Thursday newspaper round-up: TikTok, Google, NatWest

(Sharecast News) - Britain's biggest banks are under pressure to pass on higher interest rates to savers after figures showing they have made an extra £7bn by refusing to do so, and as they stand to benefit from a tax cut announced by Jeremy Hunt. On the day the Bank of England is expected to announce a further rise in interest rates, the Unite trade union said banks had already made billions of pounds in extra profit from the dramatic rise in borrowing costs. - Guardian The chief executive of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, is set to face a grilling from US lawmakers on Thursday as the political storm surrounding the China-owned social media platform intensifies with the Biden administration threatening to ban the app entirely in the US. TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has long faced criticisms over the data it holds on US users - data that lawmakers fear could fall into the hands of the Chinese government. While the platform has repeatedly denied those claims, stating it stores US user data outside of China, legislators on both sides of the aisle have united in their backlash despite the company's growing popularity. - Guardian

Google's artificial intelligence chatbot is still making the same error that contributed to a $120bn wipeout for the tech giant's share price a month ago. Bard, which was opened to the public in the US and UK on Tuesday, still incorrectly claims that the James Webb Space Telescope took "the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system". - Telegraph

Panicked British technology companies pulled £2.9 billion from the UK subsidiary of Silicon Valley Bank in the space of a single day, far in excess of the size of withdrawals envisaged by the normal liquidity management rules, the Bank of England has revealed. In written evidence to MPs, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, said the scale of withdrawals on Friday, March 10, was 30 per cent of the SVB UK's entire deposit base and it was not clear if it could continue to withstand that scale of outflow. - The Times

The chief executive of NatWest has broken ranks with her largest three retail banking rivals to disclose that the bank made 14 times more from its savers last year than in 2021, booking notional net income from them of more than £1 billion. While competitor banks refused to provide MPs with details on revenues or profits from their saving customers, NatWest's Dame Alison Rose revealed a sharp increase in this net revenue figure from £80 million to £1.09 billion. - The Times