Bloomberg Apple Inc. audio engineers had been working on an early version of the HomePod speaker for about two years in 2014 when they were blindsided by the Echo, a smart speaker from Amazon.com Inc. with a voice-activated assistant named Alexa. The Apple engineers jokingly accused one another of leaking details of their project to Amazon, then bought Echos so …

Bloomberg UK banks are bracing themselves for their grades in the toughest round of stress tests yet, with the fate of their dividends and strategies at stake as the Bank of England models how the seven largest British lenders will cope in another crisis. On Tuesday the central bank will reveal how they fared in a scenario that includes sharp …

Bloomberg Roiled by India’s high-profile corporate defaults, the nation’s lenders are tightening the screws on borrowers with stricter debt covenants and greater enforcement as the battle to curb delinquent loans intensifies. Banks are asking for collateral that may amount to one-and-a-half times the value of the debt on new loans extended and are insisting on contracts that allow loans to …