Lloyds profit slides 36 per cent after hiking motor finance provisions October 23, 2025 Lloyds Banking Group recorded a major hit to profit in the third quarter after the group was forced to nearly-double its provisions for the motor finance scandal. The bank posted a third-quarter profit before tax of £1.2bn, falling 36 per cent from the £1.8bn recorded in 2024. For the year-to-date the FTSE 100 titan has [...]
In defence of sport’s blazers: Give them scrutiny, yes, but also empathy October 23, 2025 Spend a minute on social media during a major sporting event and you’ll find them: the keyboard warriors, the armchair pundits, the self-appointed arbiters of “what the fans really want”. Their target? The blazers in the boardroom perceived to be truffling for perks and who wouldn’t know how to find the nearest grassroots facility. While [...]
FTSE 100 Live: Lloyds takes profit beat, LSEG new investment October 23, 2025 Good morning from the City AM liveblog team. Just how much is the motor finance redress scheme going to cost Britain’s biggest banks? Yesterday’s results from Barclays offered an insight – and it wasn’t pretty. The Canary Wharf-based bank almost quadrupled the provision it had set aside to cover motor finance claims, from under £100m [...]
Legal sector feeling subdued as regulator loses its AML powers October 23, 2025 The Treasury’s decision to transfer oversight of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing supervision to the FCA has sparked concerns within the professional services sector. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) served as a Professional Body Supervisor (PBS) for AMLCT for law firms across England and Wales, while for the accountancy sector, the HMRC plays the supervision [...]
Only one in three Brits think home ownership is achievable in their lifetime October 23, 2025 Only 30 per cent of Brits expect to be able to afford a home within their lifetime, according to fresh research. Home ownership has become increasingly out of reach for Brits in the last three decades as wage increases have failed to keep up with rocketing house prices. The findings, from Barclays, represent a stark [...]
Autumn Budget: Reeves told avoid ‘pick and mix’ tax grabs October 23, 2025 Ahead of the Autumn Budget, City Reporter Samuel Norman sits down with top industry names for a Budget Briefing. This week, the managing director of TheCityUK warns Reeves not to patch up the tax tire just for it to deflate once more. The Chancellor has touted financial and professional services for their role “at the [...]
Brits prep for an expensive Christmas at the grocers October 23, 2025 Brits are prepping for high grocery spending this Christmas as food inflation continues to dominate daily concerns, according to new data. Consumers’ expectations over the next three months of their personal finances worsened to -11 in October, down from -7 in September, according to the British Retail Consortium. The corresponding metric, personal spending on retail, rose nine [...]
Mark Kleinman: Ovo’s quest for cash needs fresh spark October 23, 2025 Ovo’s quest for cash needs fresh spark Talk about losing its spark. For Stephen Fitzpatrick, the 2020 acquisition of SSE’s retail energy supply arm was a defining moment – a daring swoop by Ovo, the upstart utility he had founded, for a principal member of the sector oligopoly. It’s been far from plain sailing since: [...]
UK dividends fall as companies battle challenging economic backdrop October 23, 2025 UK dividends tumbled in the third quarter of the financial year, as large companies made significant cuts to their shareholder payouts. According to the latest dividend monitor from financial services firm Computershare, London-listed firms paid their shareholders £24.6bn in the third quarter, through one off and regular payments. This was a 1.4 per cent year-on-year [...]
The ‘confidence gap’ is discouraging women from investing October 23, 2025 The UK financial services’ sectors fixation with the ‘confidence gap’ is actively turning women away from investing, a trading platform has warned. An analysis by Etoro of more than 80 UK reports on women investing by the financial services industry, found a repeated belief that the gender investment gap was caused by a lack of [...]