• Rod Eddington, the new chief executive of British Airways, will consider the airline’s first-ever compulsory redundancies in an effort to cut capacity and costs. BA has also received approaches for Go, its low-cost airline.
Eddington will discuss the future of the subsidiary – which may also involve demerging it – in talks with Go’s chief executive Barbara Cassani in the next six months.
The former chairman of Ansett, the Australian airline, took up his new post last week amid plans to cut a further £1bn of costs, expected to involve more than 6,500 job losses.
He has instigated a fresh review and is reported as saying the airline can no longer avoid compulsory redundancies, and that total job losses could be anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000. Ft.com
Halifax logs on
• Halifax bank sought to take on the UK clearing banks and Internet-based new entrants when it unveiled the product range and business proposition for Intelligent Finance (IF), its stand-alone Internet bank.
Halifax chief executive James Crosby said IF’s product proposition would target the clearing banks’ core markets with “some precision”, taking Halifax “right to the heart of clearing bank profitability”.
Chief executive of IF Jim Spowart said the new bank is also an “attack on the new entrants who have some product range and are known for loss-leading products”. Ft.com
True cost of credit
• Banks which have ditched the personal touch are losing up to £15bn in lost revenue every year by blacklisting millions of Britons.
More than eight million people in Britain – one in five adults – are on a credit blacklist, according to figures from Datamonitor. They cannot use plastic cards, draw money from banks or take out HP agreements.
Datamonitor reveals that 22.9 per cent of people aged between 18 and 65 would have applications for credit rejected from high street banks and building societies.
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