmodjo. Non-performing loans will peak at around 3.5 percent of total credit this year, up from last year’s 2.5 percent, Wirjoatmodjo said in an interview ...

Bloomberg Bank of Korea (BOK) Governor Lee Ju Yeol warned on Wednesday that economic growth for 2016 is poised to fall below 3 percent and said the impact of further interest-rate cuts may be limited. The comments come amid a change in the BOK’s board and speculation of additional rate cuts given the ruling party’s request for the bank to ...

Bloomberg National Bank of Kenya Ltd. placed Managing Director Munir Ahmed on compulsory leave pending an internal audit, a day after dismissing speculation on social media that he’d been fired. Five top managers were also sent on leave, the Nairobi-based lender said in an e-mailed statement. The board appointed Wilfred Musau as acting-chief executive officer, it said. “The aforementioned actions ...