UK

The share price of Paris-listed Ingenico plummeted on Friday, even as the Cac 40 index rose, after it was reported that the firm was considering a merger with UK payment processing company Worldpay.

Lloyds Bank was at the head of a stack of FIG trades that hit the market on Tuesday, despite European stocks diving again on poor manufacturing data from China.

The UK Debt Management Office plans to reopen an ultra-long index-linker in the second half of September. The deal will be the sovereign’s third syndication of its financial year.

Dealers have cut their fixed income inventories by 75% since 2008, according to staff at the Bank of England, who questioned bond market liquidity in a timely blog post on Thursday.

The UK’s gargantuan £4.2bn infrastructure project, the Thames Tideway Tunnel, will delight institutional investors and bankers alike with as much as £2.8bn of rare inflation-linked bond issuance. Elly Whittaker reports.

Sanne, the corporate administration provider, spent £7m on transaction costs for its initial public offering in March, the firm said in its half year results.

Was it all a dream? At the start of the week the markets were in the throes of a full-blown panic, with talk of “Black Monday” and plentiful comparisons with the Lehman collapse. Yet barely three days later, the iTraxx Europe was back trading at 70.5bp, exactly the same level it was quoted at a week ago.

Since March 2009 Britain’s benchmark official rate has been 0.5% — the lowest rate in the Bank of England’s 320 year history, its long term average being about 4.5%. But recently BoE's governor Mark Carney speculated that it will begin to rise from the end of the year to around 2%, possibly heralding the end of the era of cheap money.

A member of Royal Bank of Scotland’s covered bond and SSA research team has left the bank.

Nomura has put Benedict Nielsen and Simon Deeny at risk of redundancy, as part of the extensive global markets headcount review it started two weeks ago.

The UK Debt Management Office is likely to pick a reopening of its 2068 inflation-linked Gilt for its September syndication, after holding a consultation with Gilt-edged Market Makers and investors on Monday.

Closely following Markit’s launch of a foreign exchange trade confirmation service, the company has agreed to acquire DealHub, a provider of FX trade processing and trading services.