Foreign news: StanChart's recovery plan, Citi pitches to Asia, RMB adoption continues, bank via smar 26 June 2015 4:01PM Banking Day staff Foreign news, Standard Chartered's chief executive officer Bill Winters is planning to shift capital and power to new regional hubs in a bid to improve performance and meet new regulatory demands. The Financial Times reports that Winters is expected to hand more power to a handful of regional subsidiaries in key markets, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, India, the United Arab Emirates and Africa. By removing overlapping layers of management, the bank could cut costs beyond the projected US$1.8 billion in savings over three years. Moving the bank's headquarters out of the UK has been put on hold. Citigroup is looking to increase its wealth management clients in Asia in the next five years to one million, the Wall Street Journal reports. To meet this target, Citi will focus on two segments among Asia's growing middle class: those with investable assets between US$100,000 and US$1 million and those with assets between $1 million and $10 million, focusing on markets in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, China and South Korea, among others. In 2014, revenue from consumer banking reached US$7.5 billion, more than half of the group's total revenue from its Asian operations. China is to remove the lending cap on the country's longstanding loan-to-deposit ratio requirement which stops banks from lending more than 75 per cent of their deposits. China's cabinet published its decision as part of a draft amendment to the country's 20-year-old commercial banking law in a series of reforms to the country's commercial banking sector and get more funding into a slowing economy. Analysts do not expect a substantial increase in lending, as banks have become more risk-averse in a slowing economy. Atom Bank, a newly created purely online bank, plans to launch in the UK later this year after being granted its banking license from the Bank of England. Atom won't have any branches or even a website initially, with all operations to be run entirely through a smartphone application. However, the licence comes with restrictions, as its systems need further testing before regulators let the new bank go live, the UK's Telegraph reports, adding that Atom also needs to finish raising the £75m required to meet the UK's regulatory capital rules. The RMB Tracker, produced by bank messaging system SWIFT, shows that in May 2015 almost 1,100 financial institutions used the renminbi for payments with China and Hong Kong. RMB-denominated payments accounted for 35 per cent of volume, compared with 29 per cent two years ago. Overall, the RMB strengthened its position as the fifth most active currency for global payments in value, accounting for about 2.2 per cent of payments worldwide in May 2015, SWIFT's analysis has shown.