Weekly Global News Wrap: Citi to cut 20,000 jobs in two years; Spain’s BBVA expects higher dividend payout

And crypto firms in UK are introducing new risk assessment and profile tests ahead of stricter regulations.

From Reuters:
Citigroup will cut 20,000 jobs over the next two years, the bank said on Friday, after reporting a $1.8b quarterly loss driven by a string of one-off charges.

Shares of the bank - which has rolled out a multi-year effort to cut bureaucracy, increase profits and boost a stock that has lagged peers - fell more than 1%.

"The fourth quarter was very clearly disappointing," CEO Jane Fraser told analysts. "We know that 2024 is critical."

From Reuters:
Spain’s BBVA expects to pay a significantly higher dividend in 2023 than the 0.43 euros per share it paid out in 2022, Chairman Carlos Torres said in a post on the bank’s website.

"With a growing profit, a declining number of shares and a constant dividend policy - with distributions between 40 to 50% of profit - we see how the dividend per share is clearly growing year after year," Torres wrote.

In October, the bank paid an interim dividend of 0.16 euros against its 2023 results, a 33.3% increase over the interim dividend paid in October 2022.

From CNBC:
Coinbase, Crypto.com, Gemini and other cryptocurrency exchanges are warning users in the U.K. that they’ll need to start filling out risk assessments and investment questionnaires aimed at testing their financial knowledge.

It comes ahead of tough new rules on the advertising of digital asset products in the country.

The firms have told users in Britain that, starting Monday, they will be required to complete a declaration about what type of investor they are, and respond to a questionnaire on a range of aspects of financial services and regulation to continue using their respective platforms.