Economies dependent on oil exports have been devastated by the sharp drop in oil prices, including Africa’s second-largest oil exporter, Angola. Despite the gloom, Banco Angolano de Investimentos, the country’s largest private bank, has swum against the down currents of its banking peers by delivering net income growth and successfully exploiting numerous rewarding market opportunities.
Financial managers need to know what to expect, but in the UK with the inevitability of Brexit there are as many or more unknowns as there are knowns, especially in relation to trade and trade finance. To reduce risks, policymakers who negotiate the terms of the Article 50 process should consider from the start how their decisions will affect trade and its finance.
During his election campaign, US President Donald Trump promised to be a human boon to the US construction industry, one of the nation’s most vital and influential. As the days have ticked away since his inauguration, have the new administration’s policies made a difference for the industry, or added to its uncertainty about what the future really holds?
For the last two years articles have been talking about how blockchain will transform both the banking industry and people’s lives. However, there have been few, if any, practical examples of where and how this will actually occur.
On May 24, Moody’s reported that it had downgraded China’s long-term local currency and foreign currency issuer ratings from Aa3 to A1. With the downgrade, China’s credit rating is now on a par with those of Israel, Japan and Saudi Arabia.
Governments around the world have joined the battle against money laundering – passing laws that put an end to anonymous banking services and under-the-table money transfers and payments that enable crime and finance terror.
SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the grease that keeps the wheels of the worldwide economy moving. Some 25 million messages – most of them money transfers – pass through the SWIFT system daily.
Millennials are changing banks from the inside out, causing them to reduce their dependence on the product-centric, transactional model that has been the standby of banking business for decades. Instead, banks are having to creatively cultivate one of their main advantages, their large customer bases, to develop adapted digital models that promote the bank’s role as advisor throughout their customers’ financial lifecycles.
In the recent massive ransomware attack, which threatened institutions, businesses, and organizations in 99 countries, unless victims paid the required ransom, hackers didn’t discriminate; they successfully targeted hospitals, Telco’s, government offices, and thousands of businesses with WannaCry, the breed of malware that they used to propagate the attack.
The threat of catastrophic consequences from rampant global warming has given rise to a relatively new financial instrument, the green bond, issued by governments and institutions that are successfully combining healthy financial returns with equally healthy measures to tackle environmentally unhealthy carbon emissions. These investments are now regarded as an integral part of the global effort to combat climate change.
