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@Nasdaq/CCMC released survey for corporates – on 2017 experiences with proxy advisors http://bit.ly/2utst5q #corpgov
— Corporate Governance (@SocietyCorpSec) August 10, 2017
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August 10, 2017 at 07:50PM
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@EYnews latest report on audit committee reporting shows significant rise in voluntary disclosure http://bit.ly/2wEndMX #corpgov
— Corporate Governance (@SocietyCorpSec) August 8, 2017
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ProfessionalDirector retweeted:
Barclays UK: Non-Executive Directors for UK retail bank wp.me/p2nqQ8-13Fq #NonExecs #CorpGov
June 12, 2017 at 09:32PM
https://twitter.com/ProfessionalDir/status/874298550406041600
from ProfessionalDirector
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Mo Hossain retweeted:
Normalizing The #Activist In American #Boardroom
June 11, 2017 at 09:32PM
https://twitter.com/MoHossain/status/873938294412902400
from Mo Hossain
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Charlie Helps FRSA retweeted:
IIA Chapter Updates From Around The World #InternalAudit http://ift.tt/2mTOUQF Stories via @rfchambers @IaMag_IIA #corpgov #internalaudit
June 10, 2017 at 09:36PM
https://twitter.com/HelpsCharlie/status/873573566733836293
from Charlie Helps FRSA
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5 DAYS TO GO! Join a FREE Webinar “Quality Board Reports”.Sign-up at crwd.fr/2s4MvF0 See crwd.fr/2t2OJSF #business #corpgov
June 10, 2017 at 09:36PM
https://twitter.com/JCS_NG/status/873572994081226757
from JEE Client Services
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June 10, 2017 at 09:32PM
from Joanna Glasner
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IIA Chapter Updates From Around The World #InternalAudit http://ift.tt/2mTOUQF Stories via @rfchambers @IaMag_IIA #corpgov #internalaudit
June 10, 2017 at 09:36PM
https://twitter.com/IIAChicago/status/873571775367532544
from IIA Chicago Chapter
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Charlie Helps FRSA retweeted:
The latest The Will to Intervene Daily Report! http://ift.tt/2mjf37c Thanks to @ChrisDca @marc1309 @h_lovatt #cdnpoli #corpgov
June 10, 2017 at 09:36PM
https://twitter.com/HelpsCharlie/status/873571533129691138
from Charlie Helps FRSA
Sovos Brands, which is backed by Advent International, has agreed to acquire Rao’s Specialty Foods Inc, a producer of pasta sauce. No financial terms were disclosed. Morgan Stanley is serving as financial adviser to Rao’s Specialty Foods on the transaction.
PRESS RELEASE
BERKELEY, CA, and NEW YORK, June 8, 2017 – Sovos Brands, a new food and beverage company formed by Advent International, today announced that it has agreed to acquire Rao’s Specialty Foods Inc., the producer of Rao’s Homemade, the leading brand of super premium pasta sauce made with only the highest quality natural ingredients. The transaction is expected to be completed during the third quarter of this year. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Rao’s Specialty Foods is the second acquisition in less than six months for Sovos, which seeks toacquire and build value in one-of-a-kind food and beverage brands. In January 2017, the company purchased Michael Angelo’s Gourmet Foods, a leading producer of premium, authentic frozen Italian entrées. Headquartered in Berkeley, CA, and led by seasoned consumer packaged goods executives, Sovos focuses on high-quality brands in on-trend categories with the potential to accelerate growth by investing in distribution, marketing, production and product innovation.
Rao’s Homemade is an iconic brand with a storied heritage dating back to the opening of Rao’s Italian restaurant in East Harlem, New York, in 1896. Established in 1992, Rao’s Specialty Foods produces super premium pasta sauce, known for its commitment to the highest quality ingredients, clean label and superior taste profile. Rao’s Homemade contains no tomato blends, paste, water, starches, fillers, colors or added sugar like many of the other leading brands. In addition to sauces, the company offers a selection of premium dry pasta, dressings, marinades, olive oils, vinegars, tomatoes and fire-roasted red peppers.
“Rao’s Specialty Foods is a great addition to the portfolio we are creating of one-of-a-kind brands in the food and beverage sector,” said Todd Lachman, President and CEO of Sovos Brands. “Its unwavering commitment to authentic, delicious-tasting products using only the highest quality ingredients aligns with our strategy of partnering with unique brands that are in demand with discerning consumers. Working alongside the company’s talented management team, we see numerous opportunities to grow the Rao’s Homemade brand and expand Rao’s Specialty Foods into adjacent food categories.”
“We are thrilled to join the Sovos Brands family,” said Eric Skae, Chief Executive Officer of Rao’s Specialty Foods. “Since 1992 we have been the leading brand in the premium pasta sauce category by a wide margin, and as we enter our 25th year, we are committed to maintaining our top position in the space. With the resources and expertise of Sovos and Advent, we will be in an even stronger position to pursue the significant growth opportunitiesahead of us. We look forward to expanding our product offering and introducing more consumers to the authentic taste of our pasta sauces and other specialty foods.”
Jim Morano, President of Rao’s Specialty Foods, added, “As we continue to grow the business, we will remain true to our co-founder Frank Pellegrino Sr.’s vision for our recipes, which as Frank said, is ‘to use the fewest number of ingredients and take the fewest number of steps. Good cooking is simple. It’s called ‘pulito’ – Italian for ‘pure, clean.’ That’s the right way to cook. That’s what we do. That’s how we do it.’”
Spearheading the acquisition and value creation initiatives at Sovos Brands is a team headed by Mr. Lachman, Larry Bodner, CFO, and Bill Johnson, Chairman. Mr. Lachman has a 25-year record of delivering growth and value creation as a senior executive at major consumer products companies, including Mars, Del Monte Foods, H.J. Heinz and Procter & Gamble. Mr. Bodner has over 25 years of experience as a performance-driven financial executive at companies including Big Heart Pet Brands, Del Monte Foods, Walt Disney and Procter & Gamble. Mr. Johnson was formerly chairman, CEO and president of H.J. Heinz, where he had a distinguished 31-year career, transforming the company into a global food industry leader.
“Sovos Brands is making great progress on its strategy to establish a scale player in the consumer packaged goods industry,” said Jeff Case, a Managing Director at Advent International. “We continue to work with the Sovos team to support and grow its brands and acquire other leading branded players offering delicious food that meets today’s consumer demand for high-quality, clean ingredients.”
The transaction does not include the iconic Rao’s restaurants in New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, which will remain under current ownership.
Advent International has significant investment experience in the retail, consumer and leisure industry. Over the past 27 years, the firm has invested more than $9 billion in 71 companies in the sector across 21 countries worldwide. In addition to Sovos Brands, recent North American investments include Noosa Yoghurt, lululemon athletica (NASDAQ: LULU), The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Serta Simmons Bedding, Party City (NYSE: PRTY), Bojangles’ (NASDAQ: BOJA) and Five Below (NASDAQ: FIVE).
Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC is serving as exclusive financial advisor and Morrison & Foerster LLP is serving as legal advisor to Rao’s Specialty Foods on the transaction. Weil, Gotshal & Manges is serving as legal advisor to Sovos Brands and Advent International.
ABOUT RAO’S SPECIALTY FOODS
Founded in 1992, Rao’s Specialty Foods is a leading producer of super premium pasta sauce, with Rao’s Homemade ranking as the leading brand in the super premium pasta sauce segment. In addition to sauces, Rao’s Specialty Foods offers a selection of premium dry pasta, dressings, marinades, olive oils, vinegars, tomatoes and fire-roasted red peppers. Rao’s Specialty Foods provides customers with high-quality products made with homemade ingredients, including 100% Italian tomatoes. Find out more about Rao’s Specialty Foods at http://www.raos.com.
ABOUT SOVOS BRANDS
Sovos Brands is a new kind of food and beverage company with a mission to acquire and build one-of-a-kind brands. The first brand in its portfolio, Michael Angelo’s Gourmet Foods, is a leading producer of premium, authentic frozen Italian entrées. Sovos Brands has the soul of a startup, the experience of an industry leader and the financial backing of Advent International, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. The company has a one-of-a-kind approach to brands, business and people—in fact, the only thing that’s old school about the business is the name, inspired by the old Latin term sovos, which means unique or one of a kind. This one-of-a kind vision leads the company’s focus on people and brands, working to ensure that both can really thrive. Find out more about Sovos Brands at http://ift.tt/2rQnT0D and Michael Angelo’s Gourmet Foods at http://ift.tt/RVYacP.
ABOUT ADVENT INTERNATIONAL
Founded in 1984, Advent International is one of the largest and most experienced global private equity investors. The firm has invested in 325 private equity transactions in 40 countries and as of December 31, 2016, had $41 billion in assets under management. With offices on four continents, Advent has established a globally integrated team of over 180 investment professionals across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia. The firm focuses on investments in five core sectors, including business and financial services; healthcare; industrial; retail, consumer and leisure; and technology, media and telecom. After more than 30 years dedicated to international investing, Advent remains committed to partnering with management teams to deliver sustained revenue and earnings growth for its portfolio companies. For more information, visit http://ift.tt/1iQznYv.
June 08, 2017 at 09:38PM
from Iris Dorbian
More and more young people are angling for early retirement.
According to a poll from our partner, MSN, 67% of American millennials (aged 18 to 29) want to quit the working world at or before age 65. The current full retirement age, meaning the age at which Social Security benefits fully kick in, is 67 for those born in 1960 or later.
MSN polls its readers, and then uses machine learning to model how a representative sample of the US would have responded, using big data, such as the Census. It’s nearly as accurate as a traditional, scientific survey.
The poll found 36% of all Americans — including one-third of younger millennials — are worried they aren’t saving enough money.
For the two-thirds of millennials hoping to retire early, the fear of coming up short may be justified. Nearly half of millennials are saving 5% or less of their income, while only 16% are saving more than 10%.
A recent report by Vanguard, which manages 401(k) accounts for 4.4 million Americans, underscores this finding. US employees under age 25 contributed an average of just 3.9% of their pretax income to a 401(k) last year, down significantly from 4.7% in 2015, while 25 to 34-year-olds socked away only 5.3% of their income.
To stay on track for retirement, a 10% savings rate in your 20s is on par with expert recommendations, but that should steadily rise to 15% of your income by your 40s — or even earlier. In fact, if you start saving 15% at age 30, you could be $570,000 richer by the time you turn 65 than those saving just 10% of their income (illustrated in the chart below, from T. Rowe Price).
The growth is largely because of compound interest, which is essentially your earned interest earning interest on itself. Because of how drastically compound interest affects retirement savings, money socked away earlier rather than later has a disproportionate effect on the ultimate earnings.
Saving may get harder — not easier — the older you are. For many millennials, the burden of student loan debt may be to blame for paltry savings. But by the time they’ve paid off their debts — and are likely earning a higher salary — financial milestones hit, like homebuying, marriage, and kids.
The MSN poll revealed that the percentage of 30 to 44 year-olds saving 10% or more of their income is even less (14%) than younger millennials. And yet, more than half of that group expects to retire before 65. This is evidence of a huge gap between expectation and reality when it comes to early retirement.
As Americans grow older, the MSN data shows, they become less optimistic about their ability to retire early. A whopping 68% never increase their savings rate beyond 10%.
SEE ALSO: If you want to retire early, follow these 6 savings life hacks from people who actually did
DON’T MISS: The 13 dumbest things to do with your money in your 20s
Join the conversation about this story »
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June 08, 2017 at 09:35PM
from Tanza Loudenback
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June 08, 2017 at 09:34PM
from
June 08, 2017 at 09:35PM
from Lisa Levin
President Trump’s
June 08, 2017 at 09:34PM
from
This post is authored by Alex Weinert from the Identity Division’s Security and Protection Team.
Hey there!
I want to share three basic hygiene tips for account protection that every organization should consider. Applying these will go a long way in making sure that only the right users get into to their accounts (and all the things those accounts give access to). While there are many great security features available from Microsoft and our partners, in this blog post I am going to focus on three basic hygiene account security tasks:
While these don’t guarantee you’ll never deal with account compromises, we find that in most cases implementing these simple practices would have prevented attackers from getting initial intrusion. For account security, it really is true that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” So here is your “ounce of prevention.”
In a perfect world, no one would ever complete a multi-factor challenge. We would get rid of static rules (“MFA always”) which cause user friction, and replace them with perfect risk detection. Good users would never see MFA challenges – we’d always figure out we were working with a trusted person – and bad guys would never be able to solve them.
Alas, despite many years of hard work on the problem (and substantial improvements), we still have “false positives,” where the system detects risk on a login that belongs to a good user. This could be because
These are simple examples, but this “grey area” will exist even as our detection gets more sophisticated, because, unfortunately, the bad guys are evolving too. It is their job – through phishing, malware, and the use of botnets – to act more and more like the people whose accounts they are trying to hack. Because of that, we must be able to challenge when we aren’t sure they are good – and that will mean some false positives that challenge good users.
If your users aren’t set up for multi-factor authentication, then your security policy will effectively block them from signing in and doing their jobs. Now, good security enables better productivity, but when organizations (and individual users) are faced with the choice between security and productivity, they choose productivity. MFA readiness allows users to solve the occasional challenge from a false positive, which in turn allows you to have a great security posture. That is why a good MFA registration policy is first on our list for basic hygiene.
In Azure Active Directory, you can use Azure AD Identity Protection to set up a policy to cover your users for MFA registration. Azure AD MFA will allow MFA challenges using voice, SMS, push-notification, or OAUTH token challenges. The registration policy will offer whatever you have configured in Azure AD MFA.
To set up a registration policy with Azure AD Identity Protection, just look at the menu on the left, and under “Configure” choose “Multi-factor authentication registration”.
Once you do this, you can choose the users to include in the policy, see the current state of MFA registration in your organization, and enable the policy.
Now, when a user who hasn’t yet registered for MFA logs in, they will see this:
This process has a few major benefits:
Ok, now that everyone is registered, let’s put all this MFA goodness to work.
There are many tools out there for telling you when a login has gone wrong, and a bad guy got in to your resources by pretending to be a good user. While helpful for forensics and improving your security posture for future events, the second step in your “Basic Hygiene” is to prevent bad guys from logging in at all. Azure Active Directory Identity Protection can detect risky logins in real time. Examples are logins from TOR browsers, new or impossible locations, or Botnet infected devices. To see the events impacting your organization, check the “Risk Events” area in Azure AD Identity Protection.
An unfortunate reality is that password leaks are happening daily (the biggest recorded breach was reported last week, at over 1B cred pairs), and 60% of people reuse their usernames and passwords. We detect and block tens of millions of credential replay attacks every day.
Our detection algorithms are based on our experience defending Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise assets, and the assets of our customers. They benefit from the supervised machine learning system which processes 20TB of data a day and self-adapts to new attack patterns, as well as many applied data scientists. Applying this evaluation to conditional access is your path to ensuring that bad actors are stopped in their tracks. That’s where Azure AD Conditional Access comes in. Azure AD Conditional Access is your Swiss army knife for making sure all logins are secure and compliant. It allows you to specify conditions of a login which impose more requirements before a resource can be accessed. With login risk assessment, you can apply a policy to challenge risky logins. Pick “Sign-in Risk Policy” and enable the policy.
With this policy enabled, you can apply a real-time intercept when risk is detected. The end user experience is as follows:
If a bad guy logs in (in this case, emulated from TOR):
The mobile app then gets the approval notification:
And the user simply doesn’t approve (or, if it *is* the good user, can get in), with the same approval process as previously described.
Users regularly fall for phishing scams, get malware, reuse their credentials on other systems, and use easily guessed passwords. As a result, we see a lot of cases where we are confident that the valid user is not the only one in possession of their password.
If we are seeing a lot of attempted logins or bad activity in a login, or find your users’ credentials leaked on the black market, we notify you of this by setting the “User Risk” score, indicating a probability that the user’s password is known to a bad actor. You can see which users the system is detecting as “At Risk” and why in Azure AD Identity Protection under “Users flagged for risk”. Notice my account about mid-way down on the right is marked as being at medium risk with six events.
(Please note that for hybrid environment, our ability to detect leaked credentials from black market finds requires that you have enabled password hash sync from your on-premises environment to Azure AD.)
I am frequently asked if compromise of the password is significant if the user is configured for MFA – the answer is emphatically yes! Multi-factor authentication is multi-factor if it utilizes at least two different mechanisms (choosing from a secret you know, what you have, and what you are). If the password is compromised, then you really don’t have a valid secret anymore. So, once we detect a compromised credential, it is important to lock out that user until the credential can be remediated, or better, we can have the user change the password themselves as soon as they can do so safely (with MFA). We do this on our consumer (Microsoft account) side, and find that we can get the user to safely change their password before the bad guys have a chance to act about 80% of the time. Our investigations in the enterprise cases show roughly the same results in terms of stopping attacks even when the password is known to the attacker.
Here again, Azure AD Conditional Access is your friend. When the condition includes users at risk of compromised credentials, we can challenge for MFA and require a password change. Look for “User Risk Policy”. In this case, I have configured the policy to require password change when user credential risk is medium or above. For this to work, you need to be mastering your passwords in the cloud, so if you are in a hybrid deployment, be sure password writeback is enabled!
When a user logs in with a user risk score that triggers this policy, they see the following:
On clicking next, they are asked to do multi-factor authentication:
And upon approving the login, the user can change their password.
And importantly – they can carry on with their work! Which emphasizes again the importance of getting those users registered!
So, there you have it! Three easy steps to VASTLY better account protection by doing basic hygiene! In summary:
Azure Active Directory makes it easy!
Be safe!
Alex (@alex_t_weinert)
June 05, 2017 at 09:37PM
from Microsoft Secure Blog Staff
