JPMorgan Chase & Co is planning to enter the UK consumer-banking market in the next few months, offering a range of savings and loan products under its Chase brand, Sky News reported, citing unidentified sources.
The Wall Street stalwart has been in discussions with regulators about securing the necessary approvals to operate in UK personal banking, Sky said.
The new service would probably debut later this year and an unnamed JPMorgan executive is helming the project.
A JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment.
New York-based JPMorgan would be jumping into a consumer-banking market that is in a state of flux. Financial technology (fintech) players, such as Monzo Bank Ltd and Starling Bank Ltd, have attracted millions of customers looking for alternatives to the traditional institutions, such as HSBC Holdings PLC and Barclays PLC.
The prospective launch could also pit JPMorgan against Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s online-only bank called Marcus, which opened in the UK in September 2018, though a City of London source told Sky that JPMorgan was planning a wider range of products.
Marcus, which offers savings accounts, is expected to add more services as it steps up its presence in the UK.
In the UK’s booming fintech sector, mobile app-based “neo-banks,” such as Revolut, Monzo and Starling, have established themselves as plucky upstarts.
However, fierce competition might already be taking its toll. Last week, N26 GmbH, a German digital bank backed by investor Peter Thiel, announced that it was withdrawing from the UK after four years.
The traditional banking sector, which is still reeling from the 2008 global financial crisis and a string of product misselling scandals, retains a strong grip on personal banking, experts have said.
However, Warwick University’s Andreas Kokkinis, who specializes in corporate law and financial regulation, told reporters that fintech was gaining a foothold.
“The six biggest UK banks have 87 percent of the market share for current accounts, so the remaining 13 percent is split amongst smaller conventional banks and building societies, and challenger banks,” he said.
“In that sense large universal banks — HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Santander UK — retain their dominance over UK retail banking market,” Kokkinis said.
“However, challenger banks, which operate exclusively online and thus offer cheaper services, are popular amongst customers below the age of 37,” he said.
If current trends persist, “the market share of challenger banks will grow significantly in the near future,” which could lead to takeovers, Kokkinis added.
“This does not necessarily mean that large banks will lose their dominant position in retail banking markets... What is more likely to happen is that large banks will acquire successful challenger banks,” he said.
Additional reporting by AFP
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”