Foreign news: Barclays boss exits, Apple Pay for UK, China grows P2P lending, criminals prefer cash

Banking Day staff
  • In a surprise move, Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins will step down later this month. He had been CEO since 2012, after predecessor Bob Diamond resigned over a Libor price-fixing scandal. The Barclays board decided Jenkins was "not the right person," to carry out the next stage of the bank's agenda, chairman John McFarlane told CNBC, adding that he would take over as executive chairman on 17 July. The British major becomes the fourth of Europe's biggest banks to have changed its leader so far this year, joining Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and Standard Chartered. The search for a successor is underway, with Barclays group finance director, Tushar Morzaria, already being tipped as a contender.

  • Apple Pay appears set to launch in the UK next week. A leaked memo from supermarket Waitrose suggests the service will go live on 14 July, Finextra reports.

  • Legitimate peer-to-peer internet lenders (as opposed to online loan sharks and fraudsters) are slowly achieving critical mass in China, with the support of regulators frustrated by the banks' reluctance to lend to small businesses, the Financial Times reports. Tech-savvy P2P players are succeeding in micro-loans where banks fail. One P2P firm has financed up to 400 aspiring Uber drivers to buy or lease cars, using the cars as collateral, and can monitor their takings in real time. The emerging "virtual infrastructure" includes a credit bureau set up by the Alipay unit of Alibaba that is as good - or better - than traditional banks, the FT says.

  • Information from law enforcement investigations indicates that cash, both for criminal payments and money laundering purposes, remains the instrument of choice, despite a steady increase in the use of non-cash payment systems across the EU, according to a new Europol report. "The proportion of high denomination bank notes (€500 and €200) not commonly used by consumers or businesses, indicates that there are large sums of cash in circulation that are not used as means of payment," the report adds.