Britain has called on banks to support households finding it difficult to make payments on mortgages during the cost of living crisis.

HSBC is closing a quarter of its branches across the United Kingdom from April 2023 after the bank failed to recover customer loss since the pandemic.

UK police on Thursday said their biggest ever counter-fraud operation had disrupted an international criminal network targeting hundreds of thousands of victims in millions of spam phone calls.

It's the best of times, it's the worst of times. At least when it comes to mining coal.

As inflation rockets and recession looms, many British businesses are struggling to secure affordable bank finance, piling pressure on the embattled UK government as it unveiled a budget aimed at reviving the economy.

Britain's biggest domestic bank Lloyds has offered UK staff a minimum 2,000 pounds ($2,242) pay rise, a source with knowledge of the talks told Reuters, as lenders and employees across the sector begin annual pay talks that could see wage bills soar.

Russia said on Wednesday it would resume its participation in a deal freeing up grain exports from Ukraine, reversing a move that world leaders warned would increase hunger globally.

Having hiked mortgage rates after political turmoil drove up the cost of borrowing, British banks are now cutting home loan prices, albeit slowly, as markets calm since Liz Truss's government collapsed and Rishi Sunak took power.

British banks are bracing for a potential tax hit to their profits as the government scrambles to plug an estimated 40 billion pound ($45 billion) hole in its finances.

From 1925, the Bank of England had kept interest rates high to keep the pound at a fixed parity to gold

Wall Street giant JPMorgan is planning to double the size of its workforce at fledgling British retail bank Chase to at least 2,000 within two years, the CEO of the venture told Reuters, despite losses and some investor scepticism.

The Bank of England said on Thursday it would move to a "more British style of regulation" for the country's huge financial services industry as it seeks to take advantage of Brexit.

Lloyds Banking Group has been hit by more than 300 million pounds ($348 million) of suspected fraud linked to COVID-19 pandemic-era recovery loans for small businesses, the highest among big bank peers, according to government data.

British households are feeling "a sense of exasperation" about the surging cost of living which has pushed consumer sentiment to its lowest since at least 1974, according to the country's longest-running survey of household finances.

European banks this week offered flashes of surprisingly good news on profits, but some executives spoke of a bleak outlook for the rest of the year.

Britain's biggest domestic lender Lloyds Banking Group contacted 2 million of its 26 million customers in May after identifying they could need extra support to cope with soaring food and energy prices and rising debt costs.

The trillion-dollar retail investment express is losing steam, dampening the fortunes of British trading platforms that boomed during lockdowns on the back of a meme stocks frenzy.

The Bank of England said on Friday it was satisfied lenders had taken steps to ensure they were no longer "too big to fail" in any future crisis, though it found shortcomings at three major banks.

One of the first direct consequences of Brexit, the move by UK lenders to shut expat services is said to affect tens of thousands of people across Europe.

COVID-19 is forcing governments into a persistent balancing act between saving lives and preventing economic devastation.

RBS shares sold at 46 percent less than the 502 pence-a-share the government invested in 2008 and 2009.

McKinsey & Company states that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians.

The introduction of Open Banking earlier has made it easier for fintechs and other providers like internet companies to enter the market by using open APIs.

The Winklevoss twins and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen are among those at the top of Forbes' cryptocurrency rich list who will have seen their Bitcoin billions slump this week.

Carlos Tapang of Washington alleges that T-Mobile's poor security allowed hackers to steal thousands of dollars in bitcoin.

Carstens said many people believe so far that, given the limited size of virtual currencies, "concerns about them do not rise to a systemic level".

Bitcoin lost 30% of its value last week, ending at $8,291.87, less than half its $19,000 value reached in November.

Around £90 billion that is illegally laundered in the UK each year will soon be within reach of government officials.

Ex Lloyds forex chief Darren Coote has also invested in Cobalt.

Brian Cohen is CFO of BitSight, which provides companies with security ratings.