The Times

Klarna, the buy now, pay later lender, has cut more than 1,000 staff partly due to artificial intelligence and plans to shed almost twice that number ahead of a stock market flotation. The Stockholm-based financial technology group, which wrote off 2.33bn (£173m) in bad loans in the first half of 2024 as more shoppers using the popular form of credit defaulted on their borrowings, said: “Our proven scale efficiencies have been enhanced by our investment in AI, which has driven down operating expenses and improved gross profits.” The company, which has two UK offices in London and Manchester, according to its website, as well as dozens of others across Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, declined to comment on how many people it employs in the UK, but said the planned headcount reductions would be even across its sites

Over-optimistic house sellers who end up having to reduce their asking price typically see the property take more than twice as long to sell as those more competitively priced from the outset. The finding comes in analysis from Zoopla, the property website, which said that while all key measures of activity in the housing market are higher than they were at this point last year, it remains a buyers’ market

In the autumn of 2021, rows upon rows of containers sat idle at the port of Felixstowe in Suffolk. A shortage of lorry drivers meant goods could not leave the UK’s largest container port quick enough. Disruptions from the pandemic to the Suez Canal blockage have forced businesses to rethink their stock-building patterns

Doug and Mary Perkins started their optical business on a ping-pong table and have spun it up from a single store into 1,000 branches in 11 countries. Doug, 81, remains co-chief executive and chairman and his focus is on new business development and innovation. Mary, 80, has always been “the champion of the customers and the people person”, he said. She sends handwritten birthday cards and new baby cards to the company’s thousands of staff, and also visits stores incognito to talk to customers about their experience. “Cut us and our blood is green,” said Mary, referring to the colour of the company’s logo. 🔗 Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/e8cpJQni

Sir Keir Starmer is seeking priority access to the German economy for British businesses in what the prime minister has called a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to fix the country’s relationship with the EU. On Wednesday the prime minister will begin talks on a new treaty with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor. He said closer working with Europe would be “crucial” to boosting the economy and controlling immigration — and that Britain needed to “turn a corner” on Brexit. No 10 hopes that the agreement with Berlin will stimulate business and trade, and help to build defence and security co-operation

Passengers should be restricted to two drinks at airports, the chief executive of Ryanair has said, after a surge in violence on flights this summer, with attacks occurring weekly. Michael O’Leary said that assaults on cabin crew were of the greatest concern but added that confrontations between passengers had become common. He blamed some aggressive ­behaviour on holidaymakers mixing ­alcohol with other drugs

Work to remove dangerous cladding has yet to begin at half the 4,600 blocks affected by the problem. Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, said on Tuesday that the pace of remediation work was “far too slow”. She was speaking a day after fire engulfed an apartment block in Dagenham, east London, that had “known” safety problems. A safety expert said that making apartment blocks safe by removing dangerous cladding must be prioritised over building new homes. Dame Judith Hackitt, who led a review of building safety after the deadly Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, called on the government to step up the pace of “remediation and hold those who are responsible to account for doing so”

The co-founder of Hargreaves Lansdown has described the £5.4 billion agreed bid price for the UK’s biggest DIY investment platform as “questionable” and “not the greatest deal in the world”. Stephen Lansdown, who co-founded the business in 1981 with Peter Hargreaves, said the £11.10 per share take-private offer was nevertheless “fair” and would remove the FTSE 100 business from the limelight to enable it to focus on growth

Mark Zuckerberg has said that senior officials in the Biden administration repeatedly pressured Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to censor information about Covid-19 during the pandemic. Zuckerberg, 40, said that Biden administration officials had “expressed a lot of frustration” when Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, resisted its requests

The British Red Cross has asked staff to avoid using the term “maiden name” and the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” in a new inclusive language guide. The charity is said to have circulated a 12-page handbook designed to help staff recognise that some “language can be harmful, triggering or emotive”. The British Red Cross said that the guidance gave “suggestions rather than rules — and we have included some explanations as to why some terminology is preferable”