Companies in the news ... and how they were assessed

Arqiva: leaning on lamp posts

“With its boring phone and telly masts, Arqiva sounds like a pretty dull utility,” said Jim Armitage in the London Evening Standard. But the company, which helped transmit the first BBC radio broadcast in 1922, is making a good job of dressing itself up as “a tech superstar” ahead of a £1.5bn float (valuing it at around £6bn). How? By trialling technology that could “break BT’S Openreach monopoly on delivering broadband”. The plan is to install mini-5g transmitters in lamp posts, that would beam broadband signals “at gigabyte speeds” to any nearby household with an Arqiva box on the windowsill. At last, something to rival Openreach’s “miserable service”! “That alone must make Arqiva a float worth backing.” Well, maybe, said Matthew Vincent in the FT, but there are reasons for caution amid the hype surrounding “the biggest flotation in London this year”. Consider, for instance, why Arqiva’s owners – the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the Aussie finance house Macquarie – are so keen to sell. Debt is a factor. The hope is that cash from the float will cut interest payments and fund “a generous dividend”. But, having racked up some £900m in net losses over three years, Arqiva may “need to lean on all the mobile phone lamp posts it can find”.

Royal Bank of Scotland: bully beef

RBS boss Ross Mcewan recently complained about former customers “badmouthing” the bank, said Sean Farrell in The Observer. He’d better get used to it. The Financial Conduct Authority has released a summary of its report on RBS’S alleged mistreatment of small business customers – and it doesn’t make for pretty reading. The allegations centre on RBS’S Global Restructuring Group (GRG), a supposed “turnaround unit” that has been dogged by allegations that it “wrecked livelihoods” in the years following the financial crisis, said James Hurley in The Times. The watchdog has thrown out “the most serious allegation” – that GRG “engineered the failure” of companies, so it could grab their assets on the cheap. But it did conclude that GRG’S often “insensitive and unduly aggressive” staff “deliberately mistreated” customers, causing hundreds of viable firms “material financial distress”. The watchdog is now considering whether to take further action against the bank. And so this apparently endless saga drags on, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The “doubly frustrating aspect” is that the clean-up seems to be advancing at the same snail’s pace as the investigation. Although some 939 complaints have been filed, the actual complaints process is reportedly only just under way.

Lyft/uber: battle for supremacy

The greatest beneficiary of Uber’s recent “series of high-profile stumbles” is its more touchy-feely US rival Lyft, said The New York Times. Now, in “an escalation of its ridehailing war with Uber, Lyft has begun to explore going public in 2018”. And it has secured $1bn in new financing from Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The move further complicates an already “convoluted web of financial relationships” in the sector: Google was an early backer of Uber, but now Alphabet’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, is suing Uber for “stealing trade secrets” in a case set to go to trial in December. The plot thickens, even as the stakes get higher. But in its “battle for supremacy” over Uber, Lyft has “a new and formidable partner”.