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There are fintechs, and then there are fintechs. Cheerleaders point to payments startups like Jack Dorsey’s Square Inc., whose stock has soared 242 percent in a year, as evidence of a Silicon-Valley-style revolution in the making. But there are sob stories, too: loan platforms LendingClub Corp. and On Deck Capital Inc. are still trading well below their IPO prices. Promises ...

Coca-Cola Co.’s thirst for an alternative to sugary drinks has proved a boon for Whitbread CEO Alison Brittain. She announced the sale of the Costa Coffee chain to the US beverage giant for 3.9 billion pounds ($5.1 billion). Brittain has been able to capitalise on the fact that coffee is piping hot right now: In May, Nestle SA paid $7.15 ...

President Donald Trump talked tough against Mexico, and then essentially agreed to renew the existing trade deal and called that a victory. If only the China spat could end the same way. It won’t. That’s because the gulf between Beijing and Washington is not just caused by recent rhetoric and tariffs. It also goes beyond national security concerns. The inevitable ...

US Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed a bill — the Accountable Capitalism Act — that would require large companies to create corporate charters that take account of the interests of workers, customers and communities in addition to shareholders. To enforce this dictum, it would give each company’s employees the power to elect 40 percent of the corporate directors. Right now, ...

When there’s no trick left to defend a spectacularly failed experiment, blame Raghuram Rajan. If India’s top policy think tank is to be believed, the reason economic growth faltered last year, reaching 5.6% in the June quarter after 7.6% nine months earlier, had nothing to do with the November 2016 ban on 86% of the country’s cash. The decline had ...

Meituan Dianping wants to be everything to everyone: It even describes its mission as “helping people eat better, live better” in its preliminary IPO prospectus. With these broad ambitions, the Chinese food-delivery giant is sounding out investors for a valuation of $45 billion to $55 billion. Its plans to raise up to $4.5 billion in a Hong Kong IPO would ...

Bloomberg Canadian banks are scoring back-to-back record earnings, beating big US lenders on profitability, productivity and dividend yields. They still can’t outperform US banks on the stock market. Toronto-Dominion Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and the nation’s other six large lenders collectively boosted profit 10 percent to a record $8.9 billion in the fiscal third quarter. Still, that’s no match ...

Bloomberg India’s rupee owes its tag of Asia’s worst-performing currency this year to the selloff sweeping emerging markets. There’s more pain in store from beyond its borders. While foreign currency debt has zoomed, various external vulnerability indicators paint a rather mixed picture, according to the Reserve Bank of India’s annual report. Indeed, data due as early as next week will ...

Bloomberg The prospect of Bank of England (BOE) governor Mark Carney extending his term of office garnered mixed reactions from UK lawmakers. Carney told Parliament that he would be open to lengthening his tenure for a second time to help the UK’s transition out of the EU. The Financial Times reported later that he will stay until 2020 in a ...

Bloomberg Westpac Banking Corp. agreed to pay a A$35 million ($25 million) civil penalty after admitting it breached responsible-lending laws by failing to properly assess whether some customers could afford to repay their mortgages. In a settlement ahead of court, the regulator said in a statement that Westpac’s automated loan approval system had failed to use customers’ actual living expenses ...