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 [...]
Can the ‘hotelification’ of the office beat working from home? March 8, 2025 London offices are offering monogrammed towels and rooftop gardens to tempt staff back into work, says Alex Morgan Some of the world’s largest companies are pulling the plug on hybrid working, but not without a hitch. In the US, Amazon’s return-to-office (RTO) mandate has been put on pause because of a shortage of desks in [...]
UK mortgage brokers expect interest rates to jump March 7, 2025 According to a new study, over two-thirds of UK mortgage brokers expect interest rates to stop falling and resume their upward trend by the beginning of next year. Butterfield Mortgages surveyed 300 brokers and 69 per cent said they believed the Bank of England base rate would be higher than the current level of 4.5 per cent [...]
Natwest, Barclays, HSBC lead months worth of online banking outages March 6, 2025 Nine of the UK’s biggest banks and building societies were down for over 803 hours – the equivalent of 33 days – over the last two years. Fresh data from the Treasury Committee shows a minimum of 158 IT failure incidents at banks had affected millions of consumers in the period between January 2023 and [...]
HSBC’s ‘never had it so good’ say Barclays analysts March 4, 2025 Barclays analysts have said HSBC “never had it so good” as they predicted further growth and upsides for the FTSE 100 lender. Following the lender’s strong full-year performance, the analysts upgraded HSBC’s share price target by 28 per cent to 1,200p. The lender pocketed a pre-tax profit of £25.6bn in 2024, up from £24bn in [...]
Ex-Barclays boss case against FCA over relationship with Epstein goes to court March 3, 2025 Former Barclays boss Jes Staley is seeking to overturn an FCA ban after he was found to have misled the watchdog over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein
Thousands of customers unable to use Lloyds, Halifax and TSB banking apps February 28, 2025 Thousands of Lloyds Group banking app users across the UK have reported technical difficulties when trying to access their money. Outage monitor Downdector recorded issues affecting the Lloyds banking app spike over 4,000 on Friday morning. Users across the group’s subsidiaries Lloyds, Halifax, TSB and Bank of Scotland raised the alarm posting error notices across [...]