Bloomberg Walmart Inc.’s employees have adopted money-management tools from Even Responsible Finance Inc. at a faster pace than anticipated, prompting a fresh round of funding to expand the fintech startup. More than 200,000 Walmart employees in the US use Even’s app to manage their finances or access their wages early, the Oakland-based startup said, and almost half of that group ...

Bloomberg Switzerland’s Lindt & Spruengli AG plans $200 million US investment offensive to further challenge Hershey Co. and Mars in that market. The maker of Lindor chocolate balls is expanding a plant in Stratham, New Hampshire, over the next four years, constructing high-tech production lines for premium chocolate, the company said. The site will eventually have more than 1 million ...

Bloomberg Toys ‘R’ Us’s fired workers last week won the right to negotiate for severance money in bankruptcy court, in an unusual victory. They may end up getting nothing. Before much money can be paid to the retailer’s 33,000 former employees, senior lenders need to collect about $1 billion. For now, the staffers can try to tap a pool of ...

Bloomberg Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s food delivery platform Ele.me plans to spend $443 million this quarter trying to wrest customers from Meituan Dianping. Ele.me wants to command more than half of all food delivery transactions in China over the short- to medium-term, according to Chief Executive Officer Wang Lei, who took the reins after Alibaba acquired the startup this year. ...

Bloomberg The bruising telecommunications price war unleashed by the entry of India’s richest man into the sector may continue for at least a year or as long as it takes Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. to nearly double its user base. Ambani’s telecom unit “will strive to double subscribers to 400 million before raising prices,” Kunal Agrawal, a Hong Kong-based analyst ...

Bloomberg China unveiled a package of policies to boost domestic demand as trade tensions threaten to worsen the nation’s economic slowdown, sending stocks higher. From a tax cut aimed at fostering research spending to special bonds for infrastructure investment, the measures announced following a meeting of the State Council in Beijing are intended to form a more flexible response to ...

Bloomberg Japan’s manufacturing sector lost steam in July as demand for exports weakened. The Nikkei Japan Purchasing Managers Index for manufacturers for July showed a preliminary reading of 51.6, the lowest since November 2016, and down from 53.0 in June. Output came in at 52.4, down from 53.6, and the index for stocks of finished goods fell. A reading above ...

Bloomberg When South Korean President Moon Jae-in was greeted with four deep bows from de facto Samsung Group chief Lee Jae-yong earlier this month in India, the footage quickly went viral back home. The overseas encounter between two of South Korea’s most powerful men — their first since Moon’s election on an anti-establishment platform last year — struck a chord. ...

The prospect that the UK would leave the European Union without a deal setting out the terms of the withdrawal once seemed laughably remote. When it was mentioned at all, it was mainly as a negotiating tactic aimed at securing favorable trade and tariff agreements between the UK and the EU. Even when Prime Minister Theresa May uttered the mantra ...

UBS Group AG has kicked off the European banks’ earnings season after a quarter hit by fears of a global trade war, rising market volatility and slower economic growth. For all the jitters, expectations may be set too low. The Swiss bank didn’t do too badly amid the gloom: net income rose 9 percent to 1.28 billion Swiss francs ($1.29 ...