Good morning from the new chaperones of City Bulletin. Philip Stafford and Ashley Armstrong are now in the saddle for a daily canter through the biggest and best of business news to start your day.

As well as daily round-ups of the finest the FT has to offer and the morning’s top results, we might just be treating you to titbits of gossip that we hear on our dashes around the Square Mile.

If the London Stock Exchange Group is often seen as the beating heart of the City, what should financiers make of the whispers that staff are shuffling off to Canary Wharf, albeit temporarily?

LSEG’s Paternoster Square headquarters holds the bulk of its 5,000 employees. But there have long been complaints that the market opening and closing ceremonies are a bit, well, boring in comparison to the brash panache of its US rivals.

The New York Stock Exchange has its famous bell and Nasdaq a seven-story billboard on Times Square. The LSE has a button in an awkward-shaped atrium and a flashing digital cube, so it’s giving itself a facelift from 2027. We hear the new version will include a golden bell as well as confetti — steady on lads.

While this radical refurbishment takes place, the bulk of LSEG’s staff will be headed to the old Refinitiv building at Canada Square in Canary Wharf. You can bet Wharf evangelist Sir Nigel Wilson will be happy.

The LSE meanwhile reassures the FT that it will be maintaining a City presence throughout the works, and leasing a temporary office with enough space for “a bit of theatre”. Let’s hope that includes some stock exchange listings soon!

Should London make more of an event of corporate listings? Drop us a line with your thoughts at [email protected] or hit reply to this email.

Matchroom Holdings, Barry and Eddie Hearn’s sports empire, has been valued at more than £1bn in a deal to sell a minority stake to US investor Bruin Capital, as the British business targets a “massive push” into America.

NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data while working on a part of its flagship data platform. 

Britain’s £10bn market for “bridging” lending has grown rapidly alongside private credit, but the lightly regulated market has been rattled by the collapse of two of its most prominent players, Market Financial Solutions and Century Capital Partners.

Europe’s three biggest oil companies reaped as much as $4.75bn from the turmoil in global energy markets as the Iran war caused violent swings in prices, presenting huge opportunities for their trading desks. Shell, BP and TotalEnergies’ trading units earned between $3.3bn and $4.75bn extra in the first quarter, compared with the final three months of last year, according to estimates from five analysts.

Catering group Compass has lifted its full-year profit forecasts after it reported rising demand for meals in the workplace. The FTSE 100 group projected underlying operating profit growth above 11 per cent, up from a previous forecast of 10 per cent, after it won $4.1bn of new business. First-half turnover rose 9 per cent to $25bn while underlying operating profit increased by 12 per cent to $1.8bn.

Sports Direct billionaire Mike Ashley has admitted for the first time that he orchestrated the infamous car park footage that brought down JD Sports boss and long-term rival Peter Cowgill.

Lendable, the £3.5bn British fintech backed by Goldman Sachs, is plotting a major US expansion after doubling its profits last year by providing more new personal loans than any other UK bank.

Airlines across Europe are cutting prices for summer flights to counter a delay in bookings, as customers worry that jet fuel shortages will disrupt their holiday plans.

Coal shipments have surged in recent months as countries search for alternative fuels to replace oil and gas supplies disrupted by the ongoing Middle East conflict.

Luis de Guindos, one of Europe’s top central bankers, has attacked the German government for opposing Italian lender UniCredit’s bid for Commerzbank, warning that such interventions in cross-border deals go against the spirit of the EU single market.

Saudi Aramco’s earnings rose in the first three months of the year as shipments via its east-west pipeline allowed the company to mitigate the impact of conflict in the Middle East.

Franco-German tank maker KNDS has urged the German government to decide on plans to purchase a stake in the business, warning it would press ahead with a planned stock market listing before the summer even if no agreement is struck.

Consumers are tightening their belts and companies are warning of price rises as the Iran war upends global business. Yet since the start of the conflict the world’s largest technology companies have grown more than $5.4tn in value. My colleague Clara Murray charts how big gains for semiconductor stocks such as Nvidia, TSMC and Intel are disguising the corporate hit from the war.

City Bulletin is edited today by Harvey Nriapia