Tuesday newspaper round-up: Royal Mail, RTGS, Pensions
Royal Mail and Amazon are set create over 30,000 temporary jobs for the Christmas season, The Daily Telegraph reported on Tuesday.
Amazon.Com Inc.
$173.67
13:09 25/04/24
International Distributions Services
274.00p
17:09 25/04/24
Total
€68.06
16:39 25/04/24
Anticipating a sharp increase in demand, Amazon plans to hire 13,000 extra staff to work in its eight distribution centres and customer service centres throughout the UK during the festive season, while Royal Mail will take on an additional 19,000 employees.
“We’re excited to be creating 13,000 seasonal jobs, hundreds of which will lead to permanent, full-time positions,” said John Tagawa, Amazon director of UK operations.
The Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, has ordered an investigation after the failure of a system delayed hundreds of thousands of payments, the Guardian reported.
The Real Time Gross Settlement payment system, which banks use to transfer large sums of money, crashed on Monday, creating problems for homebuyers waiting for money to be transferred to pay for their new homes.
Carney promised a “thorough, independent review” after MPs demanded answers into how the system had failed for almost 10 hours.
A “wall of money” is set to shift out of guaranteed final-salary pension schemes and into riskier money-purchase funds as they move to take advantage of the chancellor’s retirement market revolution.
Nearly 30% of those who save into final-salary pensions schemes are expected to transfer out of it so as to make the most of the increased flexibility afforded by the above changes, Hymans Robertson said in its annual assessment of FTSE 350 schemes, according to The Times.
Ofgem, the UK energy regulator, has defended price comparison websites against accusations that they are deliberately hiding the cheapest deals in favour of suppliers who pay them commission, the Financial Times reported.
Ofgem said a totally transparent process would “ruin” the sites’ business models, in response to an angry reaction by politicians and energy following an investigation by consumer group The Big Deal that found revealed popular online switching sites ComparetheMarket, uSwitch, GoCompare, Moneysupermarket and Confused.com gave more prominence to money-saving tariffs that generated commission payments of up to £60 a time.
The amount of equity released by people from their properties between July and September reached £375m. That was the biggest amount for any single quarter since records began, back in 2002.
The estimate comes from the Equity Release Council, which now says the figure for the first nine months of the year stands above £1bn. That is the equivalent of over an entire year’s lending during the period between 2009 and 2012. It comes as retirees look to tap their housing wealth when considering their financial plans for later life, The Times reports.
French prime minister Manuel Valls paid tribute on Tuesday to deceased Total chief executive officer Christophe de Margerie. The business captain was traveling on a jet taxiing for take-off at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, on Monday, when it hit a snowplough.
He was the only passenger, along with three crew members, on board the Dassault Falcon business jet. The accident occurred just minutes before midnight local Moscow time, The Daily Telegraph writes.