Text Here for featured item. The Co-operative Bank has issued a trading update in which it reveals that profit for the second half of 2008 has continued to rise, despite difficult market conditions. Compared with the same period of 2007, income has increased while. The Co-operative Bank has issued a...

The Co-operative Bank has issued a trading update in which it reveals that profit for the second half of 2008 has continued to rise, despite difficult market conditions. Compared with the same period of 2007, income has increased while costs and bad debt charges have declined. The bank makes mention...

The Bank of Japan’s Policy Board has announced that it is to keep interest rates unchanged at 0.1%. The decision to retain the current uncollateralised overnight call rate was made without dissent when the vote was cast. The global economic downturn has hit Japanese exports significantly, with bad...

Nationwide is keen to support savers during the recession as according to the building society, one quarter of Britons are currently unable to put anything aside. Mortgages director, Andy McQueen, has therefore identified five different savings styles to encourage people to explore their savings potential. According...

RBS insurance subsidiary, NIG, has been appointed to a panel of insurers that is launching new commercial property owners’ and let property owners’ policies, through PowerPlace. Towergate subsidiary, PowerPlace, is currently used by over 160 brokers operating off the Open GI platform. NIG will take...

Bay Finance has advised individuals and firms to be on their guard when the clocks go forward on Saturday 28 March. The advent of British Summer Time (BST) can sometimes herald a spike in the number of burglaries committed. Lighter evenings can also encourage thieves to go after goods left in the garden,...

Halifax Home Insurance is warning households that thefts from gardens are likely to jump again this year. According to the insurer, summer 2008 saw a 63% rise in the number of claims made for items stolen from gardens, compared to a year earlier. London saw the greatest influx of such claims but garden...

In an update on its thematic review of sale of Payment Protection Insurance (PPI), the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has set out that, due to the poor findings from its recent work, it is escalating its regulatory intervention. The FSA will consider the action it will take to deal with ongoing non-compliant...

The recession has led to a huge surge in tenants abandoning their properties to avoid paying rent, according to the Letting Protection Service (LPS). The figures show that the number of landlords claiming for lost rent soared tenfold over the last year. In October 2007, 91 landlords experienced a runaway...

Rents dropped across the residential lettings sector in the final quarter of 2008 as would-be-sellers continued to flood the rental market with unsellable properties, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). Between the third and fourth quarters of 2008, the net balance of chartered...