Banking

BLOOMBERG Ghana’s Agricultural Development Bank Ltd. extended its initial public offering (IPO) by a month to attract more retail investors and may sell as much as 100 million cedis ($26 million) more of stock than it initially planned. Demand for shares from individual investors surged during the final week of the original proposed sales period, Solomon Adu Atefoe, a spokesman …

Frankfurt / AP European Central Bank head Mario Draghi has all but promised more monetary stimulus for the 19-country eurozone economy at Thursday’s meeting of the bank’s governing council. Now the question is, exactly how much will he deliver — and how much effect will it have? Expectations at a minimum are that the ECB’s governing council will cut the …

BEIJING / Bloomberg HSBC Holdings Plc winning approval to start a credit-card business in China’s $1 trillion market offers Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver added flexibility in his push into the nation’s retail banking and wealth-management industries. The approval from Chinese authorities came as HSBC ended a card venture with Bank of Communications Co., the bank’s Asia-Pacific head Peter Wong …

CAPE TOWN / Bloomberg FirstRand Ltd., Africa’s biggest bank by value, said first-half profit was little changed after South Africa’s economy slowed and non-performing loans increased. Net income rose to 10.48 billion rand ($683 million) in the six months ended December 31 from 10.3 billion rand a year earlier, the Johannesburg-based company said in a statement on Tuesday. Earnings per share …

Canberra / Bloomberg Australian central bank Deputy Governor Philip Lowe said that low wage growth and contained inflation provide scope to cut rates further and said, like most of his global peers, he’d prefer a weaker currency. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s official said the economy had proved pretty resilient to the winding back of a massive mining investment boom and …

BLOOMBERG Arnaud Droitcourt, Bank of America Corp.’s head of Asia-Pacific equity trading, left the company as it cuts jobs to trim expenses, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Droitcourt, a Hong Kong-based managing director who oversaw both cash equity and equity derivatives trading of the bank, left Tuesday, said the person, who asked not to be identified …

BLOOMBERG European Central Bank (ECB) Executive Board member Yves Mersch has said he wants evidence that high-denomination euro banknotes facilitate crime. While there’s been much coverage of the matter, Mersch would be “very happy if any substantiated evidence would be shipped to the ECB.” Step forward the Spanish police, who arrested two men at Madrid airport and seized 200,000 euros …

Bloomberg For the biggest US bank, the best way to fight Silicon Valley is to mimic it. JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s. new technology hub across the street from the Hudson Yards development on Manhattan’s West Side — a 125,000-square-foot space so vast it’s subdivided into five neighbourhoods — has all the trappings of a start-up: foosball tables, a game room, …

Canberra / Bloomberg Already faced with higher capital requirements and a housing market past its peak, Australian banks have a new headache to contend with: corporate loans. Bad-debt provisions at the lenders are set to rise to their highest in eight years by 2018, as the chances of defaults in the mining, agricultural and dairy sectors increase, according to a …

Bangalore / AFP A group of Indian banks has petitioned a court seeking the arrest of corporate honcho Vijay Mallya, the beleaguered businessman accused of defaulting on hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, a lawyer said. Heavily indebted Mallya has been deep in a financial fight over his now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines, which owes more than $1 billion to a …