Are luxury cars untouched by economic slowdown and inflation? The latest results from Italian luxury automaker Lamborghini suggests so. CFO Paolo Poma believes the company can even improve its profitability, despite economic headwinds. Global Finance spoke with Poma—who has been managing director and CFO since 2017—when he recently visited New York.
Global Finance editor Andrea Fiano interviews Ásgeir Jónsson, Central Bank Governor of Iceland during Global Finance's World's Best Bank Awards at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on October 15th.
The Bank of China (BOC) announced in December that it had issued $2.8 billion (19.4 billion yuan) of bonds on a blockchain platform, a first for China and evidence of its pivot to digital ledger technology.
The bond is a two-year fixed interest rate product with a final coupon rate of 3.25% and a subscription multiple of approximately 2.7 times, according to a statement by the BOC, one of China’s big four state-owned commercial banks. The system the bank developed “uses the blockchain network as the underlying platform to support on-chain interaction and deposit of key information and documents during the bond issuance process.” The funds are being raised to support China’s small and micro-size enterprises.
Thailand and HSBC Singapore were also running blockchain-based bond issuance pilots as of late 2019. Issuers cite reduced costs, greater investor access and heightened efficiency as reasons for embracing digital ledger technology.
Santander Bank, a DLT leader, in September issued what it claimed was the first end-to-end blockchain bond, with an early redemption in December. The deal proved “unequivocally that a debt security can be managed through its full lifecycle on a blockchain, public in this case,” says John Whelan, head of Digital Investment Banking at Santander.