Bloomberg Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Ltd, the world’s largest lender by assets, posted a 5.8% increase in third-quarter profit amid a deepening economic slowdown. Net income for the three months through September rose to 83.8 billion yuan ($11.8 billion) from 79.2 billion yuan a year earlier, the Beijing-based lender said in a filing. ICBC led the nation’s ...

Bloomberg The Competition Authority of Kenya gave Nigeria’s biggest lender the go-ahead to acquire 93.57% of Transnational Bank Ltd, as consolidation in the East African nation’s banking industry gathers pace. Access Bank Plc’s purchase follows the merger of NIC Group Plc and Commercial Bank of Africa Ltd, and KCB Group Ltd’s acquisition of National Bank of Kenya Ltd earlier this ...

Bloomberg UBS Group AG has cut about two dozen jobs in Europe over the last two weeks as Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti restructures the investment bank after a poor performance this year. At least 10 of the cuts came at the equities trading division, people familiar with the matter said. Five positions were eliminated in Zurich, including three managing ...

Bloomberg State Bank of India (SBI) Ltd posted a bigger-than-expected profit in the fiscal second quarter as asset quality improved. Shares jumped. Net income more than tripled to 30.1 billion rupees ($424 million) for the three months ended on September 30 from 9.4 billion rupees a year earlier, India’s largest lender said. Analysts had expected a profit of 22.9 billion ...

Bloomberg A senior Chinese foreign-exchange regulatory official called for “special attention” to be paid to blockchain as the nation looks to gain advantages from digital finance. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange is looking to use blockchain and artificial intelligence in cross-border trade finance and macro-prudential regulation, Lu Lei, deputy director of the regulator, said at the Bund Summit in ...

Bloomberg Weeks after Armand Wahyudi Hartono became the vice president director of Indonesia’s largest non-state bank, he noticed how staff were leaving half-empty glasses of water after work. The next morning, he restricted the amount of drinking water available at PT Bank Central Asia’s (BCA) headquarters. Such stringent cost control is just an example of how the lender has managed ...

Bloomberg Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (Sabic) posted its lowest quarterly profit in at least a decade as the chemical maker took an impairment charge and cheaper oil put pressure on its product prices. Net income slumped 86% from the previous year to 830 million riyals, while sales fell 23% for the same period to 33.7 billion riyals, the company known ...

Bloomberg Beneath the din of earnings, clanging economic alarms and the blare of a political circus, US investors are quietly rediscovering their nerve. With the S&P 500 just touching a record, it may sound odd to suggest there was a lack of confidence to begin with. But gains this year have been built on caution as investors chased the safest, ...

Bloomberg The pound may be back from the precipice, but it’s still some way from sunlit uplands. A formal request to delay Brexit has all but removed the risk of a sterling crash triggered by a no-deal scenario. Instead, it’s left the pound in limbo and exposed to a tangle of political quarrels on both sides of the English Channel. ...

Bloomberg Indonesian investigators found sweeping problems and missteps in connection with last year’s fatal Lion Air crash, including design flaws in Boeing Co’s 737 Max jet, certification failures by the US regulator and a raft of errors at the airline by pilots and mechanics. In a much-anticipated report, the National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) listed its findings and recommended fixes ...