Swiggy is reportedly closing on a deal to acquire Uber Eats, the food delivery arm of online cab booking company Uber. The business was launched in January 2017 and is currently worth over $330 million.

At the time of launch, Uber India had high hopes from Uber Eats, however stiff competition from established giants like Zomato, and Swiggy made the journey quite difficult. Therefore, the San Francisco based company has decided to sell the ailing business to curb losses. The move will also help the Uber go for IPO with a targeted valuation of $120-$150 billion. Apart from Swiggy, reports have suggested that Gurugram based Zomato is also in contention to acquire Uber Eats. Swiggy and Zomato are arch-rivals in the online food delivery space; both of them are fighting very hard to increase their market share.

Uber Eats India is currently executing around 150,000 to 250,000 deliveries per day, generating around $200-$300 million in sales. On the other hand, Swiggy and Zomato manage to squeeze out business almost four or five times of Uber’s numbers. Uber’s delivery arm is currently ranked 3^rd, ahead of Foodpanda, owned by rival ride-booking company Ola.

Uber reported a loss $1.8 billion for 2018, and it desperately wants to shed loss-making units away before it goes for the IPO in India. Reports have surfaced that Uber Eats in India was losing about $15 to $20 million per month. Contrasting to the recent developments, Uber Eats had said last year that India is one of the fastest growing markets, claiming that it was adding 4,500 delivery personnel per week, an adding 100 restaurants a day in the country.

India is one of the markets where Uber still suffers high losses. It has already sold businesses in China, Russia, and Southeast Asia to rivals, to curb losses. Contrastingly the market leaders, Swiggy and Zomato are reportedly losing $30-$40 million each month. The two main reasons for these losses are the regular discounts given to customers to attract them, and high incentives to delivery personnel.

Experts have been projecting a market consolidation, sooner or later. The food delivery space offers razor-thin margins; large scale competition is causing companies to bleed. Uber Eats was also rumored to consolidate with Ola’s Foodpanda, as both have a common investor in Softbank which holds substantial shares in both firms.

The transaction, if completed, will be the first move towards sector consolidated of food delivery space in India. Though Zomato is trying too, Swiggy is expected to close the deal as early as next month. This will be the Bangalore based company’s largest acquisition till date, and will also be Uber’s first divestment of its food business globally. Uber its is estimated to be valued at around $20 billion, and the business generates $1.5 billion in revenues.

The transaction is most likely to be structured as a share-swap deal, with Uber accepting shares in Swiggy as contract remuneration. Uber is expected to get 10% shares in Swiggy. The Indian food delivery service company is valued at around $3.3 billion.

With the recent enactment of EU’s Payment Service Directive (P2D2) requirement for banks to create APIs that let third parties initiate payments on behalf of consumers. Adyen has become an early adapter to this by introducing a new open banking payments method that will enable authentication of payments between the consumer and the bank avoiding chargebacks generated due to card frauds or an inability to capture funds. Upon selecting the payment type, the customers will be redirected to their bank’s online environment to securely confirm the transaction. Adyen with its latest financial technology will handle the payment flow between banks and merchants. Their latest offering is suggested to decrease transaction processing costs for higher value transactions while at the same time open banking will offer real-time credit transfers guaranteeing payments and enabling merchants to confirm payments and ship orders immediately.

It is constantly striving to innovate and simplify the payments process for consumers and merchants. Adyen is a unique payment solution provider that is the choice for many of the world’s leading companies. Fraud protection has been an increasing priority in today’s digital economy. Traditional card transactions are slow, charge higher processing costs and are prone to frauds. With this latest addition in the company’s offerings, Adyen has become the first payments provider to offer a fully compliant, direct payment solution in the UK and it has been continuously working with Open Banking Implementation Entities to bring the benefits of a digitized payments system to consumers and merchants alike.

“It is exciting to see another great example of open banking powering innovation and leading to new services which ultimately help drive efficiencies in payments,” said Imran Gulamhuseinwala OBE, Trustee of OBIE (Open Banking Implementation Entity). “Adyen is a great example of how consumers and organizations can benefit from increased collaboration and secure data sharing between financial institutions.”

Dutch airline KLM is the first major brand to roll out the new offering. The service is now live and accessible to all UK customers. After Brexit, UK has become the most important foreign market for EU nation companies. “It is great to see that KLM is the first airline to offer this open banking payment option to our UK customers. BY working with Adyen’s payment initiative, we are offering customers a wider choice of payment options securely and seamlessly,” said Pieter Groeneveld, Senior Vice President at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

Air France and KLM have to manage to agree on strengthening ties between the airlines, putting an end to a power struggle that had been bothering the Dutch government, staff, and shareholders.

In the process, Air France has secured a salary agreement with pilots after an elongated protest which saw them college strike last year, which caused €335 million ($380 million) to evaporate from the 2018 profits. The truce between the two airlines was declared on Wednesday morning by company officials.

Specifics of the deals, however, weren’t released, though the group Chief Financial Official Frederic Gaygey stated that the Air France-KLM plans would boost both the companies’ prospects despite high fuel prices and other obstacles ahead. Gaygey also said that the group was “absolutely not” considering a merger between the two airlines completely.

The Franco-Dutch airline group pledged new efficiency games to tackle higher fuel costs this year with a motive to deepen cooperation between two of its main careers, Air France and KLM. While presenting 2018 earnings of the group, Chief Executive Officer Ben Smith assured Better coordinated network and fleets after subsiding KLM resistance against closure integration with Air France in a new deal. Smith said these achievements pave the way for the group’s ambition to regain a leading position in Europe and across the globe.

Rivals like Lufthansa and British Airways continue to maintain a profitability lead on Air France and KLM due to restrictive French union deals, and strikes that took away a substantial chunk of profits last year forcing out the previous CEO. Ben Smith joined the group, hit by internal conflicts in September 2018. Smith, an ex-Air Canada veteran, has successfully resolved labor issues by granting wage hikes in return for increased flexibility, which now give hopes to make better and more profitable use of the group aircraft and networks.

The board of Air France-KLM has also agreed to reappoint Pieter Elbers as KLMs chief executive officer.

Ben Smith met with the Dutch government Ministers of Finance and infrastructure last week to discuss the future of the Air France-KLM alliance. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, while addressing journalists in a press conference on Friday, said that it was extremely important for the Dutch economy that KLM functions well. However, he refrained from giving out any details from the discussion between his Ministers and Ben Smith. He further added that the esteemed organization was out of danger though not functioning as brilliantly as other airlines.

As per the new deal, Air France pilots will get a 4.3% hike in return for concessions including extended flexibility on leave and sharing routes with KLM. The dominant SNPL pilots union signed the deal after received 85% support in a ballot.

Conflicts between the two flagship airlines began last year as Smith, after his appointment in September, started pushing for a more concerted decision making between the two brands as well as his seat on the KLM board. This development encountered resistance from KLM’s workforce, including CEO Pieter Elbers. Due to this, a possible departure of Elbers started to hover especially after his contract would expire in April. This led to a show of public support by the Dutch career’s employees last week, which triggered talks between Smith and Dutch ministers.

The Chief Executive Officer of Nordea Bank Abp Casper von Koskull has called on the critics of Finland based back to show patience and added that bank is well on its way to staging a turnaround in the fiscal year 2020. Nordea Bank has been in doldrums for some time, and in recent years, the bank went on an aggressive cost-cutting spree. The bank laid off workers, embraced technology and generally tried to turn it into a much more efficient organization.

However, the recent fourth quarter result has not gone down well with key investors and angry investors even went on to state that the less than satisfactory results were a sign that enough progress had not been made. Sampo, which holds around 20% of the bank’s shares, stated that the bank’s most important ‘performance indicators’ did not meet the standards of Nordic banks. Another investor simply said that the profit recorded by the bank in the fourth quarter was too low.

The bank’s CEO has now taken a swing at the investors and called them impatient during the course of an interview. Koskull said, “When I look at 2019, my clear ambition is that we have growing income and reduced costs. Markets are always impatient.” He went on to state that the bank is going to stage a comeback in 2019 and Nordea’s asset management division is going to have a big say in it. The CEO stated that the asset management business is poised to swing into profits.

The bank’s income has gone down drastically and has dropped to 9 billion Euros in 2018. However, Koskull has assured that the bank is looking at plenty of new avenues through which income could be boosted. Other than asset management, he believes the bank has the chance to get into segments in which it did not venture before. For instance, private banking in Norway and Sweden is one of the options he spoke about. He went on to state that the bank has a huge room for improvement and growth is around the corner. He said that in 2018, the bank’s traditionally strong asset management earnings did not go as planned and that gives Nordea an excellent opportunity to raise income in the coming year. Koskull is bullish about his hopes regarding the asset management business. He said, “I’m convinced we can get the asset management that has been shrinking. We will get that back; now we have a new starting point. We have the products, the capabilities in place. It doesn’t need magic to get that back.”