Barclays’ Ashok Vaswani is hoping to turn around the UK’s most broken industry July 27, 2014 "My name is Ashok Vaswani. My role is to listen to customers, to make sure we give them what they want.” This understates his job title somewhat. Vaswani is Barclays’ CEO of personal and corporate banking, a powerful new job which has seen him take control of its global operations in retail, business and [...]
HSBC among banks accused of manipulating price of silver July 27, 2014 HSBC, Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Nova Scotia have been accused of rigging the price of silver. According to J Scott Nicholson, an investor who filed a lawsuit against them in the US, the banks abused their position of controlling the daily silver benchmark by unlawfully manipulating it to reap illegitimate rewards from [...]
BSkyB share price slides on £5.3bn deal for Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia July 25, 2014 BSkyB's share price opened 3 per cent lower this morning after announcing a long-awaited £5.3bn deal to acquire European pay TV operators Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, creating one of the biggest pay TV operators in Europe. BSkyB has offered £2.9bn in cash for 21st Century Fox’s 57.4 per [...]
Barclays bites back over US dark pool fraud charge July 24, 2014 Barclays squared up to US regulators yesterday, fiercely rejecting claims it had lied to investors using its dark pool trading facilities. It is the first time a British bank has reacted so strongly to legal attacks from the US, as banks have been reluctant to fight back openly since the financial crash struck. “Fundamentally, the [...]
Unemployment falls as Spanish economy starts to warm up July 24, 2014 JOBLESSNESS fell in Spain in the past three months, official figures showed yesterday, as the economic recovery started to be felt in earnest. Unemployment dropped from 25.2 per cent in the first quarter to 24.7 per cent in the second quarter – its lowest rate in more than two years. The drop was also faster [...]
City Moves for 25 July 2014 | Who’s switching jobs July 24, 2014 Quantum Advisory Sean Gilfeather has been appointed principal consultant and actuary at the actuarial and benefits consultancy. He joins from Lorica Consulting, where he was head of actuarial and risk management. Gilfeather has also held roles at PwC and Towers Watson. Mercer The talent, retirement, health and investment firm has appointed Jane Barker as its [...]
Analyst Views: What did you make of TalkTalk’s interim management statement? July 23, 2014 MAURICE PATRICK | BARCLAYS TalkTalk continues to make progress towards its medium term goals, with another quarter of steady customer additions, upselling to the existing base driving revenues up three per cent and churn 0.1 percentage point lower to 1.4 per cent. Our estimates are broadly unchanged. CARL MURDOCK-SMITH | JP MORGAN CAZENOVE Churn reduction [...]
Exclusive: RBS is big loser of seven-day switching while Santander wins customers July 22, 2014 RBS is losing the battle for banking customers, City A.M. can reveal, shedding 171,400 customers through the seven-day switching system and gaining just 95,000 current account customers. Overall, RBS and NatWest have lost a net 76,200 through the system since it was launched last September, according to City A.M. calculations based on figures from survey firm [...]
Lazy small firms blamed for bad banking market July 21, 2014 BRITAIN’S small firms have to try harder to push their banks to work for them, and be prepared to walk away if they do not, Britain’s competition chief said yesterday. Banks have been hit by waves of complaints from small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) even since before the financial crisis. But only a tiny proportion [...]
Barclays’ clients lead charge out of dark pools July 21, 2014 THE NUMBER of shares traded in Barclays’ dark pool collapsed by more than half last week, industry data showed yesterday, as clients flee the private trading platform. The bank is facing allegations in the US that it misled clients trading on the LX platform, leading to a 66 per cent fall in shares traded on the site. [...]