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New Sipp dealing account has no annual management fee

New Sipp dealing account has no annual management fee




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Yorkshire Building Society’s tracker-to-fixed mortgages

Fixed rate that applies in years three to five has been cut




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Chelsea’s five-year fixed-rate mortgage

3.19 per cent deal comes with a fee of £1,495




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Cashback for Santander mortgage customers

1% cashback for mortgage customers with 123 account




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Why US mortgage rates should be even lower

Uncertainty over loan forbearance prevents savings being passed on




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Bonus restrictions hamper City mortgage borrowers

Lenders reluctant to count payments as affordability checks tighten




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Avast’s rotten week is a lesson in crisis management

Shares in security software maker dropped sharply after revelations of data harvesting




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Where the fund manager consolidation narrative goes wrong

Optimism, not pessimism, could spark future takeover offers for UK investment houses




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Mexico’s Grupo Lala chief to join JAB beverages arm

Mauricio Leyva to advise German family company on expanding beverages arm




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Finance on Instagram: what’s not to like? 

Money matters are a surprise hit on the photo-sharing app




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Simple rules for managing your money

Learning how to budget is a vital skill to master at the beginning of a career




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Coronavirus: Congress passes $484bn interim stimulus package — as it happened

US job gains since financial crisis wiped out. Switzerland faces sharpest economic contraction since 1974. UK and eurozone business activity hit by historic collapse this month as lockdowns choked Europe’s biggest economies.

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Erik Fyrwald: Changing the image of the agrochemicals industry

Concerns over climate change led the chemicals veteran to dramatically transform Syngenta




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Kairn is a new task manager focused on speed

Meet Kairn, a new startup coming out of stealth today with a sneak peek of what the company has been working on. As Wunderlist shuts down, Kairn wants to prove that there’s still room for an innovative task-management service. “We’re building a task manager that is smart and focused on capturing tasks,” co-founder and CEO […]




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Deep Render raises £1.6M for image compression tech that mimics ‘neural processes of the human eye’

Deep Render, a London startup and spin-out of Imperial College that is applying machine learning to image compression, has raised £1.6 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Pentech, with participation from Speedinvest. Founded in mid-2017 by Arsalan Zafar and Chri Besenbruch, who met while studying Computer Science at Imperial College London, Deep Render […]




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World Bank’s pandemic bond failure; ESG shakes virtual AGM agendas; BlackRock’s green Fed fight

Your guide to the investment and business revolution you can’t afford to ignore




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From balcony concerts to cyber drinks — the power of ritual in the corona age

Under lockdown, communities are finding new ways to voice their defiance, anger and support




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Exclusive: Shake Shack CEO talks bailout failings; climate chaos ahead for mortgage market; EU green plans charge forward




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My pity package of Chinese face masks sends a bigger message

As US health workers suffer from inadequate protection, there are signs of a shifting world order




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Instagram ‘pods’ game the algorithm by coordinating likes and comments on millions of posts

Researchers at NYU have identified hundreds of groups of Instagram users, some with thousands of members, that systematically exchange likes and comments in order to game the service’s algorithms and boost visibility. In the process, they also trained machine learning agents to identify whether a post has been juiced in this way. “Pods,” as they’ve […]




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Equity Monday: Intel covets Moovit, two early stage rounds, and Uber’s earnings

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a jumpstart for your week. Equity had a busy last few days, so to help you catch up: Friday’s episode was a lot of fun (Duolingo, Figma, OMERS, and aquafaba), and we also dropped an Equity Shot on Saturday, digging into the first major technology earnings week. […]




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Lagarde must resist pressure on inflation target

The new president should ensure governments grasp the interaction of fiscal and monetary policy




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Eurozone stability is under threat again

Without a co-ordinated response, national stimulus policies will end up increasing imbalances




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Samsung’s new ‘eco’ TV packing transforms into cat houses, shelves and magazine racks

Here’s a nice thing. It’s not revolutionary or life-changing, but it’s nice. And right now we can all use a little bit of nice. Earlier this month, Samsung announced an addition to its line of “eco-packing” that will turn TV boxes in a wide variety of different “furniture.” I use furniture in quotes here because […]




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Amazon Q1 beats on net sales of $75.5B but posts net income of $2.5B, down $1B on a year ago

Amazon has been one of the biggest names synonymous with how the consumer masses are experiencing life under lockdown: its site lets you buy anything from soup to nuts, from books to baking pans for all your sourdough; and via its streaming services, it gives you many ways to stay entertained. But it can also […]




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Sinch acquires SAP’s Digital Interconnect messaging business for $250M

M&A activity has generally slowed down in the weeks since the novel coronavirus took a grip on the world, but there have been some pockets of activity in the tech industry when the price is right or when the divestment/acquisition just makes sense. The world of messaging brings us the latest development in that theme: SAP, […]




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Microsoft to open first data center in New Zealand as cloud usage grows

In spite of being in the midst of a pandemic sowing economic uncertainty, one area that continues to thrive is cloud computing. Perhaps that explains why Microsoft, which saw Azure grow 59% in its most recent earnings report, announced plans to open a new data center in New Zealand once it receives approval from the […]




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Microsoft and AWS exchange poisoned pen blog posts in latest Pentagon JEDI contract spat

Microsoft and Amazon are at it again as the fight for the Defense Department JEDI contract continues. In a recent series of increasingly acerbic pronouncements, the two companies continue their ongoing spat over the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract spoils. As you may recall (or not), last fall in a surprise move, the DoD selected […]




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COVID-19 quarantine boosts smart speaker usage among U.S. adults, particularly younger users

The coronavirus outbreak has driven more consumers to turn to their smart speakers for news, information, music and entertainment, according to new data released today by NPR and Edison Research. Around three-quarters of U.S. adults 18 and up said their routines have been impacted due to COVID-19 and their media habits have changed as a […]




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Fund managers back equities for 2012

What the experts are forecasting for next year




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How can I manage the succession of our family business? 

My mother has early onset dementia and her health is deteriorating rapidly




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Can I cut our mortgage costs by negotiating a lower rate? 

Our household income has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic




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I’ve been asked to take a pay cut, should I agree?

My employer has said that if we don’t cut salaries redundancies will be on the cards




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Boris Johnson’s agenda is over

Voters will not tolerate another NHS winter flu crisis with too few medical staff




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Apple’s iPad Pro Magic Keyboard arrives next week, ahead of schedule

The global supply chain is currently being squeezed from all angles amid a global pandemic. At least one product, however, will arrive ahead of schedule. Originally planned for a May arrival, the iPad Pro’s new trackpad-sporting Magic Keyboard is up for preorder now and set to start shipping next week. You can read all of […]




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Apple’s Magic Keyboard Review: Laptop class typing comes to iPad Pro

Over the past two years, I’ve typed nearly every word I’ve written while traveling on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard Folio. For more on why, you can see my iPad Pro review here. For the purposes of this look at the new Magic Keyboard, though, you should probably just know two things about the old […]




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Twitter says Elon Musk’s tweets advocating against expert COVID-19 guidance don’t violate its rules

Twitter has said that tweets posted early Tuesday morning by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that irresponsibly call for restrictions put in place to defend against the spread of COVID-19 don’t violate its guidelines around inaccurate or disputed information about the coronavirus that could cause harm. Musk tweeted a series of things on Tuesday, […]




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Oxwash bags $1.7M for a cleaner spin on laundry

Oxwash, a UK-based laundry startup that’s aiming to disrupt traditional but environmentally costly washing and dry-cleaning processes by using ozone to sterilize fabrics at lower temperatures, along with electric cargo bikes for hyper local pick ups and deliveries, has bagged a £1.4 million (~$1.7M) seed. Backers in the funding round include TrueSight Ventures, Biz Stone […]




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Deep Render raises £1.6M for image compression tech that mimics ‘neural processes of the human eye’

Deep Render, a London startup and spin-out of Imperial College that is applying machine learning to image compression, has raised £1.6 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Pentech, with participation from Speedinvest. Founded in mid-2017 by Arsalan Zafar and Chri Besenbruch, who met while studying Computer Science at Imperial College London, Deep Render […]




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Longtime VC Todd Chaffee of IVP says late-stage scene is now ‘M&A world’

Todd Chaffee has long been one of the most senior members of the late-stage venture firm Institutional Venture Partners. Chaffee joined IVP in 2000 after logging six years at Visa, and went on to lead rounds in numerous prominent later-stage companies, many (but not all) of which have gone public, including Coinbase, Compass, Klarna, Kayak, […]




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Wealth management could soon cost less than you’d think

Costs are falling — but it still looks far more expensive than it should




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Roadside recovery and an aggravating communications breakdown

In an overleveraged world headed for economic slowdown, don’t rely on the heavily indebted for rescue




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The tragedy of two failing superpowers

To address the pandemic, China and the US must not only function. They must function together




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Monetary financing demands sober management

It is simply another policy tool, neither the royal road to hyperinflation nor a cure-all




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Crisis lays bare risks of financial leverage, again

This time it is capital markets, rather than banks, that have to reform




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Greylock’s Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo to talk fundraising at Early Stage SF 2020

Early Stage SF is around the corner, on April 28 in San Francisco, and we are more than excited for this brand new event. The intimate gathering of founders, VCs, operators and tech industry experts is all about giving founders the tools they need to find success, no matter the challenge ahead of them. Struggling […]




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Russia’s push back against big tech has major consequences for Apple

Tech companies are getting so large that Russia is fast-tracking laws aimed at developing "digital sovereignty." How will these regulations affect tech companies looking to do business in the country?




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R&D Roundup: Sweat power, Earth imaging, testing ‘ghostdrivers’

I see far more research articles than I could possibly write up. This column collects the most interesting of those papers and advances, along with notes on why they may prove important in the world of tech and startups. This week: one step closer to self-powered on-skin electronics; people dressed as car seats; how to […]




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Amazon Q1 beats on net sales of $75.5B but posts net income of $2.5B, down $1B on a year ago

Amazon has been one of the biggest names synonymous with how the consumer masses are experiencing life under lockdown: its site lets you buy anything from soup to nuts, from books to baking pans for all your sourdough; and via its streaming services, it gives you many ways to stay entertained. But it can also […]




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Backblaze challenges AWS by making its cloud storage S3 compatible

Backblaze today announced that its B2 Cloud Storage service is now API-compatible with Amazon’s S3 storage service. Backblaze started as an affordable cloud backup service, but over the last few years, the company has also taken its storage expertise and launched the developer-centric B2 Cloud Storage service, which promises to be significantly cheaper than similar […]