Corporate

Deutsche Bank has lost several senior employees after paying out employee bonuses last month. Earlier this year, the bank cut its 2016 bonus pool by nearly 80%.

According to Bloomberg, at least three executives have left the bank’s trading unit in Asia, two of whom have reportedly taken jobs at competitor Credit Suisse. Europe’s largest investment bank in January scrapped bonuses of its top executives and slashed variable pay for other senior employees as chief executive John Cryan seeks to rebuild capital buffers eroded by misconduct fines.

Proxy adviser Glass Lewis on Tuesday recommended Credit Suisse shareholders reject its proposal to pay 25.99 million Swiss francs ($25.9 million) in short-term bonuses to the executive board in a binding vote at the April 28 annual general meeting.

The amount appears “wholly inappropriate given the loss suffered by shareholders in the last two fiscal years,” the San Francisco-based proxy adviser said in its recommendations for the bank’s annual meeting on April 28. Proposed compensation for the board of directors is “excessive,” as Bloomberg reported.

US regulators have agreed to a Chinese conglomerate’s proposed $43 billion acquisition of Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta on condition it sells some businesses to satisfy anti-monopoly objections.

China National Chemical and Switzerland’s Syngenta have agreed to divest three types of pesticides in order to win U.S. Federal Trade Commission approval for their $43 billion merger, the largest ever overseas acquisition by a Chinese company. A U.S. national security panel cleared the deal in August 2016, despite concerns among some lawmakers and farmers about China’s influence in U.S. food production.

Uber makes no secret of its ambitions to replace human drivers, testing autonomous cars in a highly public manner. But for the moment, and even for the next decade, the ride-hailing company remains reliant on an army of contractors.

“We’ve underinvested in the driver experience," an Uber official said on a press call in March, "and relationships with many drivers are frayed. We are now re-examining everything we do in order to rebuild that love."

The latest Tesla software update brings anticipated new features to Autopilot 2.0 cars, including Summon, which calls your car to you from its parking spot, but it also has a lighter side, as Tesla software updates tend to.

Tesla added a new Easter Egg (a goofy software gag generally slightly hidden from view) to its vehicles with the 8.1 update, and this time it’s a sketch pad. The 17-inch touchscreen that dominates the Tesla Model S center panel is basically already a huge digital surface primed for drawing, so it’s a natural add-on – not counting that most of the time you’re going to be using the screen while driving, of course.

BlackRock, the world’s largest fund company, will rely on robots to do its stockpicking. The $5.1 trillion asset manager announced on Tuesday that they will be restructuring the business to offer cheaper quantitative stock funds driven by computer models.

The change impacts about $30 billion in assets under management, including $30 million in annual fee-related dollars, says Jefferies analyst Daniel Fannon. Fannon says that while the scale of the reorganization is surprising, the change makes sense in the context of the firm’s struggle to draw active stock assets. This means that traditional stock-pickers will be replaced, with reports indicating that 40 jobs are on the line in the shake-up, with Blackrock earmarking $25 million in severance and bonuses to those affected.

IBM Security has partnered with SIX, the infrastructure operator for the Swiss financial sector, to integrate IBM Watson for Cyber Security into a new cognitive Security Operations Center (SOC). As part of a new partnership, the SIX SOC powered by IBM will give clients access to the latest IBM cognitive security tools used to fight cybercrime.

Watson has been trained on the language of cyber security, ingesting over 1 million security documents, helping security analysts parse thousands of natural language research reports that have never before been accessible to modern security tools.

Twitter is considering whether to build a premium version of its popular Tweetdeck interface aimed at professionals, the company said on Thursday, raising the possibility that it could collect subscription fees from some users for the first time.
The way that this subscription format would manifest would be in the form of a premium version of its popular Tweetdeck service, which is a popular app and website that the firm bought six years ago. It allows users to run multiple accounts out of the one interface, schedule tweets and generally have greater control over their Twitter experiences.