Royal Bank of Scotland is eliminating 3,500 investment bank jobs and will sell or shut the bank’s equities and advisory business under a 3-year plan to further reduce risk. RBS said the bank will focus more on domestic retail and corporate banking. RBS, 83 percent owned by the UK government, on Thursday said it will exit from cash equities, corporate broking, equity capital markets and mergers and acquisitions businesses.
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and RBS roundup
Wells and USAA mortgage refi, credit card news of the week
Thanks goodness for credit card reform. Compared to the old days it is really nice to get email reminders when a credit card payment is due. Confirmation emails are wonderful. What happened to huge profits generated by credit card companies when they “forgot” to mail a statement, just to make you pay interest on “zero interest” promo accounts? Personally I would would take the honesty of GE Money over the shady tactics of Household Bank any day.
Programming of HSBC Watch completed
Meeting another end-of-2011 goal Lender Watch recently completed reprogramming of HSBC Watch. The website was formerly located at householdwatch.com and the new domain name better reflects today’s visitor interests. Timothy Blake and Lender Watch have owned the domain name HSBCWatch.com for many years.
Bank layoffs might thrill Occupy Wall Street
A recent article on Equities.com by Brittany Barrett tells us which Wall Street Banks are laying off the most people. Our Lender watch articles reflect layoff announcements as they happened, but Barrett puts figures all in one place. You might find the results both interesting and revealing.
Fitch Ratings downgrades Ocwen Financial
Here at Lender Watch we monitor companies that are heavy into subprime. Confirming our concerns today was a downgrade of Ocwen Financial by Fitch Ratings. In the past two years, Ocwen has executed numerous high-profile servicing acquisitions, including buyouts of Barclays’ HomEq platform and Litton Loan Servicing’s portfolio and operations.
