Morgan Stanley to buy brokerage firm E-Trade in $13bn deal February 20, 2020 Morgan Stanley is to buy discount brokerage firm E-Trade in an all-share deal worth around $13bn (£10bn), the biggest deal by a major Wall Street bank since the financial crisis. The deal will help Morgan Stanley boost its wealth management division, which chief executive James Gorman is trying to grow in order to help the [...]
PPI, profit drop, and a mixed 2020: Five takeaways from Lloyds’ results February 20, 2020 Lloyds reported a 26 per cent drop in annual profit on Thursday, with Britain’s largest domestic lender hit by a rise in bad debts and billions of pounds of customer compensation payout. Chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio said the results demonstrated a “solid financial performance in a challenging external market”, but analysts have described them as [...]
UBS hires ING boss Ralph Hamers as new chief executive February 20, 2020 UBS has named ING boss Ralph Hamers as successor to current chief executive Sergio Ermotti. In a surprise announcement late last night, UBS said Hamers would leave Dutch lender ING in June. Hamers will join Ermotti for a transition period in September before taking the helm at Switzerland’s largest bank in November. ING said that [...]
Lloyds’ 2019 profit sinks after £2.45bn PPI charge February 20, 2020 Lloyds Banking Group revealed its 2019 profit sank 26 per cent today as it said it must pay out £2.45bn to settle payment protection insurance (PPI) claims. The figures Lloyds recorded profit before tax of £4.39bn, down 26 per cent on 2018, after the £2.45bn PPI charge. Underlying profit slipped seven per cent to £7.5bn [...]
Swiss bank UBS set to hire ING boss Ralph Hamers February 19, 2020 Swiss bank UBS is reportedly set to name the chief executive of Dutch bank ING as its new chief executive. The Financial Times reported that Ralph Hamers would take over from Sergio Ermotti who has been in post for more than eight years. ING pulled a bond deal today, saying “information had come to the [...]
Exclusive: Barclays installs Big Brother-style spyware on employees’ computers February 19, 2020 Barclays has been criticised by HR experts and privacy campaigners after the bank installed “Big Brother” employee monitoring software in its London headquarters. Introduced as a pilot last week, the technology monitors Barclays workers’ activity on their computers, and in some instances admonishes staff in daily updates to them if they are not deemed to [...]
Metro Bank hands interim chief executive the top job February 19, 2020 Metro Bank has announced that interim chief executive Dan Frumkin will take the top job at the bank. Frumkin, who will be a paid a £740,000 salary, joined Metro Bank last September as chief transformation officer from The Bank of NT Butterfield & Son, based in Bermuda. He took the interim role when former boss [...]
Coinbase becomes first crypto platform to receive Visa principal member status February 19, 2020 Cryptocurrency platform Coinbase has become the first crypto company to become a principal member of Visa. The new status will allow Coinbase to issue Visa payment cards as well as provide direct settlements. The San-Francisco headquartered platform brokers exchanges of digital currencies including bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin. It is licensed to provide flat currency-related services [...]
HSBC’s drastic reforms still leave the big questions unanswered February 19, 2020 Noel Quinn may only be an interim chief executive at HSBC but there’s nothing temporary about the sweeping changes he announced yesterday. The dramatic reduction in headcount goes further than the 10,000 figure he floated in October last year, when he said “there is scope throughout the bank to clarify and simplify roles.” Now we [...]
US prosecutors overlooked HSBC sanctions breaches in exchange for help targeting Huawei February 18, 2020 US prosecutors overlooked violations of US sanctions against Iran by HSBC in exchange for cooperation with an investigation into Huawei, lawyers for the Chinese tech giant said. “The government agreed to overlook HSBC’s continued misconduct, electing not to punish the bank, prosecute its executives or even extend the monitorship,” Huawei’s lawyers wrote in a 10 [...]