Fixed income

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.

Switzerland has extended a ban on Brazilian meat to 21 processing plants from four as part of Europe-wide safety measures, Swiss authorities said on Sunday. EU veterinary experts recommended reinforced checks on imports of meat from Brazil on Friday after an investigation began there into bribery of food inspectors.

The moves are in response to a scandal that emerged last weekend, in which authorities in Brazil suspended over 30 government following allegations that some of the country’s biggest meat processors have been “selling rotten beef and poultry for years”.

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.

Credit Suisse increased its bonus pool by 6%, defying a trend toward smaller payouts at many of its peers in an effort to prevent an exodus of talent from its investment banking and Asian operations. That followed a second straight year in the red for the bank amid a major restructuring and steep penalties for the sale of toxic mortgage debt in the run-up to the financial crisis.

CEO Tidjane Thiam’s pay for his first full year in the job swelled to 11.9 million Swiss francs ($12 million), the 2016 annual report of Switzerland’s second-biggest bank showed on Friday. This compared with the 4.57 million francs he earned in 2015 after joining the bank on June 22.

Last week a team of civil society organisations, included swiss Pro Specie Rara, Swissaid and Public Eye, started a public appeal to politicians and demand that effective prohibitions are put in place to stop the granting of patents on plants and animals derived from conventional breeding.

The protest is targeted at patents granted by the European Patent Office (EPO) in 2016 to the brewing companies Carlsberg and Heineken. The patents claim barley derived from conventional breeding, its usage in brewing beer and the beer produced thereof. However, the patents are simply based on random mutations in the plant’s genome.

The cost of making a car in the UK could increase by £2,370 ($2,930) in the event of a hard Brexit, according to research published by PA Consulting Group. The tariffs would apply to both imported and exported cars with the report stating carmakers would be likely to pass any price increases to buyers.

The report explained that the increased cost of manufacturing could be the case if the UK falls back on World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules post Brexit. It warned that the 10% WTO tariffs on exporting and importing with the European Union (EU), could force some manufacturers in the UK to relocate outside the country.

Apple has unveiled a new special-edition red iPhone 7, with a philanthropic decision, the Cupertino-based company added a red special edition to the lineup. The new red aluminum finish, which is available to order for both iPhone 7 and 7 Plus in-store and online on March 24, is a fundraising effort for the Global Fund.

The additional colour option is part of Apple’s Product Red campaign, a range of red products for which Apple makes a contribution from every purchase to the Global Fund for HIV and AIDS programmes. To date, Apple has generated over $130m through the project making it the organizations’s largest corporate donor, the company said.