Japan

The merger involves Fukuoka Financial Group and local rival Eighteenth Bank.

Profits could be slashed by up to $900,000 over the next three years.

One of the reasons is that it supports risk-adjusted profitability.

Sources told Reuters that the head of the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (BTMU), the core business of Japan's biggest "megabank," has decided to step down for health reasons barely a year into the job.

The reorganisation is expected to increase pre-tax profits by around US$43b.

They are most likely to issue these in USD.

The city's cheaper rents, moderate taxes attract MUFG and Mizuho.

This is after a successful pilot programme for a cloud-based payments platform.

Average overseas NPL ratio stood at 0.7% as of end-September 2016.

Domestic loans would need to have grown at least 5%.

Industries across the board are undergoing structural change. This change extends beyond individual firms and spills across industrial sectors. Other industries that have been exposed to the tide of technology-driven structural changes have through the process harnessed technology to be reinvented as new industries befitting this evolution in industrial structure. The financial industry traditionally has been far from the vanguard of this change.

Blame it on the rising costs of foreign-currency funding.

Total assets were up 5.5% in November 2016.

This post addresses trends in Fintech, with a focus on Robo-advisors and the unique attributes of Japan's financial market.

For the last few years, Japanese banks have aggressively expanded their assets overseas, which has helped increased their stubbornly low profitability even after the introduction of negative interest rates by BoJ. Such a successful overseas strategy, profitability-wise, may be at risk due to US$ liquidity developments at a global level.

Banks face maturity and higher interest risks.