Receiving Wide Coverage ... Tough times in subprime: U.K. subprime lender Provident Financial Group's stock plunged by two-thirds on Tuesday after announcing its second profit warning in two months, the resignation of its chief executive, and the end of its interim dividend.
"This is, without doubt, a disaster for a company and management team which, up until recent times, we regarded extremely highly," Gary Greenwood, an analyst with Shore Capital, told the Financial Times.
Wall Street Journal Big deal: Affirm and Walmart are close to an agreement in which Affirm, run by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, would offer installment loans to some Wal-Mart shoppers in the U.S. "The development is the latest sign of retailers' desire to reach new customers with limited credit histories, and of the intensifying competition facing credit card providers such as Synchrony Financial," which issues Walmart's credit card, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Shopping carts sit in the lobby of a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. location in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2015. In 2011, several big U.S. retailers moved their opening times to midnight; in 2012, Wal-Mart crossed the Rubicon and opened its stores at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. But after last year's Thanksgiving weekend retail sales fell 11 percent from the year before while overall holiday sales rose, some retailers have been reconsidering. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
A solid quarter: Aggregate earnings at American banks rose 10.7% to $48.3 billion in the second quarter, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s quarterly report, as nearly two-thirds of banks reported higher earnings compared to a year earlier. The average net interest margin rose to 3.22%, its highest level since the fourth quarter of 2013.
However, the agency warned that the rate of loan growth is starting to weaken. Loan balances grew 3.7% in the quarter, down from 4% in the previous quarter and down sharply from the 7% pace of a year earlier.
It seems banks are starting to wonder if interest rates really are headed higher. The FDIC report found that the percentage of bank assets that don't mature or change interest rates in less than five years reached a new high in the second quarter. "That means banks are allowing more borrowers to lock in low rates for long periods, a potential risk should rates move sharply higher," the Journal said.
Meet the ethics officer: The paper's Risk & Compliance Journal interviews Katie Lawler, U.S. Bank's first global chief ethics officer. "You can't teach people to be ethical but you can create an environment where they are more likely to make good decisions," she said. "Research shows people behave in a certain way not because of rules; they decide how to behave by looking at the people around them and seeing how they are behaving. You just can't rely on rules."
New man on the Block: H&R Block named Jeffrey Jones, a former executive at Uber and Target, to be its next CEO, effective October 9. Jones' job "will be to transform a company best-known for its in-person tax-preparation services into a formidable competitor of Intuit's rapidly growing TurboTax products and other low-cost online options," the Journal said.
Financial Times Striking while the iron's hot: Goldman Sachs hopes to use its newfound influence in Washington to overturn or modify the Volcker rule, which it views as the "main culprit" in its recent bond trading woes. With Goldman alumni Steven Mnuchin at Treasury and Gary Cohn at the National Economic Council, the bank is hoping for a "new opening" under President Trump following a "harsh time" during the Obama years.
New York Times The NYT has two items of note from its opinion section: one, entitled “Mr. Trump Sides With Wall Street; You Lose,” calls the administration’s delaying tactics on the “fiduciary rule” (which requires financial advisers to put their clients’ interests first) “obstruction, pure and simple.”
After several quarters of slumping investment banking and trading fees, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company reported a big uptick from that division, which helped compensate for a large decline in net interest income.
The Federal Reserve's Office of the Inspector General says the Fed has yet to fulfill 65 recommendations, and also identified 18 outstanding issues at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The bank will use biometric authentication to streamline checkout in stores starting in 2025. It has already completed internal and external pilots of the technology.
Banks reported nearly $27 billion had been tied up in scams or theft against elderly people in a recent 12-month period, according to a report from the U.S. Treasury.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. says it's ready to wind down the global systemically important banks. But until that happens, many in the banking industry are skeptical that regulators have actually developed a workable strategy to end "too big to fail."
