Foreign news: bid to buy NCR Corp, interest in bailed-out British lenders, Bank of China to set gold

Banking Day staff
  • Blackstone Group and Carlyle Group, the world's two largest private equity firms, are making a joint bid for US cash register and ATM maker NCR Corp in a leveraged buyout. If it goes ahead, the deal that would be the year's biggest at more than US$10 billion, including debt, Reuters reports, citing "people familiar with the matter." The same sources also said other buyout firms were circling and any decision on an NCR sale was several weeks away - assuming its board and shareholders agree to a sale.

  • UK Asset Resolution, tasked with selling off the £13 billion mortgage portfolio of two failed and bailed-out British lenders, Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley, said it has had "indicative expressions of interest", Reuters reports. UK Chancellor George Osborne, who's more than keen to sell the government's banking assets and recoup taxpayers' money, said last week that the British government would begin selling shares in Royal Bank of Scotland in coming months, having already sold more than half its stake in Lloyds Banking Group.

  • Bank of China is set to become the bank from the Middle Kingdom to join the group of lenders that sets global gold prices, marking another step in China's push for a bigger role in international financial markets, the WSJ observes. The bank, one of China's big-four state-owned lenders, will participate in the twice-daily electronic auctions that set the London Bullion Market Association Gold Price benchmark. China is the world's biggest importer of the yellow metal, consuming more than three times the amount of gold it produces.

  • The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has assessed Indian banks' liquidity coverage ratio requirements as 'largely compliant' with the minimum prescribed standards, the Reserve Bank of India said in a circular distributed earlier this week. The BCBS has published the assessment reports on the implementation of liquidity coverage ratio and other risk-based capital framework for its member countries.
     
  • Barclays is pursuing technology that could see users talk to a robot computer system to make money transfers, Derek White, the bank's chief design and digital officer, told CNBC. An artificial intelligence system similar to Apple's iPhone personal assistant, Siri, could allow customers to talk to a device and receive information. White gave the example of Amazon's Echo, where users can ask it to carry out actions such as playing or song or provide information about the weather.

  • The OECD's economists, with 50 years of data to draw on, have examined the effects an expansion of finance can have on both economic activity and inequality. At today's level of financial development, further expansion of bank credit to the private sector has been shown to slow growth in most OECD countries. A ten per cent rise in bank credit translates into a GDP growth rate that is 0.3 percentage points less than would otherwise be the case, according to the OECD.

  • Indonesia has accepted the challenge of creating an Islamic megabank reports Bloomberg. The government plans to merge the Shariah-compliant units of state-owned Bank Mandiri, Bank Negara Indonesia, Bank Rakyat Indonesia and Bank Tabungan Negara with paid-up capital of more than 15 trillion rupiah next year. Indonesia's move marks the latest effort by the US$1.7 trillion Islamic finance industry to form a megabank. Malaysia was on its way to forming an Islamic megabank before its plans were aborted in January.