Twitter has agreed to pay $809.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the social media giant of inflating stock value and misrepresenting user data for the benefit of insiders. In an SEC filing this week, Twitter stipulated the final settlement agreement will not “constitute an admission” or finding of liability or wrongdoing. The settlement agreement still needs approval from U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The suit originated with a shareholder complaint filed in Q3 2016 and was later consolidated. Read more

Global firms such as Amazon, IKEA, Mercedes-Benz and Walmart are cutting out traditional financial institutions in favor of financial technology, or “fintech” — startups offering everything from banking and credit to insurance. Embedded finance, a term for companies integrating software to offer services like “buy now pay later” at check out, are poised to disrupt the status quo, according to Reuters, which reports that while “banks are still behind most of the transactions,” analysts are warning that as they “get pushed further away from the front end of the finance chain” they’ll be frozen out of lucrative consumer data mining. Read more

Apple and Google are introducing privacy protections to thwart marketers from gaining access to consumer data when displaying ads, a change that is expected to seriously impact the online advertising schema that is the bedrock of ‘free’ apps and websites like Facebook and TikTok. In April, Apple iPhones debuted a pop-up window that asks people for permission to be tracked by apps. Google has outlined plans to disable a tracking capability in its Chrome web browser. And Facebook announced last month that is working on a new type of ad display that will not rely on personal data. Read more

Advertising sales and data company Ampersand is stepping up to promote its Total TV Measurement solution at a time when the go-to industry ratings firm, Nielsen, is under fire. Total TV is designed to help advertisers strategize and purchase multi-screen marketing campaigns. Ampersand is owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, and sells network, spot and addressable advertising that targets viewers based on viewing data from 40 million set-top box households. Ampersand reaches 85 million households across more than 150 networks. Read more

Intuit is acquiring global newsletter and email marketing platform Mailchimp in a cash and stock deal valued at $12 billion. Intuit, which makes software products including TurboTax, says it plans to integrate Mailchimp with its QuickBooks accounting software to help small and medium-sized businesses acquire and retain customers, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi said in a statement. Mailchimp has “a lot of customer data. We have all the purchase data,” Goodarzi told investors last week. The deal follows Intuit’s 2020 purchase of Credit Karma for $7.1 billion. Read more