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Covering themselves: Royal Bank of Scotland Group said it put aside an additional $3.8 billion to cover future settlements with the U.S. over the sale of toxic mortgage-backed securities, raising the British bank's total provisioning since the financial crisis to about $8.4 billion. The provision will likely push the bank "to one of its largest annual losses since its taxpayer bailout in 2008, further denting the bank's prospects for paying dividends in the medium term," the Wall Street Journal said, while at the same time "offering investors hope that the British bank is getting closer to resolving one of its last major crisis-era litigation headaches."
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In custody: JPMorgan Chase has won the custodial rights to more than $1 trillion of BlackRock Inc.'s assets, wresting the business from long-time custodian State Street. The deal, which is expected to take about two years to complete, will boost JPM's custodial assets to about $21.5 trillion, which could make it the second largest player in the business, behind only Bank of New York Mellon, which has an estimated $28 trillion. State Street would fall to third place.
"Many of BlackRock's clients will experience cost savings through decreased operating expenses at the fund level," said Derek Stein, head of BlackRock's business operations and technology. JPM is "likely to garner roughly tens of millions of dollars in annual fees in one of the largest-ever custody deals," the Wall Street Journal said.
School's out: Harvard University is expected to lay off about half of the 230 employees who manage the school's $35.7 billion endowment and
"The changes are a break with the university's long-held approach to managing its wealth," the Wall Street Journal noted. "While Yale University and others park nearly all their money with outside managers, Harvard for decades deployed a 'hybrid' approach, relying in part on its own traders to wager on assets such as stocks and bonds." That strategy, however, has produced the second lowest returns over the past 10 years among Ivy League schools.
Wall Street Journal
Power driver: Goldman Sachs was the
Too generous?: The rising cost of
Financial Times
Regulatory burdens: Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, is warning banks and financial technology companies "to expect
"Authorities can be expected to pursue a more intense focus on the regulatory perimeter, more dynamic settings of prudential requirements, a broader commitment to resolution regimes, and a more disciplined management of operational and cyber risks," he told an audience in Germany.
At the same time, "thousands" of compliance jobs at the world's biggest banks created in recent years to meet increasing regulatory demands "will simply disappear" in the near future, thanks to greater use of artificial intelligence and other automated systems. Richard Lumb, head of financial services at Accenture, told the FT that new technologies "can
Quotable ...
"We have been