China

The lender and its local rivals take part in global rush to set up China-focused PE funds.

The lender joins rivals in capital raising to comply with governments stricter requirements.

Under the agreement, MasterCard’s e-commerce platform will now accept China UnionPay Cards.

The new branch in the World Finance Centre in Beijing’s Central Business District is Westpac’s sixth office in the region.

ANZ, NAB, Commonwealth Bank, and Westpac are competing for pole position in Australia’s largest trading partner.

Should the listing push through it will break a three-year IPO hiatus by the nation's city commercial banks, which operate under regional rather than national licenses.

The MOU between the companies will enable them to work together towards exploring mutually beneficial solutions to innovative payment businesses.

The companies will develop payment systems for online and mobile phone transactions.

The lender seen to outclass five rivals in acquiring the company’s 66.67% stake.

Five Chinese commercial banks were found to have misallocated 58 billion yuan or 8.9 billion U.S. dollars of policy loans. This was revealed by the head of the National Audit Office, Liu Jiayi. Liu said that various policy-based financial institutions have been following the country's policies to make their own loan plans and boost operation and risk-prevention abilities but problems still exist in loans and insurance services. These financial institutions cited include China Life Insurance Company, Property and Casualty Company Limited and the five commercial banks, China Construction Bank, Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, the Bank of Communications and the ICBC. Among the policy loans misused, 25.4 billion yuan was granted to projects that lacked sufficient capital funds or bypassed approval procedures. Auditing of China Life and PICC's 499 branches revealed that some of these branches used false insurance claims and payments to steal insurance funds that totaled 1.99 billion yuan. According to Liu, related financial institutions have rectified 18.5 billion yuan involved in illegal management, and another 84.79 million yuan was recovered or collected as taxes. The full story is availabled at xinhua.

CCB plans to sell shares of the company with largest rare earth production and research base in China with appraised value of $110.48mn.

Delay resulted from growing volatility in global markets even as the lender planned to price deal on July 8.

China UnionPay signed a framework agreement with Huaxia Bank to cooperate in the field of cell-phone payment.

CRBC says the total assets of foreign banks in China increased to RMB 1.74 tn at the end of 2010.

BoA could use the proceeds to comply with tougher capital requirements that may be imposed by regulators for prevention of a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. 

China Banking Regulatory Commission announced that it will keep approving domestic lenders' establishment of new branches.