THE DAILY BRIEFING

TRANSFER PROBE The boss of Standard Chartered, Bill Winters, is helping Singapore investigate a dubious £1.1bn cash transfer. LENDER BOOST Online firm Lendable, which lends money from big investors, has been given £300m from Castle Trust.

CAPITAL IDEA Start-up investor Balderton Capital has raised a £281m fund for entrepreneurs. RICH PICKINGS Boris Collardi, the boss of Swiss bank Julius Baer, has defected to rival Pictet. BANKING BILL Banks spent £10.2bn on consultants in 2016, Source Global Research said.

STORE START-UPS To bring in new ideas, John Lewis is investing £100,000 in the dining app WeFiFo and the delivery service Exaactly.

NUMBER CRUNCHING British tech firm Wandisco has joined Amazon on a cloud computing service to improve data transfer. MERGER NEWS Bosses at Worldpay expect its £9.3bn merger with Vantiv to complete in January as it reported a 3.5pc rise in third-quarter profits to £62.5m. SCRAP VALUE Steel firm GFG Alliance has pledged to recycle more of the 7.2m tonnes of scrap exported every year in the UK. GENERATION GAIN Onshore wind farms Zephyr and Infinis Wind have merged to form Ventient Energy, now the UK’s No3. NOBEL PRIZE The maker of Dulux, Akzo Nobel, is buying Thai powder coater V.Powder-tech.

ENERGY SAPPING Non-executive directors Dr Yousef AlAwadi and Mohamed Yusof Rafie have resigned from Kuwait Energy. TOTAL SELL-OUT Oil firm Total is selling two Norwegian oil fields to rival Statoil for £1.08bn. GAS GAIN AIM-listed explorer Prospex Oil & Gas has found gas at its 50pc-owned Romanian well.

IN CREDIT The credit rating of miner Petropavlovsk has been raised from B minus to B by S&P.

STORE BOSS Family-owned department store Fenwick has hired former Argos executive Robbie Feather as chief executive.

BIGGER DIGGER Construction rental firm Plant Hire UK has bought 450 JCBs for £25million.