Business Diary: Battle of the banks is on

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Hats off to the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment, for its plan to hold a fascinating debate – The City: Asset or Liability? – next month. It will pit Angela Knight, the former Economic Secretary to the Treasury who these days runs the British Bankers' Association, against Chuka Umunna, the Streatham MP and former member of the Treasury Select Committee who is carving out a name for himself, not least as a critic of the banks'. That's a recipe for fireworks, we reckon.

Stealth brand to break its cover

So what exactly is a "stealth brand"? We ask only because that is how Barracuda Pub Group says it has been operating its Smith & Jones brand over the past decade – it now plans to relaunch the pub chain with a more active promotional strategy. It rather sounds to us naive souls as if stealth is a straightforward synonym for not properly marketed or just plain ignored, but then we're not marketing gurus.

Rocking all over Wall Street

Happy news for anyone in search of a new investment management service: there's a new business coming that might just interest you. Former Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan plans to launch his new asset management firm in October, he's announced, though there are apparently a few appointments still to make. McKagan got into finance almost 20 years ago – while recovering from a serious illness, he spent some time ploughing through Guns N' Roses' financial reports and realised he couldn't understand a word of them. He took some finance lessons, got more interested and ended up giving advice to fellow musicians. Now he's going full time.

Budweiser toasts FA Cup success

Budweiser made history at the weekend by screening the first ever FA Cup match on its fan page on Facebook – the extra preliminary qualifying round between Ascot and Wembley. The news on the viewing figures is surprisingly good, we hear – 27,000 people tuned in to watch the game on Friday evening. Will there be a repeat of the experiment in future rounds of the tournament? Maybe Budweiser should stick with Wembley, who won 2-1.

businessdiary@independent.co.uk