"You've got a company that moved from merchant management to financial management, and now finds itself tragically overleveraged," said Burt Flickinger III, a consultant with Reach Marketing in Westport, Conn.
The firm says on its verified Sino Weibo microblog that it will impose stricter policies to better control product quality and improve merchant management.
"With this, the only time you need the true credit card number is when you do the authorization," says Craig Tieken, First Data vice president of merchant product management.
Verisign, the $1.1 billion (in 2003 sales) Internet security concern, has a payment unit that has 102,000 merchants under management and processed $7.7 billion in transactions.
Plaintiffs lawyers are circling with the predictable shareholder lawsuits, many complaining of "material misrepresentations" and "false assurances" made by InterCept about iBill's dependence on porn (a press release at the time of the acquisition benignly referred to iBill's clientele as "Web merchants," while management claimed that adult sites represented less than 10% of iBill's transactions).
Commuters pore over newspaper columns; politicians spend fortunes on deciphering polling data; bosses sit in thrall to the pronouncements of coiffed young flip-chart merchants from management-consulting firms.Governments are as keen as anyone to know the future, and one of the main jobs of intelligence agencies is to arm them with forecasts about how the world will look months or years from now.
The salary levels might seem high, but I think pound per pound, lawyers work much harder than merchant bankers or management consultants.
At Cambridge, architecture students have gone on to pursue careers in health services management, merchant banking and advertising, to name but a few.
Mr. Sully, 59, part of Morgan Stanley's office of the chairman until he retired in January, oversaw asset management, merchant banking and the Discover credit card business, the bank said.
In a marked twist from last year, the company announced that 49percentt of its revenue, or $49.3 million, stemmed from financial advising, and 51percentt, or $51.6 million, from merchant banking fund management.
The banks financial services include merchant banking, fund management, factoring, primary dealership, broking, investment banking, credit cards, life insurance and general insurance.
