Banks

Credit Suisse plans to complete its group restructuring in 2018, it said Thursday as it raised its 2018 profit target for its wealth-management and connected business in Asia-Pacific, and announced new guidance for 2019 and for 2020.

"Our teams remain strongly focused on driving value for our clients and shareholders through 2018 and our objective is to achieve a group reported return on tangible equity of between 10-11% for 2019 and between 11-12% for 2020," CEO Tidjane Thiam said in the statement.

As Coinivore reports, Shinhan, the second largest commercial bank in South Korea by market valuation in the country is testing a Bitcoin vault and wallet service for its customers that is expected to be released by mid-2018.

A representative of Shinhan Bank told Naver News, a media publication in South Korea in an interview : “It is a service that keeps the blockchain key through the virtual safe provided by the bank. We are looking for ways to provide a free service when depositing and charge a fee when withdrawing.”

Banks and financial institutions of particularly intrinsic importance to the global financial ecosystem are sometimes blithely referred to as "too big to fail".
A more sober term is ‘global systemically important banks’, or G-SIBs for short. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, at the 2009 G20 summit, an international body called the Financial Stability Board (FSB) was set up, its aim being to monitor the global financial system and make recommendations, when it deemed appropriate. The 2017 list was published on Tuesday and it makes for interesting reading.

British financial technology firm Revolut said on Wednesday it has applied for a European banking license, as it bids to join a growing number of digital-only banks looking to win away customers from larger, traditional lenders.

Founded in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko in 2015, Revolut is an app-based banking alternative with a multi-currency card and mobile app. An account can be created in seconds, enabling users to instantly send free money transfers in 26 currencies to banks around the globe; spend fee-free in 120 currencies with a contactless Revolut card; and exchange currencies at interbank rates in the app. It also offers peer-to-peer payments.

Daniele Nouy, head of supervision at the European Central Bank, said in Frankfurt on Tuesday that license applications from about 20 banks are in some stage of assessment by supervisors on the continent, Bloomberg reported.
"Some have visited us several times to discuss their plans to move," said Daniele Nouy, who heads the ECB’s banking supervision.

Banking giant HSBC has reported pre-tax quarterly profits of $4.6bn (£3.5bn) for the three months to the end of September.
The result marks a huge 448% increase from $843m posted in the same period a year ago.
With one-off costs and currency impacts stripped out, HSBC posted a $3.8bn leap in pre-tax profits to $4.6bn for the third quarter, as it made a one-off loss on the sale of a business in Brazil last year.

Frankfurt is emerging as the frontrunner in the battle for the post-Brexit spoils, as the German city lures banks and jobs out of London amid uncertainty over divorce talks.

After months of stalled negotiations in Brussels between Britain and the EU left London’s future shakier than ever, a growing number of banks are stepping up their contingency plans by leasing office space in other European cities.

While rival hubs have jostled to attract London’s bankers, Frankfurt – the city known by locals as Mainhattan, indicating its dreams of financial stardom – has established a clear edge over competitors such as Paris, Dublin and Amsterdam.

Most big eurozone banks are well braced for possible future interest rate rises, the European Central Bank said Monday after running dozens of them through a stress test. On a scale running from a top mark of 1 to the lowest of 4, 60 out of 111 banks scored 1 or 2 in the test, the ECB said.

For the first time, the stress test examined how sudden changes in interest rates will affect banks’ income and the value of their assets. Of the other banks, 34 received a mark of 3 and 17 scored a 4.