Financial/Banking

By Kevin Hughes, JLL

1. Keep Your Options — And Doors — Open: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is designed to prohibit discrimination and ensure equal opportunity for people with disabilities. In effect since 1991, it has undergone updates, affecting most commercial real estate in some fashion. In fact, all commercial spaces used by the public – as well as many employee-use areas – are required by law to comply with ADA regulations.

San Jose, Calif. – eBay Inc. shareholders have reportedly voted themselves a measure of power to nominate directors on the company’s board. According to the Wall Street Journal, 59% of shares voting at the meeting approved allowing investors who hold at least 3% of eBay’s shares for three years to nominate up to 25% of the company’s directors.

San Francisco - Visa Inc. is expanding its technology research capabilities globally and appointing Min Wang to senior VP of Visa Research Labs. Wang joins Visa from Google Research, where she was a senior staff research scientist focused on data mining.

She also held senior staff research roles at HP Labs China and at the Unified Data Analytics Department at the IBM Watson Research Center.

Greenboro, N.C. – The Fresh Market Inc. has elected Michael D. Casey, CEO and a director of Carter’s Inc., and Robert K. Shearer, formerly CFO of V.F. Corp, and currently a director of Church & Dwight Co. Inc., as independent directors. With these additions, The Fresh Market’s board has nine directors, eight of whom are independent directors.

CVS Health's growth in its drug services business is helping to offset retail sales declines from its decision to stop selling cigarettes<span style="color: rgb(54, 54, 54); font-family: open_sansregular, Arial, Helvetica, sans-

Whether local or global, growth has been robust for 2014’s top third-party managers

The 26th annual survey of Fastest-Growing Managers surveys new domestic and international third-party management and leasing contracts obtained during the 2014 calendar year and ranks the top performers.

New York - RDG Capital Fund Management, a shareholder of TravelCenters of America, has engaged in what it calls “constructive dialogue” with TravelCenters CEO Tom O'Brien and other board members. RDG said the TravelCenters board has indicated a willingness to consider selling some company-owned real estate as a source of liquidity.

The upcoming Oct. 1, 2015, mandate for U.S. retailers to adopt POS systems that can securely accept and process transactions using EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa)-compliant, chip-based payment cards is fast approaching. Retailers that are not in compliance with the mandate after that date will be held liable for any fraudulent transaction committed with a chip-based card.