PayPal's expansion plans; Deutsche pays for FX issues

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Still shopping: PayPal, which has been on a buying spree lately, isn’t done yet. The payments company, which Tuesday agreed to buy Hyperwallet Systems for about $400 million and last month said it would buy iZettle for $2.2 billion, plans to spend $1 billion to $3 billion a year on acquisitions. It also plans to add more users in “underpenetrated” markets like Mexico, Brazil, China and India by forming partnerships with local companies, according to chief financial officer John Rainey.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

One of the companies PayPal may go up against is SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund, which the Financial Times calls “the largest private pool of money ever raised.” The firm founded by Masayoshi Son “is shifting the relationship between the tech sector and capital markets” and is “now competing against tech giants from the U.S. and China for the most sought-after start-ups.”

But Tadashi Yanai, who heads clothing retailer Uniqlo and is an outside director on SoftBank’s board, warned shareholders at SoftBank’s annual meeting about the firm’s breakneck pace. “Please don’t think you can rest easy,” he said. His comments “highlighted tensions over Son’s penchant for big bets in loss-making startups.”

Triple threat: New York’s Department of Financial Services fined Deutsche Bank $205 million for what it said was “improper, unsafe, and unsound conduct” in the bank’s foreign exchange unit between 2007 and 2013, when it was the world’s largest currency trader. The agency said the bank’s employees tried to skew FX prices and charge excessive spreads. Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, American Banker

Wall Street Journal

Endorsing Kraninger: The consensus opinion seems to be that President Trump’s nomination of Kathy Kraninger to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is just a ruse to prolong Mick Mulvaney’s acting leadership of the agency. But the paper’s editors say “she has more than enough of the experience that matters at the CFPB — in how bureaucracies work,” and that Republicans shouldn’t dawdle in getting her confirmed.

“One risk of not confirming Ms. Kraninger is what might happen if Mr. Mulvaney leaves government,” they write. “Then the director job would fall to Leandra English, [former CFPB director Richard] Cordray’s deputy whom he tried to install as director as he went out the door. If Republicans can’t kill the CFPB, or reform its unconstitutional governance structure, they can at least give it better long-term leadership.”

Financial Times

Hard time: David Drumm, the former CEO of Anglo Irish Bank, was sentenced to six years in prison following his conviction for a €7.2 billion fraud that led to the bank’s failure. Drumm’s trial “ranked among the longest in Irish legal history,” the paper says. Drumm “joins the very small club of senior banking executives to be put behind bars in connection with the 2008 financial crisis.”

Judge Karen O’Connor said Drumm deserved eight years but reduced the sentence to six based on mitigating factors. He was also given credit for five months he spent in American custody before his extradition to Ireland.

Elsewhere

Speak to me: U.S. Bank is the first to offer banking services through all three virtual assistants — Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Assistant.

Quotable

“This was grossly reprehensible behavior and it does not provide any excuse for fraud and dishonesty.” — Judge Karen O’Connor of Dublin Circuit Criminal Court in sentencing former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm to six years in prison.