Financial/Banking

Phoenix — CBRE Group, Inc. announced that Geoffrey Harris has joined the firm’s Capital Markets’ Debt and Structured Finance team as senior VP.

Based in Phoenix, Harris will play a key role in originating net-leased transactions for the firm nationally, in the multi and single-tenant, office, retail and industrial properties space.

Harris joins CBRE from Meridian Capital where he was managing director. He previously served as VP of Capital Markets at Marcus & Millichap.

Atlanta -- First Data has taken a key step toward expanding its payment services by acquiring Gyft Inc., the Silicon Valley-based company that entered the $100 billion gift card market in 2012 and pioneered the concept of a mobile wallet for gift cards.

San Francisco – Twitter reported a net loss of $144.6 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2014, up from $42.2 million in the same period a year earlier. Stock compensation drove the increase in net loss.

Revenue more than doubled to $312.17 million from $139.29 million. In Twitter-specific metrics, average monthly users grew 24% to 271 million. Seventy-eight percent those users were mobile, a 29% increase from the same period a year earlier.

Bangalore, India – Indian e-commerce platform Flipkart has received about $1 billion in funding from investors including existing backer Tiger Global Management, as well as new stakeholders Morgan Stanley and Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund GIC. Flipkart operates as an online marketplace for 3,000 individual merchants, similar to China’s Alibaba.com.

Matthews, N.C. – Activist investor Carl Icahn, who had been pressuring Family Dollar to sell the company, has reduced his ownership stake in the company from 9.39% to 6.09%.

BitPay, a payment service provider (PSP) specializing in e-commerce, B2B and enterprise solutions for the bitcoin digital currency, has unveiled a new pricing plan that offers basic payment processing free, forever.

The company is hoping to leverage the pricing plan to woo businesses into accepting bitcoin for goods and services.

New York - U.S. retail and consumer merger & acquisition (M&A) activity during second quarter 2014 was driven by eight multibillion dollar transactions, anchored by the food and beverage (including alcohol and retailing) sectors, exceeding year-over-year deal value by 104% and volume by 52%.

Houston -- Mattress Firm Holding Corp. has completed its rollout of Genesis Credit second-look financing, which is powered by Genesis Financial Solutions. Genesis Credit allows customers with less-than-perfect credit to purchase goods and services from any Mattress Firm location.