Gym group David Lloyd is for sale March 5, 2017 David Lloyd owners are preparing to sell the gym chain for £1.3bn, according to The Telegraph. A sale of the gym group, which runs 83 clubs in the UK and 12 in the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain, is expected to draw considerable interest from private equity investors. However, the sale cannot proceed until a prior [...]
Vote Leave launches £50m Euro 2016 competition May 27, 2016 A football guessing game with a £50m prize and free entry might sound like the sort of email that automatically lands in the spam folder. Even if not, most discerning folk would raise at least one eyebrow of scepticism at the prospect of guessing correctly the result of every one of the Euro 2016 matches. Whether you decided to [...]
Going global: Exporting isn’t the hassle British SMEs fear July 31, 2017 The UK's decision to leave the EU has thrust the issue of international trade into the spotlight. Currently, just one in five SMEs export, and a recent study by Lloyds Bank found that the EU was a trading partner for 85 per cent of exporters over the past year. Pre-referendum, this relationship was easier, cheaper [...]
UK house prices: Oxford, not London, is Britain’s least affordable city, according to new study March 26, 2016 Shock news from Lloyds Bank: London is not the UK's least affordable city. An affordability survey by the bank, comparing average house prices with average gross annual earnings, places the capital behind Oxford and Winchester. The average price of a house in Oxford is £364,429, which is 10.68 times average earnings. Lloyds attributed Oxford's high [...]
Marks and Spencer pulls advertising from Google over extremist content March 20, 2017 Marks and Spencer has become the latest firm to pull its advertising from Google after reports that it has been allowing adverts for UK companies to appear on extremist websites. A recent investigation by the Times showed that UK advertisements, from the likes of Sainsbury's, RBS and the UK government, have been posted on YouTube [...]
First time buyers, close your eyes – in 1996, you could buy a house in Hackney for £75,000 February 17, 2017 House prices in the London borough of Hackney have rocketed 700 per cent in the last 20 years. It may seem hard to believe now, but in 1996 the average house price in Hackney was just £75,569. Now, the average price is £606,269 – a jump of 702 per cent. Read more: This tiny house [...]
The Serious Fraud Office’s Barclays probe: Everything you need to know June 21, 2017 What happened in 2008? In the summer of 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis, Barclays needed emergency funding. The bank raised £4.5bn in June that year and £7.3bn in October from investors including Qatar Holding and Challenger Universal. Why was this investigated? Over the last five years, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) [...]
Tech workers are twice as productive for the UK economy, Tech Nation 2017 report finds March 22, 2017 Those working in the booming digital technology sector are boosting the UK’s economic productivity more than twice as much as other workers, fresh research reveals. Tech industry workers’ contribution to the economy is put at £103,000 per year in terms of Gross Value Added (GVA) compared to the £50,000 contribution of non-digital workers, Tech City [...]
Chatbots could save business $8bn a year by 2022, with banks and healthcare gaining the biggest cost savings May 9, 2017 Chatbots could save business billions of pounds a year with banking and healthcare expected to be the biggest sectors to benefit. Responding to customer queries using automated messages for instance, or advising patients on symptoms, could save $8bn (£6bn) in costs every year across global business by 2022, analysts at Juniper Research forecast. “We believe [...]
WhatsApp messages landed an investment banker a £37k fine from the FCA for sharing confidential client information March 30, 2017 A former investment banker has been fined by the City watchdog for sharing messages on WhatsApp which contained confidential client information. Christopher Niehaus, an ex-managing director at Jefferies, has been handed a £37,000 fine by the Financial Conduct Authority which said he wanted “to impress the people that he shared the information with”. Read more: [...]