Stocks slide again; Revolut’s Irish challenger; and Michael D’s economics

Stock markets had another grim day on the back of the Federal Reserve’s three-quarter point jump in interest rates and supporting moves on Thursday by the British and Swiss central banks. The moves raised market fears that the dramatic efforts to tame inflation could push economies across the globe into a downturn.

A plan by the main Irish banks to set up a mobile money-transfer app called Synch Payments, to take on the likes of Revolut and N26, has finally been approved by the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission – albeit with conditions to ensure independence and transparency, writes Joe Brennan

The Dublin-based company that runs the British & Irish Lions rugby tours made a profit of €9.6 million on last year’s tour to South Africa even though all three test matches were played behind closed doors. Ciarán Hancock has the details.

Plans for a 28-storey, 459-bed hotel close to Castleknock at the junction of the N3 and the M50 have been knocked back by An Bord Pleanála over fears over the scale of the project and what it might mean for traffic in the area. Gordon Deegan reports.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy appeared at the Dublin Tech Summit in a hologram address, promising to put digital technology at the centre of the rebuilding of his war-torn nation, writes Mark Paul.

In World of Work, a German-based professor says that women are resigned to earning less than their male counterparts even before they enter the workforce. The gender pay gap study says the phenomenon could result in women earning about half a million euro less than men over their careers.

And sticking with work, homeworking during the Covid crisis may have been associated with a big uptick in reported employee productivity but more than 40 per cent of women workers and a third of men reported that working from home had impaired their mental health and wellbeing, according to a new study by UCD Smurfit School of Business researchers.

Phonovation has been named as the overall winner of this year’s Deloitte Financial Services Innovation Awards. The Dublin-based communications tools company, which provides secure messaging and mobile identity services to business also won the category for the most disruptive fintech, writes Laura Slattery. Citi’s Gulru Atak won the leadership award.

And Element Pictures founders Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe have been chosen as The Irish Times Business People of the Month for May after agreeing a deal to sell a majority stake in their highly successful Dublin-based film and television production company.

In Caveat, Mark Paul throws a critical eye over President Michael D Higgins’s recent comments on housing and argues that while the President is brilliant at identifying the social consequences of policy failures, he rarely shows any genuine insight into the remedies for economic problems.

And John FitzGerald analyses the Government’s record on climate change and suggests that a significant gap remains between Ireland’s climate goals and its actions to deliver on them.

Shipping operator Finnlines has said it will establish a twice-weekly freight service between Rosslare and the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, from next month.

In an unusual ruling, Dublin motor dealership Denis Mahony has been ordered to give one of its salesmen his old job back after the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) ruled he was improperly made redundant during the pandemic.

Finally, as Dublin Airport gets to grips with its staffing issues, figures from the Central Statistics Office show some 4.7 million passengers travelled through thze State’s five main airports in the first three months of 2022. The figure was more than 11 times higher than the same period last year but still well below pre-pandemic traffic levels.

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