Banks

The BBC reported Friday banks and building societies in the UK will carry out checks from January to see if account holders are in the UK legally or not. The BBC quoted The Guardian as saying 70 million accounts will be looked at quarterly.

The BBC said financial institutions will be provided with a list from anti-fraud organisation Cifas on people who are liable for removal or deportation from the UK or who have absconded from immigration control, and these organisations will then have to report anyone they discover and freeze or close the accounts.

Falcon Private Bank, a Swiss private banking boutique, has appointed Martin Keller as its chief executive officer, taking over from Walter Berchtold, effective on Wedsneday.

The bank’s chairman Christian Wenger has also announced that he will step down. His successor will be appointed in due course.

Wells Fargo is now saying 3.5 million customers were impacted by its fake accounts scandal, a dramatic increase from the 2.1 million accounts it originally estimated.

In the weeks and months after the bank acknowledged in September 2016 that its employees opened 2.1 million accounts without getting customers’ permission, the bank agreed to look for fake accounts going back an additional two years to 2009. This was because news reports showed that problems at Wells started before 2011, which is what Wells originally admitted.

Swiss banks’ overall operating income fell last year for the fist time since 2012, Switzerland’s banking lobby said on Thursday, as the Alpine nation’s lenders grapple with negative interest rates and rising regulatory costs.

Switzerland’s banks, already hit by a clamp-down on tax evasion which has dampened the country’s position as a tax haven, saw aggregate operating net income fall 3.2 percent in 2016 to 62.5 billion Swiss francs ($65.1 billion).

"2016 was once again a difficult year for the banks in Switzerland," the Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) said while publishing its annual banking study.

A central bank rescue of Russian bank Otkritie has eased market concerns that other banks could be in trouble, prompting banking stocks to reverse three days of losses. Russia’s central bank stepped in on Tuesday to take at least a 75 per cent stake in Otkritie, the country’s biggest privately-owned bank, to plug a hole in its balance sheet.
The bailout highlights problems among Russia’s banks and the challenge the authorities face in trying to clean up the sector.

United States authorities on Thursday charged two managers at the French bank Société Générale with taking part in a scheme to manipulate a global benchmark interest rate known as Libor.

As Reuters reported, Danielle Sindzingre, 54, the bank’s former global head of treasury, and her subordinate Muriel Bescond, 49, its former head of treasury in Paris, were accused in an indictment filed in a New York federal court of submitting false information about the rates at which the bank was able to borrow money.

Italy’s largest retail bank Intesa Sanpaolo said on Wednesday it had reached an agreement to buy Switzerland’s Banque Morval. "The agreement is in line with Intesa Sanpaolo’s strategic plan to strengthen its presence on international markets in the field of private banking," the two said in a joint statement, without disclosing the value of the acquisition.

The chief executives of U.S. banks have been paid handsomely since 2004, with the average boss making three times as much as their counterparts around the globe, according to Bernstein report. The research examined chief executive pay across 25 banks in the US, Europe and Asia for the past 13 years and it shows that US banks have persistently paid more than rivals in the rest of the world based on 2016 data.