Author: Lily Harper

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the US & Canadian companies myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.To think it all started out so well. When Goldman Sachs and Apple teamed up to launch a credit card in 2019, neither the storied investment bank nor the technology giant had much experience with consumer banking. That did not stop them from dreaming big.They promised to offer “an innovative, new kind of credit card” with no fees and a cutting edge app “designed to help customers lead a healthier financial life.” Goldman chief executive David Solomon hailed the Apple…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Columbia Threadneedle Investments is shutting its standalone UK smaller companies division as investors pull money ahead of a UK Budget that could further undermine confidence in the ailing sector.The US fund group, which manages about $672bn globally, is merging the UK small cap team into its wider European smaller companies unit, which it said was aimed at using resources “in the most efficient way”.The move comes amid a broader restructuring and job cuts at the fund manager, which also confirmed that Catherine…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the UK banks myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Lenders rushed to warn the UK Treasury and the regulator about the risk of turmoil in the sector after a shock court judgement against car finance commissions that threatens to upend many areas of domestic consumer lending.The hastily arranged meeting between finance bosses and government officials underlined how anxious the industry is about Friday’s judgement in which senior judges ruled in favour of consumers who complained about “secret” commissions on car loans.The uncertainty created by the court ruling prompted the Finance and…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The former owner of a bank in Latvia has been sentenced to prison for organising the brutal daylight murder of a whistleblower.Mihails Ulmans, the former owner of LPB Bank, was sentenced on Tuesday to 15 years of incarceration for ordering the 2018 murder of Mārtiņš Bunkus, a lawyer who had raised concerns about money-laundering with Latvian regulators.The case has thrown a new spotlight on the Baltic state’s banking system — a historic weakness for the country. ABLV, another local lender, caused international…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Data centre start-up Crusoe Energy is raising as much as $500mn of equity capital from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund to expand its facilities that provide the infrastructure powering the AI boom.The fundraise will value Crusoe at about $3bn, more than double its valuation two years ago, according to three people with knowledge of the deal. It is the latest fledgling company whose fortunes have surged as a result of the significant spending on AI following the release of ChatGPT in…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A year ago FT Alphaville wrote about the Financial Stability Board’s Credit Suisse postmortem, and its almost-casual observation that the SEC believed the entire post-GFC global bank bail-in bonds regime might fall foul of US securities law. In the US the conversion of debt into equity counts as a new sale of securities, and therefore requires full registration — with new disclosures etc — or a regulatory exemption. Astonishingly, it appears the SEC feels that even bonds expressly designed to fit regulatory…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Share buybacks at HSBC, strong earnings and, more recently, promises of an overhaul have been enough to lift its share price by about a quarter in the past year. But long-term investors have heard it all before. They have become all too familiar with grand global restructuring announcements from the lender over the past decade and more. New chief executive Georges Elhedery will need to prove his promises are different to maintain HSBC’s rally.Third-quarter results helped to get his tenure off to…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Santander has delayed the release of its full UK results because of a court ruling on car loans while revealing the largest-ever drop in the division’s profits, as one of the Spanish bank’s most important markets emerges as a trouble spot.The company said on Tuesday its UK profit in the three months to the end of September had dropped 18.5 per cent from a year earlier to €346mn, in a highly competitive lending market. That followed a 23 per cent fall in…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund plans to scale back the share of its international investments by about a third, drawing a line under the past decade’s multibillion-dollar global spending spree as it refocuses on efforts to boost the domestic economy. The Public Investment Fund, which has about $930bn worth of assets, said it intended to cut the proportion of funds invested overseas to between 18 and 20 per cent, down from 30 per cent. “So initially we had less than 2 per…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Exchange traded funds myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Latest news on ETFsVisit our ETF Hub to find out more and to explore our in-depth data and comparison toolsTidal Investments plans to offer a family of actively managed exchange traded funds that take leveraged long positions in pioneering and innovative companies and pair those with short positions in their legacy counterparts, a regulatory filing shows.The new Battleshares family of strategies comprises eight ETFs across the entertainment, finance, news and technology sectors, according to the filing. The Battleshares NVDA vs INTC…