Receiving Wide Coverage ...
Trump taps bankers: GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump announced his economic team ahead of a major economic speech in Detroit Monday. The 13-member group is heavily weighted with developers, hedge fund managers and investment bankers, including hedge-fund billionaire John Paulson and Thomas Barrack, founder of Colony Capital. Many have done business with Trump previously. Notably absent are people from Silicon Valley, academia or economics. But there is at least one community banker on the team: Stephen Calk, founder and chairman of The Federal Savings Bank, a big Chicago-based mortgage lender. "I support veteran housing issues and first-time home buyers. I'm in the field every day helping Americans buy first homes, small business loans, construction loans, in a safe and sound manner," Calk told the Chicago Sun-Times. Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post
Wall Street Journal
Online lenders report: LendingClub and OnDeck Capital report second quarter results Monday. But more important than their actual results may be providing more specifics about their future business, specifically how they plan to fund their loan volume. American Banker provides a primer.
Handling money the old-fashioned way: In this age of digital currencies and money transfers, handling large amounts of cash – legally, that is – has become a lost art. Just three banks now handle the bulk of the global "bank notes" business: Bank of America, Bank of Ireland United Overseas Bank.
The Obama administration's secret airlift of $400 million in cash to Iran last week put a spotlight on this often secretive – but still occasionally necessary – service that all but a handful of banks shun. One reason is that the job doesn't pay a whole lot. BofA typically gets about two hundredths of a percentage point of the face value for its trouble, or about $20,000 for shipping $100 million in cash.
Financial Times
Gap widens: Europe's investment banks continued to underperform their American counterparts in the second quarter, enabling the big U.S. banks to increase their global dominance.
Europe's big four banks — Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and UBS — reported a collective 17.5% drop in revenues from investment banking and trading in the second quarter versus a year earlier. By contrast, the big five U.S. investment banks — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup — increased their revenues by a collective 3.4%.
"The market share shifts are still happening and I don't think they're done yet," said one analyst. "It's two different worlds. They [U.S. banks] are just much better capitalised."
'Tsunami': Antony Jenkins, the former CEO of Barclays Bank, warned traditional banks need to change their culture to deal with the "tsunami" of new technology that threatens to disrupt their business.
Jenkins, who was fired by Barclays in July 2015, has become chairman of Currencies Direct, a digital provider of foreign exchange and payment services. "We are seeing a time where technology has evolved to a point where it is creating a truly transformational customer experience," he said. The number of branches and staff employed in the financial services sector could drop by as much as 50% over the next decade, he said.
Worldpay expands. Worldpay, the U.K.'s largest payments processor, which ventured into Canada earlier this year, has obtained a license to process payments in Australia. The company reports first-half financial results Tuesday.
