Rachel Reeves takes leaf out of gardening manual– but don’t expect flowery days to come March 24, 2025 Gardening is typically something career politicians only enjoy once they have retired. But Rachel Reeves appears to be paying homage to the green-fingered guru Alan Titchmarsh in the lead-up to her Spring Statement to be delivered this Wednesday. In one video viewed 111,000 times on Youtube, Titchmarsh offers a tutorial on how to get “free [...]
Former City traders set for Supreme Court showdown March 24, 2025 Former City traders convicted of the rate-rigging scandal are now playing their last card this week by taking their case to the highest court
Banks turn to AI to lead fraud prevention efforts March 23, 2025 As Britain’s biggest banks scale up their technology, lenders are turning to AI to fight fraud, a new report has found. NTT Data’s ‘Banking Trends 2025’ report found over half of UK banks thought generative AI was key to fraud prevention. Lenders have been urged to up their consumer protection abilities after Chair of the [...]
IT outages: Are UK banks failing to modernise? March 20, 2025 Imagine it’s payday, and you’re trying to pay your bills or make a critical purchase, only to discover that your bank’s system has gone down. For millions of customers at Britain’s major banks, this nightmare is all too familiar. Over the past two years, nine of the UK’s banks were offline for more than 800 [...]
Bullish Gen Z bucks consumer confidence trend March 20, 2025 Gen Z’s plans to go big on spending in the next three months have contributed to a rise in consumer confidence, a new survey has suggested. Barclays last year predicted in November that people born between 1996 and 2010 would account for around 39 per cent of retail spending by 2030. Now a new survey [...]
Motor finance: Lloyds and Close Brothers shareholders await landmark hearing March 19, 2025 The eyes of shareholders at Britain’s biggest lenders will be on April’s landmark motor finance hearing, as the scandal heads to the Supreme Court. The hearing, scheduled for April 1-3, will allow car loan providers to challenge the October 2024 Court of Appeal ruling that it was unlawful for banks to pay a commission to [...]
Howden: Insurance giant set for US deal and £23bn stock market float – report March 15, 2025 Insurance giant Howden is reportedly set for a US takeover deal which could lead to a £23.2bn stock market float, according to Sky News. The British insurance broker, founded by David Howden, anticipates finalising a £7.73bn ($10bn) takeover of American private insurance broker and risk management adviser, Risk Strategies, in the next few weeks, the [...]
Ex-Barclays boss admits to sex with a member of Jeffrey Epstein’s staff March 13, 2025 The former chief executive of Barclays admitted at the High Court on Wednesday that he had sex with a member of staff working for Jeffrey Epstein at an apartment owned by the convicted paedophile’s brother. In his third day of cross examination as part of a legal clash with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Jes [...]
Unilever rushes to sell underperforming food labels as it focuses on ‘power brands’ March 11, 2025 Unilever will speed up the sale of its underperforming labels and focus on its 30 power brands, according to its chief executive. Fernando Fernandez said the FTSE-100 company would act at a “faster pace” and that the firm has around €1bn (£840m) of brands in its Foods Europe division, which “don’t fit well” with its company’s portfolio. [...]
Barclays apologises after customers unable to access online accounts March 8, 2025 Barclays has apologised after its customers said they have been unable to access their bank accounts online or through the mobile app. There were nearly 1,000 reports of an outage on Saturday, according to outage tracker Downdetector, leaving Barclays customers unable to pay bills or transfer money. The bank has said customers are able to [...]