PPI claim firms face fines for pestering ineligible customers November 12, 2013 CLAIMS management firms will face fines if they send banks too many false PPI claims, under rules unveiled by the Treasury and Ministry of Justice yesterday. Banks have complained that they are inundated with false claims, delaying the processing of valid mis-selling claims and adding to their costs. A consultation will be launched this week [...]
Bad bankers to pay back bonus seven years on July 30, 2014 BANKERS will be allowed to enjoy their bonuses only more than seven years after being awarded, under new rules announced yesterday to keep financiers on the straight and narrow. Regulators believe the rules would have cut the pension and bonus Fred Goodwin received after the RBS bailout. Proposed rules to stop bosses delegating responsibility are intended [...]
Euro confidence drops again as investors sour August 4, 2014 Investor confidence in the Eurozone has slumped to the lowest level in a year, despite the currency union’s modest return to growth. The Sentix index of investor confidence fell to just 2.7 in August, down from 10.1 last month and barely in positive territory. The score has not been lower since August last year, when [...]
Lloyds looks to hike PPI redress bill to £8bn October 28, 2013 LLOYDS Banking Group is this morning expected to set aside hundreds of millions of pounds more to cover the costs of its mounting PPI compensation bill. Its total provision could rise as high as £8bn, as much as the other three biggest banks combined. The lender had hoped it had finally reached the final sum in [...]
St Antony tells Barclays executives to go back to school to avoid fresh scandals July 3, 2014 HUNDREDS of managing directors are going back to school for courses on compliance, risk and crime prevention, Barclays announced yesterday, in the wake of a series of scandals which have devastated the bank’s reputation. Barclays is spending tens of millions of pounds on a new tie-up with the Cambridge Judge Business School. It hopes all [...]
Regulators beware. Your banker-bashing could end up harming us all – Bottom Line August 4, 2014 Let’s face it. It’s not difficult to see why banker-bashing is an easy sport to play along with these days – what with all the bailout-grabbing, bonus-paying, Libor-fiddling, forex-meddling, PPI mis-selling, granny-mugging, and orphan-punching of recent years. I may have made up the last two, but you get the idea. Little surprise, therefore, that few [...]
New Barclays chair should be female – CNBC Comment August 11, 2014 It’s time for a woman to be the chair of Barclays. And yes, simply because she is a woman, it would make things better. Rona Fairhead, the former Financial Times boss and finance director of parent company Pearson, is rumoured to be on a shortlist to take over from Sir David Walker next year. She [...]
Banks’ PPI crisis eases at last as complaints fall October 16, 2013 THE WORST of the payments protection insurance (PPI) crisis appears to be over for Britain’s banks as the City watchdog yesterday published numbers showing a fall in complaints. A total of 2.9m complaints were made in the first six months of 2013, according to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), down 500,000 on the previous six-month [...]
Proof that foreign call centres are best May 28, 2014 Barclays wants to keep its customers happy, so when its mortgage borrowers said they wanted British call centres, the bank agreed. It closed its overseas sites and hired Brits to help customers instead. Unfortunately, the new setup has not been as smooth as the bank hoped, and the local staff didn’t make customers [...]
CNBC Comment: Why UK banks aren’t riding the recovery July 28, 2014 THE TIES between Britain’s banks and its economy have always been close. But they have seemed even closer in the post-banking bailout era. On Friday, when RBS rushed out its second quarter results a week early (which was rather odd in itself – don’t companies usually only rush out results if they’re either worse than [...]