Increasingly, big data is becoming an important tool for understanding customer behavior. The information provided by the data can be used to understand customer behavior, predict consumption patterns and market products. Now, because big data has become such a central tool for effectively operating a company, companies are coming under fire for withholding big data…
Year: 2014
Rise of Strategic Buyers May Bench PE Funds
Strategic buyers are back at the negotiating table for middle-market deals with a serious appetite, as they closed 1,251 deals valued at $144.4 billion in the first three quarters of 2014.1 This is an 8 percent increase from last year in terms of the deals closed and a 12 percent increase from $129.3 billion in…
From Land to Sky: Amazon’s Package Delivery Initiatives
Retail sales have seen a surge on Cyber Monday (December 1) with an increase of 8.5% over last year, resulting in the “largest online shopping day” so far in 2014.1 E-shopping continued its climb, as online sales during Thanksgiving weekend grew by 17% over last year.2 Amazon, the largest U.S. online retailer,3 shipped an estimated…
Protecting Prepaid Products: The CFPB’s Latest Rule Proposal
Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a new rule regarding consumer protections and disclosures in the prepaid debit card industry. The rule would help bring the prepaid card industry under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act and Truth In Lending Act while also providing a disclosure mechanism to help consumers when they are…
Equity Crowdfunding and the JOBS Act
Crowdfunding is “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.1 When many people hear the word “crowdfunding,” they think of reward-based crowdfunding, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and people across the globe pledging money to fund cool projects like…
Code of Conduct: Oracle v. Google
What is copyrightable code? Google and Oracle are in a battle to answer this question. The issue is over Google’s use of Oracle’s Application-programming interface (API). An API is a software-to-software interface that allows different applications to communicate with one another.1 The fact that users can copy text from a Mozilla browser to a Microsoft…
Challenging “Too Big to Fail” Designation
The widening scope of the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s “too big to fail” designations has caused alarm in the financial sector and, in the case of MetLife, inspired legal action. In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, Congress formed the Financial Stability Oversight Council (“FSOC”) as part of the reforms initiated by the 2010…
The SEC – Catching up to the Clawback
In response to the major accounting frauds in the early 2000s, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act required chief executives and chief financial officers to affirm the accuracy of their books.1 In practice, this relevant portion of the Act sought to eliminate the temptation among executives to misstate their companies’ financial positions, which made the company look better…
FINRA Arbitration: Still Room for Improvement
Those in favor of out of court alternative dispute mechanisms may look at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s (FINRA) track record of arbitration as a move in the positive direction to bypass the congested court system to hasten resolution of securities disputes. Though this may be the story that a facial glance at the issue…
Testing Sarbanes-Oxley: The American Realty Capital Properties Scandal
American Realty Capital Properties’ stock price plunged nearly 20% on October 29th after the company disclosed that it had intentionally left mistakes in its financial statement uncorrected. 1 By November 3rd, less than a week later, American Realty Capital Properties’ shares had plummeted nearly 37% since the announcement. 2 According to Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell, an independent…