IBS Journal January 2017
65
billion. It’s the part-nationalised UK FI’s first acquisition since the 2008 financial crisis. The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2017.
MBNA, which holds assets of £7 billion, will boost group revenues by £650 million a year, Lloyds claims. Its share of the UK credit card market will increase from about 15% to 26%. “The MBNA brand and portfolio are a good fit with our existing card business and we will focus on providing its customers with excellent service and value,” says Lloyds Chief Executive, Antonio Horta-Osorio.
MBNA will retain its own branding and customers will not need to transfer to a new card. The company, which is mainly online and mobile-based, will also continue to have its own rates. Other parties, including Santander UK and HSBC, were interested in the deal but the process was complicated by MBNA’s exposure to the payment protection insurance (PPI) scandal.
$1,000... Bitcoin made a strong start to 2017, with its value hitting a three-year high of more than $1,000. The
digital currency continues to have its fair share of critics, who condemn its connections with drug dealers and tax evaders, but it nonetheless outperformed all its central-bank-issued counterparts with a 125% climb in value in 2016.
The majority of Bitcoin trading is done in China, so any increase in demand from there can have a significant impact on the price. The anonymous nature of the digital currency makes it attractive to those wanting to get around capital controls, such as China’s.
It’s not the highest price ever for Bitcoin, which traded at $1,165 in November 2013. But because more Bitcoins continue to be added to the system, currently at a rate of 12.5 every 10 minutes, its total value has surpassed the 2013 peak of $14.01 billion. Other factors contributing to this are India and Venezuela struggling with demonetisation, major banks being hit with hefty fines for their malpractices, and global political instability.
48… Metro Bank opened its 48th ‘store’ at the tail end of December. This latest one is situated in Basingstoke
and the plan is to increase the network to 100 by 2020 and create 2,500 jobs in the process. Projections show that it will have one million customer accounts by the first half of 2017, something that CEO Craig Donaldson reckons will make it “a proper player”. The challenger bank reports positive feedback for its “drive thru” branches for business customers, and plans for more of these to be introduced in the future. It also recently moved its IT infrastructure, including Temenos core banking and Backbase digital solutions, to a private cloud managed by Rackspace.
1MILLION... The BHIM digital payments app, launched by the National Payments Corporation of India in
collaboration with the Indian government, has shot to the top of the country’s Google Play rankings. It has been downloaded more than one million times and allows users to send or receive money via a Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Payments can be made directly to other users or merchants by scanning a QR code. Money can be sent to those who don’t have the app too, as it is linked to a bank account. The app has faced some teething troubles, with users reporting internal server errors. An update went live soon after launch but it’s unknown if that included any bug fixes.
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