Code Investing has announced that its institutional funding lines for UK SMEs have hit £500m. The loans are being provided in the form of structured and asset finance, hire purchase and leasing agreements, bridging facilities, cash flow and unsecured loans. Code CEO Ayan Mitra said that SMEs and commercial brokers are starting to discover the benefits of institutional loans.

Bridging and Commercial

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has called on the government to review the business rates system in next week’s Budget. The organisation says 39% more respondents reported a further rise than a fall in retail availability in the third quarter of 2018, as fewer businesses demanded space in a sector that is struggling to compete with e-commerce rivals.

City AM

Analysis by TheCityUK shows that Britain’s financial services industry had the biggest trade surplus in the world last year, at £68bn. The total is bigger than the US, Switzerland and Luxembourg – the second, third and fourth nations on the list – combined. The research shows that the UK holds 37% of all foreign exchange trading and an 18% share of cross-border bank lending. The analysis also shows that at $10.8tn, the UK’s banking sector assets were the largest in Europe last year. Anjalika Bardalai, chief economist at TheCityUK, said: “The UK is not only a leading global financial centre, it is also Europe’s financial hub.”

The Times

IBM is set to launch a new open banking platform that will enable banks to take an incremental approach to open banking, opening up their legacy systems and tapping into APIs. Say Tom Eck, CTO, industry platforms, IBM: “In short, it enables you to augment and revitalise your existing systems, rather than undertaking the cost, effort and risk of a complete overhaul.” The platform features an ecosystem that contains APIs from IBM Financial Services and third-party fintech companies, letting users choose from a range of APIs to add capabilities such as financial risk assessment, payments, AI and blockchain to their apps.

Finextra

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has said that Britain could withstand a hard Brexit and tough trade relations after Britain leaves the EU. The BoE does not see the scenario as the most likely outcome in March next year, when Britain formally leaves the EU, but it is still possible. Mr Carney said: “We aren’t hoping for the best, we’re preparing for the worst in several ways.”. Mr Carney added that about £100trn of cross-border derivative contracts may be disrupted by loss of regulatory permissions for clearing houses after Brexit.
The Times

The Telegraph’s Iain Withers profiles how the big UK banks are launching their own financial technology start-ups to compete against the fast-growing digital banks such as Monzo, Starling and Tandem. RBS is developing a spin-out online bank called Bó, which is expected to launch in beta testing mode next year. Rivals Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds also have launched separate digital hubs churning out potential new services scattered across London’s tech clusters. Josh Bottomley, head of HSBC’s digital operations, said the bank was investing heavily in fintech and has so far created “1,000 jobs that didn’t previously exist”. Robin Knox, CEO of Tandem, says he is not surprised that some high street banks are launching new brands. He is relaxed about the threat they pose, adding: “They may try to emulate start-ups with new businesses with new names in new offices, but th ey will struggle to compete with us in terms of speed and culture.”
The Sunday Telegraph

As part of plans to combat fraud, the name of someone receiving a payment will be as important as their bank details for the first time from next summer. The plans, which have been revealed by Pay UK, will alert the sender if the name does not match the account. It is designed to combat cases when fraudsters mimic a genuine business and attempt to trick people into sending money to an account controlled by the con-artist.
BBC News

Buy-to-let mortgage lender Landbay has chosen Oracle NetSuite to attract more users to its platform, while enabling it to make swifter decisions around mortgage applications and investor sign-ups. The firm says it is now able to approve any loan application in 48 hours, against the industry average of three weeks.
Best Advice

The Bank of England has warned that £31bn worth of risky loans have been issued this year to businesses that already shoulder large levels of debt. So-called “leveraged loans” to indebted businesses, which are packaged up and sold in global financial markets similar to sub-prime lending before the financial crisis, are different to standard lending by UK banks, who would be unlikely to lend to struggling firms.
BBC News

According to a recent Development Finance Today poll, 65% of industry professionals feel there are too many property investment platforms in the market. Bronwen Vearncombe, director at Property Investing Foundation, said that it was hard to decipher which platforms were best, as there are a lot of online investment platforms out there, many of which promised very high returns to grab investors’ attention.
Development Finance Today

A £275m sterling-dominated senior unsecured bond is to be launched by The Unite Group PLC, the company behind student housing developer Unite Students. The bond, which is for a term of 10 years and will bear interest at a rate of 3.5% pa, is to form part of Unite’s overall finance strategy as it attempts to further diversify its sources of funding and move more of its funding to an unsecured basis. Joe Lister, chief financial officer at Unite Group, said: “The new financing will provide increased flexibility to support our portfolio strategy as well as lengthening the maturity and reducing our overall cost of debt.”
Development Finance Today

Figures released by the Home Office show that more than 450,000 reported bank frauds over the past three years have been dismissed by banks’ automated systems.
The Sunday Times

Antonio Horta-Osorio, the CEO of Lloyds Banking Group, has suggested that Britain’s financial sector is now too over-regulated, having been badly policed in the years’ up to the financial crisis. In an interview with the Sunday Times, he said: “I think that in life, when you have excesses in one direction, normally to correct, you go a bit too much in the other direction – like a pendulum. Sometimes the pendulum goes further in the other direction before it comes to the middle. In aggregate, I would think that has happened in the UK.” He also apologises for the scandal at the Reading office of HBOS in the piece, and says his “total focus” was on helping SMEs. He also notes that the bank has devised a programme to help Lloyds staff “improve mental and physical resilience”. It will be offered to all 75,000 employees in due course.
The Sunday Times

Private equity veteran Jon Moulton is interviewed in the Mail. In the piece, Mr Moulton reveals that his last Better Capital fund – launched in 2012 – has estimated losses of more than £140m, caused by the troubles of City Link, Jaeger and double-glazing firm Everest. He describes the fund as a “wreckage”, adding that it will take him between 18 months and four years to close it and sell off its remaining investments.
The Mail on Sunday

UK house prices grew 2% year on year for September, Nationwide has said, up 0.3% from August to September to an average of £214,922. England had the slowest rate of annual growth, at 1.4% for the quarter, with Northern Ireland up 4.3%, and Scotland and Wales’ growth rates slowing 2.1% and 3.3%, respectively, while London house prices fell 0.7% year-on-year to £468,544 for September. Nationwide’s chief economist, Robert Gardner, said: “Subdued economic activity and ongoing pressure on household budgets are likely to continue to exert a modest drag on housing market activity and house price growth this year, though borrowing costs are likely to remain low.”
City AM

Shares in developers reliant on overseas investors to fund new luxury apartment blocks in London fell yesterday after the government announced plans to tax foreign buyers of UK property.
Financial Times

Lenders are improving their offer to buy-to-let landlords after changes to the tax rules cut demand for borrowing. Landlords were being discouraged by the stamp duty surcharge on second homes and were slowly losing the ability to offset mortgage interest against profits, experts said.
The Daily Telegraph

Theresa May has announced plans for a new stamp duty levy of up to 3% for buyers of property in the UK who do not live or pay tax in the country. Mrs May said: “Britain will always be open to people who want to live, work and build a life here. However, it cannot be right that it is as easy for individuals who don’t live in the UK, as well as foreign based companies, to buy homes as hard working British residents.” The announcement counters Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to tax second home owners, but the Sunday Telegraph contends that the tax hike will risk criticism that it could harm efforts to paint Britain as a global nation open for business after Brexit. The Government will announce plans to launch a consultation on the tax, which will include the level of tax that will be levied.
The Sunday Telegraph

Funding Circle has completed its London stock market flotation, with a valuation of £1.5bn. Samir Desai, chief executive and co-founder of Funding Circle, described the flotation as a milestone for the business and said that it showed that Britain was a “great place” to build a financial technology company. Neil Rimer, a partner who led Funding Circle’s investment and board member of the company, said the IPO showed that after a “decade of rapid experimentation and growth”, the European fintech sector had now “come of age”.
The Daily Telegraph

This Service was produced by Early Morning Media.

The FT calls for a crackdown on money laundering, arguing that UK authorities have for too long been reluctant to adopt or enforce tougher safeguards against dirty money.
Financial Times