Simon Property has traded Eddie Bauer for a bigger piece of Authentic Brands.
The CEO of America’s largest mall owner made the announcement Monday (Feb. 6) as the company released its quarterly earnings.
Those earnings saw “a net gain of $0.25 per share, principally from the sale of our interest in the Eddie Bauer licensing [joint venture] in exchange for additional equity ownership in Authentic Brands Group,” David Simon said during the company’s earnings call.
That means Simon Property now owns 12% of Authentic Brands Group (ABG), valued at roughly $1.5 billion, Simon said.
Eddie Bauer, a century-old outdoor sportswear seller, joined the stable of retail brands owned by SPARC Group in 2021. SPARC is a joint venture between Simon and ABG, and it includes brands such as Reebok, Nautica, Forever 21 and Lucky.
Last year, ABG purchased U.K. fashion brand Ted Baker in a deal valuing the firm at a highly discounted $253 million.
It also owns a majority stake in David Beckman’s DB Ventures, which controls the rights to the British soccer star and celebrities that include Elvis and Shaquille O’Neal.
During the earnings call, Simon was asked if the company had plans to invest in new retailers that might be struggling.
“If we do, it will be opportunistically,” he said, noting that most of the company’s work has been “on the bankruptcy front or where somebody wanted to unload a business.”
In general, he said, “there’s not a lot of distress in retail right now. I’m not saying it won’t develop in the year. But there are some brands out there that are in trouble that obviously people know about. But we don’t see playing in any of those situations.”
During an earnings call last year, the company said its so-called Other Platform Investments (OPIs) were performing well, with its efforts to revive struggling brands proving to be a lucrative part of its business.
Simon noted Monday, however, that the company’s gains during the quarter, driven chiefly by higher rental income and lowered operating expenses, were offset somewhat by a lower contribution from its OPIs.
“2021 was a great year for our retailers,” he said. “However, in 2022, Forever 21 and JCPenney were affected by inflationary pressures, and consumers reducing their spend.”
Later in the call, Simon said he was optimistic about 2023, noting that he routinely asks leasing agents about a drop in demand.
“It’s not really happened,” he said. “So, we feel good about that. Demand continues to be generally very strong.”
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Mastercard has teamed with financial crime prevention company Feedzai to help financial institutions prevent scams.
“As payments continue to evolve, fraudsters are increasingly using AI to scam consumers,” the companies said in a news release Tuesday (Feb. 18). “This cost more than $1 trillion last year, with more than 50% of consumers saying they had encountered a scam at least once a week.”
To that end, Mastercard will leverage Feedzai’s fraud platform, available in more than 90 countries, to deploy its Consumer Fraud Risk (CFR) solution to customers across many key markets around the world.
According to the release, CFR provides sending and receiving financial institutions in account-to-account payment transactions with intelligence to spot and prevent scams in real time. Since going live in the U.K. in 2023, the value of authorized push payment (APP) scams has fallen by more than 12% in that country.
Feedzai’s AI-native Financial Crime Prevention Platform, the release adds, is used by leading financial institutions to protect more than a billion consumers worldwide, and upwards of $8 trillion in transactions each year.
“With more than half the world’s population affected, the scale of scam fraud is not only having a devastating impact on consumers, but also surpassing the GDP of many individual economies,” said Johan Gerber, executive vice president, head of Security Solutions at Mastercard. “Together with Feedzai’s global platform we will scale our first-of-its-kind scams solution to more markets, helping more financial institutions combat financial crime faster than before.”
PYMNTS Intelligence research has found that scams became the leading form of fraud last year, ahead of digital payment fraud. The share of scam-related fraud rose by 56%, and financial losses from scams increased 121%. Scams now make up 23% of all fraudulent transactions, with relationship/trust and product/service scams generating the most losses.
“These scams manipulate individuals into authorizing fraudulent transactions, often using deceptive tactics,” PYMNTS wrote. “Additionally, fraud involving compromised credentials, where individuals are tricked into revealing account details, is also on the rise.”
Additional research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found that many financial institutions (FIs) are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to detect fraud.
“These technologies analyze large amounts of transaction data in real time, spotting suspicious activity and preventing fraudulent payments before they are completed,” PYMNTS wrote late last year.
The research found that 71% of FIs are using AI and ML for fraud detection, up from 66% in 2023. These technologies can identify anomalies and patterns that might not be detected by human analysts, allowing banks to perform quicker decision-making.