Archive for January 2022

Record euro area inflation rates mean price pressures will top the agenda for European Central Bank policymakers meeting on Thursday. No immediate policy action is expected since the ECB in December laid out plans to wind up its €1.85 trillion pandemic stimulus scheme by the end of March. But price pressures remain strong and markets…

Half of firms are planning to raise basic pay for employees by an average of 4% this year, according to a survey of businesses and consumers by Bank of Ireland. A similar proportion of workers are expecting a pay rise of on average 3%, the bank’s Economic Pulse for January shows. It comes against the…

Rogue operators could face a fine of €10 million or 10% of worldwide turnover for breaches of competition law, under a new law published today. The Competition (Amendment) Bill 2022 will give more powers to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and the Commission for Communications Regulation. It will enhance the ability of the CCPC…

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has launched a new Money Tools campaign which aims to provide consumers with information on how to compare and switch various financial services including mortgages, current accounts and credit cards. The CCPC Money Tools allows consumers to quickly and easily compare features, including maintenance fees, charges and interest rates,…

Raising capital and recruiting and retaining staff are the biggest challenges facing Irish tech start-ups, according to the findings of a survey carried out by Scale Ireland. 230 start-up founders and CEOs contributed to the survey, which aims to gauge the sentiment of entrepreneurs in the sector. It looks at key issues including the economy,…

A third of the working population aged between 20 and 69 continue to have no pension coverage outside of the State pension, new data from the Central Statistics Office shows. 73% of those with a supplementary pension said theirs was provided through their work, with 11% holding a personal pension and 16% possessing both. The…

Consumer sentiment in January recovered much of the loss it suffered in December in the face of a surge in the highly contagious Omicron variant, a survey showed today, with a further improvement expected next month. The KBC Bank Ireland consumer sentiment index climbed to 81.9 in January from 74.9 in December, falling short of…

A new €10m fund has been established to invest in socially-conscious start-ups on the island of Ireland. The Impact Syndicate, which is being launched by the Halo Business Angel Network, will look to back firms that are seeking to make “positive and measurable social and environmental change alongside financial returns”. Its members will make investments…

Recipients of jobseekers’ payments will soon have to attend a post office again in order to collect them, under plans announced by the Minister for Social Protection. In 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic hit, recipients were given the option of having the payments made electronically directly into their bank accounts. This was to try to…