acquisition

The Western Union Company signed an agreement to purchase one of its leading money transfer network agents in Europe Finint S.r.l.

Finint covers over 10,000 locations across Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. At the moment Western Union owns 30% of the company and now it will buy the remaining 70%.

JPMorgan Chase & Co plans to aggressively expand in the next 5 years in consumer and private banking sectors in spite of the fact it loses over $1 billion in revenue from new financial regulations.

At the company’s annual investor day Retail Financial Services CEO Charlie Scharf excluded any possibility to expand by smaller acquisitions, at least for now, in favor of opening new offices.

Chase will add at least 1,000 branches in the next three years and could add up to 2,000 over the next five years, Scharf said.

Bank of America will offload its Balboa insurance portfolio to Australia's QBE Insurance for over $700 million.

Last year Bank of America sold stakes in BlackRock and China Construction Bank to help meet government bailout-aid repayments. Now BofA says that QBE will assume all of Balboa's $1.2 billion in insurance liabilities under the deal.

Over 10 years Frank O'Halloran, CEO of QBE, has made over 75 acquisitions to expand into 50 countries. QBE acquired U.S. underwriting agency ZC Sterling Corp for $575 million in 2008.

Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group is seeking funds to buyout 40% of the stake held by Yahoo as it looks for a chance to put an end to its relationship with the Carol Bartz led company because it is itself now a takeover target, according to a source familiar with the case.

Jack Ma, a founder of Alibaba, was talking with private equity companies in an effort to assemble a special-purpose acquisition fund for the express purpose of buying the Yahoo stake, said the source on condition of anonymity.

On the basis of a Barron’s report media sources reported that Apple may consider the acquisition of Sony which took the stocks of the latter up 3%. Reuters reported that Apple currently has $50 billion in cash reserves while Sony has a market cap of $34 billion. So, financially speaking, Sony is a strong possibility for Apple.

Barron’s said that cash-rich Apple could be contemplating a big acquisition and noted speculation about Adobe, Sony and Disney as potential targets.

CEO of Adobe Systems made a statement to a German newspaper that the company plans to stay independent with no targets to merge with any firm as the speculations in media are reporting the software maker could become an acquisition target for Microsoft.

"Adobe's growth prospects are so great that our focus is on seizing these opportunities as an independent company," Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen was quoted as saying by daily Financial Times Deutschland on Monday.

As it became known on Monday, Google wants to buy Israel-based Quicksee for about $10 million.

Quicksee’s software enables users to turn video into interactive virtual tours.

Quicksee's technology is regarded as the missing link in Google's Street View service, used by both Google Maps and Google Earth.

Earlier this year, in April Google Inc purchased Israeli web gadgets provider LabPixies in April for an estimated $25 million.
 

Hewlett-Packard has affirmed it has agreed to buy ArcSight, a cybersecurity company, for $1.5 billion in cash.

This deal is anticipated to be closed by the end of the calendar year.

The stock has added about 24% in value since The Wall Street Journal reported that company had put itself up for sale on August 26.
 

According to many speculations in the media Cisco has made an offer to acquire Skype before they complete their IPO process. There is still no confirmation of the rumors because of the running IPO process.

Skype insiders say the company hopes for a valuation of $5 billion or so, and it is likely that Cisco would bide in this range.

Google was also rumored to be sniffing around Skype, but antitrust concerns may have persuaded them not to make an actual offer.
 

Adobe Systems is to acquire Day Software Holding, Swiss Web software maker specializing in Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management and Social Collaboration, for $240 million.

By this move, Adobe plans to use to strengthen its enterprise software offerings.  

As announced Microsoft's CFO, Peter Klein, the company doesn’t plan to spend lots of money for making any acquisitions in the nearest future.

Actually, most companies aren't offering bargain-bin prices at present, and perhaps Microsoft's still playing it safe following the recession, too. As Klein said, "the stock market has clearly rebounded, so you sort of feel like you're back to equilibrium."

According to Wednesday's Evening Standard, The City's "gossips" are floating a rumor of Apple's interest in the UK chip designer, ARM.

Actually, Apple, with rumors of a possible takeover of ARM, announced Tuesday that it was sitting on a cash reserve of $41.7bn

An open virtual currency provider and digital content microtransaction thought leader, Zeevex, has been bought by InComm, the leader in sales and marketing of prepaid products and innovator of transaction processing. 

This obtention will let InComm enhance its prepaid gaming vertical with Zeevex's virtual currency platform creating a powerful tool for consumers of all ages to discover and purchase their favorite digital content.

Google announced its purchasing of a San Francisco start-up Aardvark, supporting both Internet search and social networking.

As Aardvark co-founder and top strategy manager Max Ventilla responded, the company had signed a deal to be acquired by Google "recently". However, he declined to comment but would the price details.

But according to the technology blog TechCrunch’s assumption, the deal was closed for $50 million.

As it became known, VocaLink acquired joint venture partner Fiserv to take complete ownership of electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) specialist OneVu, designed to enable UK consumers to view, track and pay bills within their usual online banking service. However, the financial details have not been unveiled. 

Miles Quitmann, the managing director of OneVu is quitting the company. So, OneVu will be integrated into VocaLink's service portfolio under Fred Bar, MD, euro services.