Spotify goes public, the Bank of Montreal will open a tech campus in Toronto’s Eaton Centre, and Equifax reveals millions more people were affected by its data breach last year.
First up from Facebook is news that music streaming service Spotify has officially filed for an initial public offering. This IPO is one of the most anticipated filings of the year and interestingly, Spotify will list all its shares directly on the New York Stock Exchange instead of going through a major investment bank, which is usually the typical move. The Stockholm, Sweden-based company has around 71 million paid subscribers globally and millions more free listeners. Shares are likely to go as high as $132.50, giving the company a valuation of over $23 billion.
Next from Twitter, the Bank of Montreal has revealed that it will be taking over the four-story former Sears Canada store at the Eaton Centre in Toronto to build an urban tech campus. The project is meant to attract high-tech talent so it can get ideas to market quicker and will include open floorplans, collaborative work areas, and easy underground PATH access to the subway and other BMO locations. When it opens in 2021, the campus will be home to approximately 3,500 employees. While BMO declined to reveal how much it will spend on the space, it’s just the latest move within the talent-starved tech industry in Canada to compete for highly skilled workers. Scotiabank opened a digital factory last year to attract such skill, and RBC is opening an innovation lab in Montreal this year as well.
And last but not least from Reddit, the Equifax is the breach that just keeps on giving. If you recall, the credit reporting company experienced a massive data breach last year and now it’s saying that an extra 2.4 million people were affected, bringing the overall total to just shy of 150 million customers globally. Equifax says these consumers were not previously identified because only their partial driver’s license information was exposed. Its interim CEO emphasizes in a statement that this is not a case of them discovering new stolen data, but them overlooking some in their initial investigation when the hack was publicly disclosed in September. The company is under federal investigation in the US, as well as several class action lawsuits.
Hashtag Trending is produced by IT World Canada. Today’s episode is sponsored by Cogeco Peer 1, the company that enables businesses to unlock their IT potential. Learn more at CP1.com.
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