Business

The £100 cap on contactless card payments is to be lifted – under changes that will allow some shoppers to set their own limits. Under the plans, from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), banks and other card providers with strong fraud controls will be able to set their own rules for such transactions from 19…

For all the brinkmanship, for all the high stakes and attempts to wield maximum leverage, in the end, there was clear recognition from both the US and China that a degree of stabilisation was necessary. The fact that some progress has been made on a relatively wide range of issues speaks to that. But there…

A group of senior City figures is in talks to raise hundreds of millions of pounds for a new listed vehicle that would be used to target a major corporate takeover. Sky News has learnt that JRJ Group, which was co-founded by the former Lehman Brothers executives Jeremy Isaacs and Roger Nagioff, is orchestrating talks…

TikTok is being accused of “backtracking” on its safety commitments, as it puts hundreds of moderator jobs at risk in its London office.  In August, the company announced that hundreds of jobs were at risk in its Trust and Safety offices. In an open letter to MPs, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) said on Thursday…

A “significant” step has been taken in establishing a national restorative justice programme for victims of the Post Office’s Horizon IT scandal. Children of affected postmasters, as well as those directly hit by the faulty accounting software, will be part of the partially Fujitsu-funded programme, as the UK’s Restorative Justice Council acknowledged more than financial…

The manager of the bulk of TGI Fridays’ restaurants around the world has swooped to buy its British operations in a deal which preserves all 2,000 jobs at the chain. Sky News has learnt that Sugarloaf TGIF Management, run by former TGI Fridays chief executive Ray Blanchette, has struck a deal to take control of…

Tech giants Apple and Amazon have defied industry predictions with better-than-expected financial results. Apple’s success is largely thanks to record-breaking iPhone sales, while Amazon’s is down to cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services (AWS), in spite of last week’s outage which knocked out thousands of websites. AWS revenue accelerated 20.2% to $33bn (almost £25bn), which…

Virgin has cleared the first step in its plan to launch a rival Eurostar service. The company, owned by billionaire Sir Richard Branson, has been granted access to share Eurostar’s Temple Mill international depot in east London. The decision, by the rail regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), is an important first step…

Monzo, the digital bank which counts one in five British adults among its customers, is shaking up its leadership ahead of a public flotation that investors hope could value it at up to £10bn. Sky News has learnt that Monzo is to name Diana Layfield, a former Google and Standard Chartered executive, as its new…

Some of the world’s biggest tech giants reported quarterly earnings on Wednesday – with a mixed bag of results as fears grow that a bubble is forming in artificial intelligence. Microsoft revealed that its spending on AI infrastructure hit almost $35bn (£26.5bn) in the three months to the end of September, a sharp rise compared…