Blocking Transactions at PornHub, New Aramco's Valuation & Ela | Benefit Daily

Blocking Transactions at PornHub, New Aramco's Valuation & Elavon's Acquisition

World's Biggest Company Set Its Valuation

Saudi Arabia will seek a valuation of $1.6-1.7 trillion for Aramco’s initial public offering. The company will sell just 1.5% of its shares on the local stock exchange, about half the amount that had been considered.

While that would allow Aramco to overtake Apple Inc. as the world’s biggest public company by some distance, the plans are a long way from Prince Mohammed’s initial aims: a local and international listing to raise as much as $100 billion for the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.

Elavon Acquires Sage Pay

Elavon, the payments company that is a subsidiary of US Bancorp, announced that it will acquire Sage Pay, one of the bigger payment processors in the UK and Ireland serving small and medium businesses. Sage Pay’s owner Sage Group said the deal is being done for $300 million at today’s currency rates.

Elavon is active in 10 countries and says it’s the fourth-largest merchant acquirer in Europe, competing against the likes of  Global Payments, Vantiv, FIS, Ingenico, Verifone, Stripe, Chase, MasterCard and Visa. The deal is still subject to regulatory approval (both by the Federal Reserve in the US and the Central Bank of Ireland), and if all proceeds, the deal is expected to close in Q2 of 2020.

PayPal Blocks Transactions at Pornhub

PayPal took steps to stop the Pornhub transactions. “We have discovered that Pornhub has made certain business payments through PayPal without seeking our permission,” the online-payment giant said.

Pornhub Vice President Corey Price has another point of view:“The payments PayPal is referring to are only the payments that were being made to models in our Model Program. Pornhub’s growing Model Program was launched in order to empower content creators within the adult industry by providing a secure, highly visible, sex-positive space on our platform to sell and share original video content and earn a large share of the advertising revenue on their free-to-watch videos.” Price added that the site is now considering other options for paying models, including cryptocurrency.

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