Transitional arrangements after Brexit could take 18 months or more, says Charlotte Hogg, the new Bank of England deputy governor February 28, 2017 The Bank of England (BoE)'s new deputy governor Charlotte Hogg today said UK banks will need 12 to 18 months at least to make transitional arrangements after certainty on Brexit negotiations is reached. Appearing before the Treasury Select Committee, Hogg said banks will need additional time after the two-year negotiations are reached to change their business models in terms [...]
Virgin Money increases profits, as Brexit yet to wobble the business February 28, 2017 Virgin Money said profits grew during 2016, as any Brexit fallout was yet to hit the challenger's bottom line. The figures The bank, whose business ambition is to make "everyone better off", reported statutory profits before tax of £194.4m, up 41 per cent compared with £138m in 2015. The increase in underlying profits before tax was [...]
Human Rights Issues and Your Portfolio February 28, 2017 | City Talk We would rather not think about human rights issues when it comes to asset allocation. In the developed world, we often treat human rights violations — modern-day slavery, child labour, etc. — as anachronisms, at least as far they concern us. Or we dismiss them as problems for someone else to deal with, whether activists, [...]
Blockchain for banks is a “long way off” says influential central banker February 27, 2017 Blockchain fintech has a “long way to go” to satisfy financial regulators, according to an influential board member of the European Central Bank (ECB). Benoit Coeure said the underlying distributed ledger technology could pose new risks to the financial system, including legal and operational obstacles. Coeure said: “Distributed technology could become a game-changer for payment, [...]
Tandem Bank’s chief executive Ricky Knox talks sarongs, dumb pipes, ornithology and why Facebook is scared of banking February 27, 2017 "Would you have called Amazon? I didn’t! We all thought that was just a fad – it was a bookseller. An online bookseller with that valuation? But the internet creates these giants – and it’s not just one or two of them. "Look at music – EMI is basically dead. Google – a little bulls*** [...]
Chancellor slams EU for tit-for-tat spat with US, over requirements for holding companies for non-EU banks February 27, 2017 The chancellor has revealed he is less than impressed with the European Commission for proposing a holding company rule for banks which could hurt non-EU lenders, as the EU retaliates against similar measures in the US. The European Commission last November put forward an intermediate holding company rule, which would require non-EU banks with EU operations to set [...]
UK banks’ bonus pools have shrunk five per cent over the last year, but bosses’ handouts are on the rise February 26, 2017 Bonus pools at the UK's big five banks have shrunk five per cent in the last year, but handouts to bosses have almost doubled in the same space of time. The total bonus pool for HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, RBS, Standard Chartered and Barclays fell to around £5.6bn for 2016, compared with around £5.9bn in [...]
Barclays to install ex-boss of B&Q-owner Kingfisher Sir Ian Cheshire as chair of its UK operations February 26, 2017 Barclays is set to announce Sir Ian Cheshire as chair of its UK ringfenced operations tomorrow. Under the ringfencing rules, banks have until 2019 to split their retail units away from their investment divisions. Sky News, which first reported the news of Cheshire's impending appointment, revealed the Prudential Regulation Authority, the banking sector watchdog, has now [...]
Some Barclays customers are still locked out – but Barclays says it isn’t related to yesterday’s huge outage February 26, 2017 Barclays customers were still complaining about problems with Barclays' online banking service this morning, following a huge outage stranded many of its 15m customers without access to their money last night. However, a spokesperson for the lender said while there was an "ongoing issue with a minimal number of Android users", problems experienced this morning [...]
How UK banks’ bonus rounds stacked up in 2016 February 24, 2017 Bad news if you're a UK-based banker: your bonus probably dropped this year. As bank results season came to a close, it turned out three out of the four major UK lenders shrank the size of their bonus pools this year – Lloyds was the only exception. RBS employees suffered the most, with their bonus [...]