Atom Bank set for first year of profit after three quarters in the black July 18, 2022 Digital lender Atom Bank is on track to post its first full year of profits after revealing today it had spent three quarters in the black in the full year to March. The Durham-based bank, founded by chief executive Mark Mullen in 2014, notched underlying pre-tax losses for the year of £2m, a £34m improvement [...]
Soaring business costs trigger wave of profit warnings July 18, 2022 Swelling costs have crimped UK companies’ margins, leading to a surge in profit warnings, reveals a new report published today. The volume of profit warnings sounded by UK-listed companies climbed 66 per cent in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2021, up to 136 from 82, according to EY-Parthenon. [...]
War for talent swells new starter City pay packets July 18, 2022 Pay packets in the Square Mile are bulging as banks, insurers and brokers try to outbid each other to lure top talent amid a tight jobs market, reveals a new survey released today. Finance workers that switch employers received an average 25 per cent pay bump in the three months to June, according to recruiter [...]
Week ahead: More inflation woe to pile pressure on Bank of England to act July 17, 2022 Inflation bumped higher last month, reinforcing pressure on the Bank of England to motor through rate hikes, according to City analysts. London’s premier FTSE 100 index notched a poor performance last week, losing a shade over 0.5 per cent to finish at 7,159.01 points. The domestically-focused mid-cap FTSE 250 index, which is more aligned with [...]
From translations to chatbots: The future has arrived as UK firms rush to implement artificial intelligence July 17, 2022 It seems the future is knocking as more and more UK businesses are actively looking to implement artificial intelligence, with solutions such as speech recognition, machine translations, chatbots and sentiment analysis being the key drivers. Many businesses are opting to take a low- or no-code approach to implementing artificial intelligence solutions into their operations, according [...]
Newsroom’s fake news dilemma: The role of NGOs in an understaffed, hyper-competitive sector July 17, 2022 Th pressure on media outlets to rapidly get good quality footage to support global news stories has never been greater. Understaffed news rooms are rushing to beat the competition – not just the vast number of global online, print, radio and television media but also the factories dedicated to creating fake news stories that are propagated through [...]
Latest Chinese economic data sends shockwaves through Asia as world’s second-largest market shrinks July 15, 2022 After Shanghai and other cities shut down to fight coronavirus outbreaks, China’s economy contracted in the three months ending in June compared with the previous quarter. The world’s second-largest economy shrank by 2.6 per cent, down from the January-March period’s already weak 1.4 per cent, official data showed today. Activity was “much weaker than expected”, [...]
Recession fears loom over FTSE 100 as IMF warns economic outlook has ‘darkened’ July 14, 2022 London markets flopped today driven by investors fretting over the global economic downturn. The capital’s premier FTSE 100 index dropped 1.63 per cent to 7,039.81 points, while the mid-cap domestically-focused FTSE 250 index, which is more aligned with the health of the UK economy, tumbled 1.23 per cent to 18,480.66 points. Recession fears have led [...]
Brussels slashes EU growth forecasts as euro faces ‘end of the beginning’ of US dollar slide July 14, 2022 The worst inflation surge in a generation driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will choke European economic growth, revealed fresh forecasts published today. Predictions for output growth this year among the 27 members of the European Union (EU) remained unchanged at 2.7 per cent, but the European Commission (EC) downgraded expansion in 2023 by nearly [...]
How virtual twin technology is powering low carbon aviation July 14, 2022 | Sponsored The clock is ticking when it comes to preventing irreversible damage from climate change – and aerospace is one industry where a complete transformation is required to achieve Net Zero Targets. With air travel currently contributing 2.5% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it is high time to reinvent the way we fly, and decarbonisation [...]