December, 2016

• 22 December

  Retailers utilize social media to build customer loyalty

  

    Abu Dhabi / Emirates Business Middle East has seen a tremendous rise in smartphone penetration rates and social media usage as the total number of Internet users has recently crossed a 100 million mark. Retailers are exploring ways to get more personal with their customers, through online offerings and social media interactions, to gain loyalty. A recent research by ...

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• 22 December

  LaGuardia’s redesign to lift people above ceilings that don’t leak

  

    Bloomberg Congestion is the biggest reason why LaGuardia Airport in New York is regularly rated the worst in America: Neither planes nor people move in an efficient manner through a facility designed for far, far less traffic. When it’s completed in summer of 2022, a gleaming new LaGuardia will be a modern space featuring a collection of aeries and ...

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• 22 December

  Monte Paschi edges closer to state bailout after sale failure

  

    Bloomberg Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA will probably fail to lure sufficient demand for a 5 billion-euro ($5.2 billion) capital increase, leading to what would be the country’s biggest bank nationalization in decades, said people with knowledge of the matter. No anchor investor has shown interest in the stock sale, the Siena-based company said in a statement. ...

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• 22 December

  StanChat to exit Thai retail banking next year

  

    Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc plans to transfer its Thai retail-banking business to Thailand’s Tisco Financial Group Pcl next year, exiting an operation that the UK lender said lacked the scale to generate adequate returns. The net asset value is about 5.5 billion baht ($153 million), according to a stock exchange filing by Tisco on Thursday, which didn’t disclose a ...

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• 22 December

  Philippines holds key rate as emerging nations brace for Fed

  

    Bloomberg The Philippines left its benchmark interest rate at a record low as emerging nations brace for a steeper tightening path in the US. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas kept the overnight reverse repurchase rate at 3 percent, it said in Manila on Thursday, as predicted by all 18 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Policy makers increased inflation forecasts for 2017 ...

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• 22 December

  Nordea wins approval to move ahead with new branch structure

  

    Bloomberg The biggest Nordic bank just won approval to convert its subsidiaries into branches in a move that gives local regulators less say over their systemically important financial institutions. This week, the governments of Denmark and Norway said Nordea can convert subsidiaries (supervised locally) into branches (overseen from Sweden). The restructuring creates branches across the Nordic region that in ...

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• 22 December

  Kuwait’s central bank fine-tunes governance of Islamic banks

  

    Reuters Kuwait’s central bank has issued new governance rules for Islamic banks, including requirements for external sharia audits, as regulators seek more transparency and accountability in the sector. Regulatory scrutiny over Islamic banks has been building as they now hold around a quarter of total banking assets in the Gulf, while in Kuwait that figure stands at around 40 ...

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• 22 December

  Hunger for reading!

  

    DPA Donald Trump costs just 3 dollars, complete with a film of street dust that comes with every book purchased at Norman Maina’s stall tucked between a supermarket and a bus stop. Displayed on metal mesh a few centimetres off the ground, Maina’s second-hand book range includes Robert Ludlum thrillers and the success stories of the new US president ...

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• 22 December

  Soaring in the sky among migrating swans

  

    DPA Biologist Sacha Dench recently took to the skies in a powered paraglider to follow flights of swans on their 7,000-kilometre winter migration. The number of Bewick’s swans migrating from the Russian tundra to north-western Europe fell by over a third between 1995 and 2010. The Flight of the Swans project by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) aims ...

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• 22 December

  Manhunt for Berlin suspect intensifies

  

    Aleppo / AFP German authorities came under fire on Thursday after it emerged that the prime suspect in Berlin’s deadly truck attack, a rejected Tunisian asylum seeker, was known as a potentially dangerous extremist. Prosecutors have issued a Europe-wide wanted notice for 24-year-old Anis Amri, offering a 100,000-euro ($104,000) reward for information leading to his arrest and warning he ...

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