Finance & Money Edge

Financial Highlights from the Recent Week You Should Know About:

CONSULTING PwC Scales Back Operations in More Than a Dozen Countries to Avoid Scandals PwC has closed operations in over a dozen countries, including nine in Africa, as part of a strategic move to minimize exposure to financial and reputational risks. This decision follows significant regulatory penalties, such as a $62 million fine and a

CONSULTING Pentagon cancels $5.1 billion in consulting contracts with Accenture, Deloitte, etc The Pentagon is cancelling IT consulting contracts worth $5.1 billion with Accenture, Deloitte and Booz Allen Hamilton among others. US Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, believes the Pentagon can do this work themselves instead of paying external companies. Everyone things they’re an IT expert

MARKETS Are You Tired of Hearing the Word “Tariffs” Now? The global trade war of 2025 got very ugly this past week. All major stock indices were feeling the pain as the US slapped tariffs on almost the entire world (including places where the main inhabitants are only penguins, talk about getting caught in the

QUANTUM FINANCE JP Morgan’s Quantum Experiment JP Morgan announced the results of an experiment they’ve been conducting using a quantum computer, the experiment yielded “truly random” numbers generated by a quantum computer. The result is first-of-its kind breakthrough and could lead to advancements in market trading and cybersecurity applications. MARKETS CFO’s Are Pessimistic About 2025

COMPLIANCE KPMG Launches Law Firm in US KPMG has been given permission by the Arizona Supreme Court to start its own law firm in the U.S., called KPMG Law. This makes KPMG the first of the “Big Four” accounting firms allowed to practice law in the country, following a change in Arizona’s rules that lets

CAPITAL MARKETS JPMorgan Re-Classifies Qatar and Kuwait as Developed Markets JPMorgan has re-classifed Qatar and Kuwait as developed markets instead of emerging markets in their Emeging-Markets Bond Index. The re-classification process will take six-months beginning March 31. This change means new bonds from these countries won’t be added to the index, The United Arab Emirates

CONSULTING Is This the Beginning of the End of the Consulting Model? KPMG UK partners saw record profits and pay, yet slashed 1266 jobs. However, revenue barely grew 1%. Is this the beginning of the end of the business consulting model as we know it? Read on to find out. COMPLIANCE & RISK MANAGEMENT Canadian

AI Your Next In-House Legal Assistant Could Be an AI Agent LexisNexis, the legal information provider, introduced Protégé, a new AI-powered legal assistant designed to help lawyers with tasks like drafting documents and managing workflows. Protégé is an AI-agent that can work independently to create various legal documents and suggest next steps, while also reviewing

MARKETS Earnings Winners & Losers Both Mastercard and Visa were earnings winners beating earnings forecasts due to a robust holiday spending season. While Deutsche Bank was the loser who saw profits plummet 92%(!) in Q4. MARKETS Trump Tariffs Come into Effect US President Trump held to his threat to slap a 25% tariff on imports

LEADERSHIP TD Bank Expedites Leadership Change After being hit with a massive money laundering penalty, TD Bank’s new incoming CEO, Raymond Chun will take over the reins at TD Bank on February 1, two months earlier than originally planned. Accelerating the move looks like it’s due to external pressures to accelerate change get things back

CAREERS Back Office Workers Are On Notice If you work in the back or middle-office, you’d better start looking over your shoulder as AI is coming for a job near you. As Banks around the world have officially announced they will be cutting close to 200K jobs over the coming three to five years most

MARKETS Germany’s Economy Struggling While still the largest economy in the EU, Germany’s GDP has been shrinking over the past couple of years. German manufacturing has been struggling and their energy sector is trying to navigate away from relying on Russian natural gas. ON THE MOVE HSBC Promotes Lisa McGeough Amidst continuing restructuring, HSBC has

COMPLIANCE Macy’s Accountant Hid $154M in Delivery Expenses If you’re an accountant and you ask your boss for raise next time, bring up this case study and tell your boss be glad you didn’t do this: an accountant at department store Macy’s managed to hide $154M erroneously reported as “delivery expenses”. Investigation is on-going… M&A

COMPLIANCE US Court Rejects SEC’s Proposed Rule for Treasury Dealers A federal judge in Texas invalidated a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule that required certain traders in the Treasury market to register as broker-dealers, stating the rule exceeded the SEC’s authority. This decision, marked the third SEC regulation overturned in a year. The

DEBT MARKETS Banks Sell the Most Bonds Since 2016 Banks went berserk issuing bonds, raising a whopping US$23.5 billion in ONE day last week. This was the most sold since 2016. I guess the Bull market for equities is over? MARKETS Fintech Klarna Files for IPO The buy-now-pay-later fintech, Klarna, has filed for an IPO

COMPLIANCE More Details on TD Bank’s Fraud Indictment Additional details of TD Bank’s recent fraud indictment have emerged: A former TD Bank employee, Daria Sewell, caught in the middle of this fraud case is now being indicted by Manhattan’s District Attorney. The alleged fraud case accuses the former employee of sharing and leaking customer data

COMPLIANCE Canada Lobbies for Overhaul in Crime Reporting Canadian banks have not had a good time when it comes to anti-money laundering. The Canadian Bankers Association is lobbying the Canadian Government to overhaul and get rid of the current system that banks use to report suspicious activity like money laundering and follow the system used

MARKETS Canada Makes Largest Rate Cuts As the Bank of Canada (BOC) continues to rein in inflation, the BOC made its largest interest rate cut last week, lowering rates by 50 basis points to 3.75%. COMPLIANCE Goldman Sachs & Apple Get Fined Tech giant Apple and Goldman Sachs were fined $89 million by the Consumer

AI IN FINANCE AI Helped US Treasury Stop $4b Worth of Fraud Wondering what the big hoopla is about with AI? Well, the US Treasury department has leveraged the use of AI to stop a whopping $4 billion worth of financial fraud in 2024 alone! Let’s talk metrics, that’s a 6 times improvement over the

COMPLIANCE TD Bank Smacked with Penalties for Money Laundering Failures The Canadian banking giant is facing massive penalties in the US for failures in its money laundering compliance. TD Bank faces fines of $3 billion, growth limits to their US operations in the form of asset caps within the U.S. market. The penalties are similar

AI IN BANKING BMO Appoints Chief AI & Data Officer As AI dominates everything we see right now, Canadian bank, BMO has appointed Kristin Milchanowski, as its Chief AI & Data Officer. The role will focus on plans for the bank to adopt AI, including applications in data, robotics and analytics. CRYPTOCURRENCIES Visa to Launch

COMPLIANCE CIBC Slapped with Fine from US Regulators The Canadian bank is facing a total fine of US$42M due to poor record-keeping and using inappropriate communication methods (e.g. text messaging). The fines are imposed by U.S. regulators: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). COMPLIANCE DOJ Cracks Down on Visa

BANKING New TD Bank CEO Canada’s 2nd largest bank, TD Bank, will have a new CEO come April 2025, Raymond Chun. Chun will take over from current CEO, Bharat Masrani retires next year. Chun could be considered a “TD Bank Lifer”, having joined the bank back in 1992 with their internal management training program. COMPLIANCE

AI IN FINANCE Oracle’s Netsuite Adds New AI Tools for Financial Security Oracle’s Netsuite, its cloud-based management system, announced some fancy new AI tools, including the ability to detect anomalies in your financial data to alert you to potential problems before it escalates to something bigger. Also added is the ability to interact with our

MARKETS Goldman Sachs Sees Economic Boon with a Harris Win As the battle between Trump and Harris nears in November, Goldman Sachs predicts better economic growth from a Kamala Harris win. MARKETS Foreign Investors Exit Asian Tech Equities August saw large outflow from Asian Tech equities from overseas investors as investors finding valuations too rich

COMMODITIES Central Banks on Gold Buying Spree Wondering why gold has been doing well this year? It’s because Central Banks in emerging markets are on a gold buying spree. The buying spree has setup gold as the second best performing asset (just behind crypto). Forget Dogecoin, go get those gold coins! AI in BANKING Banks

BANKING TD Bank Licking Its Wounds One of Canada’s banking giants, TD Bank, suffered its first quarterly loss in over two decades and is dealing with a $2.6 billion fine from U.S. regulators for failing in its anti-money laundering controls. TD Bank CEO, Bharat Masrani, assures everyone that this is only a temporary setback and

AI in FINANCE How Mastercard Is Incorporating AI This is a great dive into how Mastercard is incorporating AI to combat fraudulent transactions across billions of transactions and how the company handles massive amounts of data. BANKING Scotiabank Expands Network in the US One of Canada’s Big Six banks, Scotiabank, is acquiring a 14.9% stake

M&A Chevron-Hess Deal Hits Delay Chevron’s planned acquisition of Hess has hit another snag, due to the international arbitration panel that is handling Exxon’s right-of-first-refusal dispute regarding Hess’ stake in an oil project in Guyana. The panel is slated to make a decision three months after the schedule hearing in May 2025. The deal is also

FINANCE Finance Pro’s Could Automate More In a recent Mckinsey survey, they found that only 1% of CFO’s have automated more than 76% of their financial processes. While technological advancement has been available at a breakneck speed, the balance of evaluating the effectiveness, safety and practicalness has been slow to catch up. FINTECH Revolut Gets

FINTECH Revolut See Record Profits British fintech darling, Revolut, saw record profits in 2023 mainly due to a surge in users and interest income. While the fintech startup has seen a range of problems with their reporting compliance in recent years, they’re hoping those days are behind them. The positive performance comes at a good

AI in BANKING Goldman Sachs Rolls Out AI Assistant The investment bank has rolled out their own internal AI coding assistant for internal developers. The AI assistant is run off their own internal platform. This internal platform allows Goldman Sachs to fine-tune the models with its own internal data in a safe way and that

PRIVATE BANKING Deutsche Private Bank Cuts External Consultants Spending The German bank is cutting its spending on external consultants by 70%(!). The private bank’s head, Claudio de Sanctis, says: “We need to bring our expert knowledge . . . to fix our recurring problems ourselves”. Adding that the lower budget for spending on consultants will be here to stay.

INVESTMENT BANKING Investment Banking is Back Baby! JP Morgan raised its investment banking revenue forecasts for Q2 by 25% to 30%. The bank is bullish on investment banking business surging on capital markets. BANKING National Bank of Canada Acquires Canada Western Bank The National Bank of Canada has agreed to acquire Canada Western Bank in

MARKETS Texas Wants Your IPO Listing Financial firms BlackRock and Citadel are leading a group to setup a stock exchange in Dallas, Texas that is less “woke” and has less barriers than their counterparts in New York. While “wokeism” is not something one usually associates with a stock exchange (we’re politicising stock exchanges now???), the

FINANCE Saudi Aramco Files New Shares Sale Saudi Arabia is set to sell new shares for the oil giant Saudi Aramco. The offering is set to bring in approximately $12 billion for the kingdom in order to fund the Crown Prince’s economic diversification goal away from purely oil. BANKING Canada’s Big Five Banks Report Q2

MARKETS The Bond King Has Spoken, He Forecasts… Jeff Gundlach, the CEO of investment management company DoubleLine Capital, aka the Bond King, forecasts a recession for the U.S. this year. BANKING TD Bank Beats Earnings Forecast Amidst Money Laundering Turmoil Canada’s second-largest lender, TD Bank, beat earnings forecasts last quarter despite being mired in a

BANKING Digitisation of Banking is Worrying Regulators Cloud computing, AI, Fintech, open banking and more are creating new risks in banking are starting to catch the attention of banking regulators. The Basel Committee is pondering new regulations to help mitigate all the new found risks with the adoption of technology in finance. Maybe they need

CRYPTO FTX Customers Exhale a Sigh of Relief The FTX saga continues, but this is a somewhat happy ending for former customers of the sunk crypto firm:  It looks like most of FTX’s customers will get their money back (with interest!). That’s good news. MARKETS Sweden Blinks, Cuts Rates Switzerland was the first to rich

COMPLIANCE SocGen Trading Scandal in Asia Two traders from SocGen Hong Kong’s branch are mired in a “scandal” about high-risk trading that went undetected by the bank’s risk management systems. And of course in the reality-tv and social media world we live in, one of the traders in question posted his side of the story

MARKETS Bank Indonesia Raises Rates in Support of Rupiah The strong US dollar triggered Bank Indonesia (Indonesia’s Central Bank) to raise rates by 25 bps, the first time in six months, to support the Rupiah. The rate increase took many analysts by surprise. CRYPTO Binance Faces Lawsuit from Ontario Due to tight regulations in Canada,

COMPLIANCE Canadian Banks Have Become Infamous for This Canadian banks have long had a reputation to being “stable” and reserved in their behaviours. But, one thing Canadian banks are infamous for is: money laundering. This was triggered by a report that found branches of TD Bank and RBC in Ontario had allowed factions of an

M&A Google Rumoured Interested to Acquire Hubspot Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is rumoured to be interested in acquiring Hubspot, a major-player in the SaaS CRM market. Google is seeing and feeling the pinch of the impacts of AI and looking to diversify its business with the CRM behemoth. Although, no official deal has been made,

BANKING Commercial Banks Stocking Up On Treasuries US commercial banks are stocking up on Treasuries at levels not seen since the pandemic. AI Intuit Bets Big on AI Known for its accounting software, Intuit, is betting big on AI. CEO, Sasan Goodarzi, says Intuit’s strategy is to become an AI-driven expert platform. FRAUD SBF Sentenced

BANKING Citigroup Investigates Bullying Complaint by Senior Banker A senior IPO banker with Citigroup is being investigated for a bullying and harassment complaint. The complaint is made alleging at least two incidents abusive behaviour towards subordinates. BANKING Open Banking Coming to Canada An open banking framework is where banks would share customer’s data (with their

AI in FINANCE JP Morgan Offers Free AI Cash Management Tool JP Morgan has developed an AI-powered cash flow management tool, named Cash Flow Intelligence, that helps corporate treasury departments analyze and forecast cash flows. This AI tool can help treasury departments cut manual work by up to 90%. The key thing to note is

RISK MANAGEMENT NYCB Shares Tumble Due to Internal Control Problems New York Community Bancorp (NYCB) shares tumbled 25% upon disclosures of problems with internal controls & risk management. Also, leading to leadership change effective immediately, the executive chairman, Alessandro DiNello, will take over as President and CEO. BANKING JP Morgan Partners with HSBC and StanChart

M&A Capital One Merges with Discover Capital One announced last week plans to acquire Discover Financial Services to be one of the industry’s largest mergers in recent history. Experts say this merger will help Capital One create a more closed-loop environment, similar to what American Express has achieved, giving insights into customer purchase behaviours. IPO