Banking

Bloomberg United Overseas Bank (UOB) Ltd.’s fourth-quarter profit barely rose as swelling expenses and provisions for bad loans capped gains in income. Net income gained 0.3 percent to S$788 million ($564 million) for the three months ended Dec. 31 from a year earlier, Singapore’s third-biggest bank said Tuesday in an exchange statement. That matched the average estimate of seven analysts ...

Bloomberg China’s bank lending surged to a record 2.51 trillion yuan ($385 billion) in January, official figures showed Tuesday, as credit gushed to help boost the flagging economy. New loans extended by banks beat market expectations of 1.9 trillion yuan, according to a median forecast compiled by Bloomberg News, and far exceeded the 597.8 billion yuan in December. But analysts ...

Bloomberg Steven Hellman has stepped down as chief executive officer of Credit Suisse Group AG’s Russian business after heading the Swiss bank’s business in the country since 2010. “We’re going through a very difficult transitional period for the industry and that’s exacerbated in Russia by the particular political and other issues the country is facing,” Hellman said in an interview ...

Bloomberg It’s not clear how much of Singapore’s bad loans for 2015, the highest since 2009, are due to low commodity prices, because banks don’t give a detailed industry breakdown of their assets. Given the city’s focus on becoming a global rig-building hub, chances are there’s a link. Another report Monday from Sembcorp Marine, the world’s second-largest maker of offshore ...

Shanghai / AFP China’s yuan currency surged more than one percent against the dollar on Monday, its biggest rise in over a decade, after the central bank chief said there was no reason the beleaguered unit should fall further. The yuan stood at 6.4944 to $1.0 at 0830 GMT, up 1.14 percent from February 5 — the last trading day ...

Abu Dhabi / EMIRATES BUSINESS Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB), announced the launch of “ADCB Private”, a new private banking proposition providing globally sophisticated banking and wealth management solutions for high-net-worth customers, delivered from the UAE. Wealthy clients in the region and the UAE have historically had to seek international banking and investment services that required them to deal with overseas ...

Shanghai / AFP Japanese telecom giant Softbank said on Monday it will buy back about 14 percent of its shares for more than $4.0 billion, after the stock plunged since the start of the year. The company plans to buy 167 million shares over one year starting Tuesday at a total cost of around 500 billion yen ($4.4 billion), it ...

BLOOMBERG Bank stock volatility this year shows that the Bank of England should “think again” about its capital buffer requirements for U.K. lenders, according to John Vickers, who led the Independent Commission on Banking. The BOE’s 11 percent goal for the “appropriate” level of Tier 1 equity, a regulatory measure of financial strength for the banking system, is “questionable,” Vickers ...

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 ...