8chan/8kun QResearch Posts (2)
#7426296 at 2019-12-04 18:15:53 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #9497: Enough With These Press Conferences Already -- POTUS Heading Home Edition
Banks Are Cutting 75,700 Jobs Worldwide
Banks worldwide have announced major job cuts this year. Globally, 75,700 jobs are reportedly being eliminated, with the most recent announcement coming from Italy's largest bank. Unicredit has become the latest major bank to unveil layoff plans, joining Deutsche Bank, Santander, Commerzbank, HSBC, and more. The negative interest rate environment and slowing economies have forced banks to cut costs and lay off employees.
Unicredit Eliminating 8000 Jobs
Italy's largest bank, Unicredit, unveiled its new business plan to 2023 on Tuesday, which reportedly includes laying off 8,000 employees and closing 500 branches. CEO Jean Pierre Mustier claims that this round of job cuts will help eliminate 1 billion euros ($1.11 billion) of the bank's gross expenses.
Unicredit also announced a separate buyback of 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion), Bloomberg detailed, noting that the job cuts equal to more than 9% of the bank's workforce. The bank, however, said it intends to spend 9.4 billion euros on information technology and human resources over the next four years to update its technology and improve compliance.
The bank currently has 12,000 branches in over 50 countries and 30 representative offices around the world, according to its website. It provides products and services to approximately 26 million customers in areas of corporate investment banking, commercial banking and wealth management. Its 14 core markets are Italy, Germany, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey.
https://www.activistpost.com/2019/12/banks-are-cutting-75700-jobs-worldwide.html
#2495958 at 2018-08-07 15:08:04 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #3148: Iran sanctions have officially been cast Edition
Blowback: UniCredit Becomes First Major Corporation To Sever Ties With Facebook Over Ethics
Facebook has lost a major advertiser, UniCredit SpA, which has severed all ties alleging that the social media giant hasn't acted ethically, reports Bloomberg - which notes that "other large companies" may follow suit.
CEO Jean Pierre Mustier says the bank maintains that Facebook hasn't acted properly, and the Italian financial group will no longer have any type of business relationship with the Menlo Park, CA company.
Mustier was referring to business activities including advertising and marketing campaigns, a spokesman for UniCredit said. The bank currently has a swath of Facebook accounts – which are regularly updated. -Bloomberg
Facebook has come under intense scrutiny for failing to safeguard user data amid the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal, revealed in March by The Guardian and The New York Times. The data from up to 87 million users, and possibly more, was found to have been "harvested" via the psychological profiling app "Thisisyourdigitallife" - which was created by two psychologists (one of whom currently works for Facebook), and was specially designed to collect and share information.
Despite Facebook's attempts at damage control, UniCredit says they're done with the social media giant - and there have been others. Unilever UV and Sonos Inc. have also threatened to pull ads.
In late July, Facebook's shares fell over 20 percent after second-quarter revenue showed the first signs of user disenchantment in the midst of public scandals over privacy and content. The company has been under fire following revelations that personal information on as many as 87 million users ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Mozilla Corp., which develops the Firefox web browser, said in March it would pause its ads from appearing on Facebook as a result. -Bloomberg
Was UniCredit's decision really based on Facebook's ethics? Or was the data harvesting scandal perhaps a convenient excuse to disengage from an advertising model that wasn't worth the expense?
In late 2016, Proctor & Gamble cut $200 million in digital ad spending - including scaling back targeted ads from Facebook. In March, the company contended that too much digital ad spending is "a waste."
Once armed with more measurement data, P&G discovered that the average view time for a mobile ad appearing in a news feed, on platforms such as Facebook , was only 1.7 seconds. The Cincinnati-based company also realized some people were seeing P&G ads far too many times. -WSJ
"Once we got transparency, it illuminated what reality was," said P&G's chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard. Ad fraud was another concern.
About a year ago, Mr. Pritchard publicly issued an ultimatum for tech companies to clean up the digital ad ecosystem or it would cut spending. He called on the industry to fix the rampant digital ad fraud and asked tech giants such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. to implement safeguards to prevent ads from appearing around controversial content and to allow independent verification of their ad measurements. -WSJ
Whatever the case, Facebook has now lost a major corporate advertiser - will others follow suit?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-07/blowback-unicredit-becomes-first-major-corporation-sever-ties-facebook-over-ethics
8kun Midnight Riders Posts (1)
#13444 at 2020-11-21 15:00:22 (UTC+1)
QR Midnight Riders #60: Dominion is A Company Which Is Owned by Smartmatic Edition
Italy picks Bank of America, Orrick to advise on Monte dei Paschi privatization
Italy's Treasury has picked Bank of America and Orrick as financial and legal advisers to secure a merger deal for bailed-out bank Monte dei Paschi (MPS) as part of its privatisation plan, four sources close to the matter told Reuters. Rome aims to clinch a merger with a healthier peer in 2021, the sources said, to provide a long-term solution for the bank, which has been backed by the government since 2017 following an 8 billion euro ($9.5 billion) rescue deal. The Treasury's efforts, however, face resistance from the co-ruling 5-Star party, as well as unions and local politicians in Tuscany, who have been asking for the sale to be delayed. The mandates, which will last 12 months, will see Bank of America's co-head of the financial institution group, Giorgio Cocini, and Orrick's partners, Patrizio Messina and Marco Nicolini, working closely with the Treasury to attract buyers and address the bank's capital shortfalls.
Italy's Treasury and Bank of America declined to comment, while Orrick was not immediately available. Rome is expected to pay about 150,000 euros in financial and legal fees, with the lion's share going to Bank of America, the sources said. The meagre fee pot has put off many banks and law firms which initially looked at the dossier, the sources said, as advisory fees typically come in the millions of dollars range. Intesa SanPaolo's recent takeover of UBI Banca, for example, generated overall fees of $43.8 million for all the advisers involved, according to Refinitiv estimates. Generally, government work across the world is poorly paid, but banks often vie for such mandates to build a relationship with the state in the hope of getting future business.
Dogged by legal claims and poor quality assets, MPS is a tough sell in Italy's banking market, which has a surplus of branches and has seen a rise in loan losses and remote banking in the COVID-19 pandemic. UniCredit is seen as the preferred buyer for the 548-year old bank given its robust balance sheet, sources have said, despite boss Jean Pierre Mustier ruling out mergers which, he has said, only add "branches and staff." Italy's third-largest bank, Banco BPM, is in the process of exploring possible tie-ups and may also emerge as a viable bidder for MPS, one of the sources said. Banco BPM has also denied any interest for MPS. Any deal for the Tuscan bank would only come after the Treasury acts to remove legal claims amounting to 10 billion euros, while also injecting fresh capital.
Rome has set aside 1.5 billion euros to shore up MPS but the bank faces a shortfall of at least 2 billion, sources have said. The Treasury is working on a scheme to shift MPS's legal risks to another state-owned entity. In a move that would help a buyer cope with redundancies in the combined entity, Rome is also considering steps to lower the cost of job cuts for banks in case of a merger, one of the sources said. Similarly, Italy has included in the 2021 budget measures to help corporate tie-ups through tax breaks. Under the scheme, two companies merging during the course of next year would be able to lower their tax burden by using so-called deferred tax assets (DTAs). In the case of MPS, that entails a 3 billion euro earnings boost, sources have said.
MPS's capital buffers are set to fall below minimum requirements early next year, hit by the cost of a bad loan clean-up it is about to complete as well as provisions against legal risks following the conviction of former top executives.
https://www.reuters.com/article/monte-dei-paschi-advisers-ma/exclusive-italy-picks-bank-of-america-orrick-to-advise-on-mps-privatisation-sources-idUSL1N2I7098