Banking

Bloomberg Commercial International Bank Egypt SAE approved an offer by billionaire Naguib Sawiris’ Orascom Telecom Media And Technology Holding SAE to buy its investment-banking unit CI Capital. Orascom Telecom made a non-binding offer to buy CI Capital for 924 million Egyptian pounds ($118 million), Egypt’s biggest publicly-traded lender said in a filing to the country’s bourse on Monday. The deal ...

Bloomberg Saudi Arabia is easing rules on bank lending to stimulate growth in the largest Arab economy, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Banks were told they can lend the equivalent of 90 percent of their deposits, up from an earlier limit of 85 percent, by the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency on Sunday, the people said, asking not ...

ABU DHABI / EMIRATES BUSINESS Habib Bank Limited ( HBL ) UAE has opened its new Abu Dhabi Main Branch at the Landmark Tower on Corniche Road in Abu Dhabi. The branch was inaugurated by H.E. Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Culture and Knowledge Development, Mr. Sultan Ali Allana, Chairman of HBL , Mr. Mubashar Maqbool, Country Manager – ...

ABU DHABI / EMIRATES BUSINESS Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB) has reported a net profit of AED 1,934 million for 2015, a 10.5 percent increase from a year earlier. The number of customers increased by over 100,000. This reflects the continued growth of ADIB’s main banking activities across all customer segments, particularly its ongoing penetration and targeting of the UAE’s ...

FUJAIRAH / WAM National Bank of Fujairah (NBF) announced the donation of AED150, 000 to The Angel Appeal, a charitable initiative supporting seafarers anchored off the coast of Fujairah. This is the fourth consecutive year that the bank has reiterated its commitment to the relief programme, further underscoring its ongoing support of the local community. The Angel Appeal is an ...

OMAN / Emirates Business National Bank of Oman (NBO)launched a new initiative, ‘Women@NBO’, to empower women in the workplace and develop a strong pipeline of potential female leaders within the Bank. NBO will invite approximately 50 talented female employees with the potential to take up leadership roles within the Bank, from various branches and divisions, to attend the inaugural ‘Women@NBO’ ...

Dubai / Emirates Business Al Etihad Credit Bureau (AECB) , the UAE’s credit reporting company, launched the Application-to-Application (A2A) advanced feature in January, granting lenders direct access to the Bureau’s database to extract that data they need and use it as direct input into their own decision-making systems. UAE’s Leading financial institution, Mashreq has become the first Bank to enable ...

Jakarta / WAM Electronic money (e-money) transactions conducted in the country in 2015 reached Rp5.2 trillion in value, up from Rp4.3 trillion in 2014, Governor of Bank Indonesia(BI) AgusMartowardojo said. “In 2009, electronic money transactions were valued at about Rp520 billion only, and now they have reached Rp5.2 trillion,” the central bank governor said while opening the National Non-Cash Movement ...

New York / AFP Iran remains essentially off limits to US banks, despite the lifting of some US sanctions following the landmark Iranian nuclear deal. The Obama administration in mid-January eased several restrictions on doing business with Iran, including former “secondary” sanctions that had threatened to penalize companies outside the US for their business with Iran, as well as some ...

Bloomberg Trading volumes in the credit-default swaps market — where banks and fund managers go to hedge against losses on corporate and government debt — have surged. Transactions tied to individual entities doubled in the four weeks ended Feb. 5 to a daily average of $12 billion, according to a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysis of trade repository data. The ...