Verizon names board member and former PayPal CEO Schulman to its top post

Verizon Communications is tapping the former CEO of PayPal to its top role, taking over the post from Hans Vestberg.

Dan Schulman, who has served as a Verizon board member since 2018 and is its lead independent director, will become CEO of the New York company immediately. Vestberg will serve as a special adviser through Oct. 4, 2026. During that time, he will focus on the transition process, which includes the integration with Frontier Communications, which is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.

Vestberg put together Verizon's 5G network strategy and oversaw its $20 billion deal to buy Frontier Communications so that Verizon can strengthen its fiber network. The transaction, which was announced in September 2024, is also a way for Verizon to shore up its foray into artificial intelligence as well as connected smart devices.

Vestberg will continue as a Verizon board member until its 2026 annual meeting.

Aside from serving as PayPal's CEO, Schulman has held senior leadership roles at AT&T, Priceline, Virgin Mobile and American Express.

“Verizon is at a critical juncture," Schulman said in a statement on Monday. “We have a clear opportunity to redefine our trajectory, by growing our market share across all segments of the market, while delivering meaningful growth in our key financial metrics.”

Semiconductor maker AMD will supply its chips to artificial intelligence company OpenAI as part of an agreement to team up on building AI infrastructure, the companies said Monday.

OpenAI will also get the option to buy as much as a 10% stake in AMD, according to a joint statement announcing the deal. It's the latest deal for the ChatGPT maker as it races to beef up its AI computing resources.

Under the terms of the deal, OpenAI will buy the latest version of the company's high performance graphics chips, the Instinct MI450, which is expected to debut next year.

The agreement calls for supplying 6 gigawatts of computing power for OpenAI’s “next generation” AI infrastructure, with the first batch of chips worth 1 gigawatt to be deployed in the second half of 2026.

AMD also issued OpenAI with a warrant allowing the AI company to buy up to 160 million shares of AMD’s common stock. That amounts to about 10% of the chipmaker based on AMD's 1.6 billion outstanding shares. The warrant will vest based on two milestones tied to the amount of computing power deployed, as well as unspecified “share-price targets."

Shares of AMD spiked 25% before the opening bell Monday. Shares of Nvidia, which have repeatedly set new record-highs this year, fell slightly.

“This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI’s full potential,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a news release. “AMD’s leadership in high-performance chips will enable us to accelerate progress and bring the benefits of advanced AI to everyone faster.”

The deal is a boost for Santa Clara, Calif.-based AMD, which has been left behind by rival Nvidia. But it also hints at OpenAI's desire to diversify its supply chain away from Nvidia's dominance. The AI boom has fueled demand for Nvidia's graphics processing chips, sending its shares soaring and making it the world's most valuable company.

Last month, OpenAI and Nvidia announced a $100 billion partnership that will add at least 10 gigawatts of data center computing power. OpenAI and its partners have already installed hundreds of Nvidia’s GB200, a tall computing rack that contains dozens of specialized AI chips within it, at the flagship Stargate data center campus under construction in Abilene, Texas.

Barclays analysts said in a note to investors Monday that OpenAI's AMD deal is less about taking share away from Nvidia than it is a sign of how much computing is needed to meet AI demand.

“We realize there will be delays with these deals, and that the infrastructure required largely doesn’t exist today, but we would again highlight this as a proof point that the ecosystem is desperate for more compute,” the Barclays analysts wrote.

Fifth Third Bancorp agreed to buy Comerica Inc. for about $10.9 billion in stock, the largest US bank deal this year and a sign that the logjam blocking big mergers in the industry may have broken under the Trump administration’s deregulation efforts.

The deal will create the ninth-largest bank in the country, with about $288 billion in assets, the two companies said in a statement Monday. The per-share transaction value represents a 17% premium to Comerica’s closing share price Friday.

Regional lenders across the US are looking to take advantage of the new environment under President Donald Trump, who’s ushered in an era of financial deregulation that’s led many investment bankers to predict his administration will go easier on merger approvals. Smaller US banks are pursuing scale to cope with the heavy costs of technology upgrades and regulatory compliance.

Fifth Third, based in Cincinnati, has long been known for its reach across the Midwest, but it’s spent years trying to expand in the Southeast, where the deal with Dallas-based Comerica could help. Explosive growth in the region’s major metropolitan areas - including Atlanta, Nashville, Houston, Dallas and Charlotte, North Carolina - has expanded the Southeast’s population at an annual compound rate of roughly 1% since 2010, easily the fastest growth of any region in the country.

The deal was attractive for Fifth Third because of Comerica’s focus on commercial banking for middle-market companies, with the buyer seeking more businesses in the category to make it a larger contributor of revenue, Fifth Third Chief Executive Officer Tim Spence said in an interview. Comerica, meanwhile, didn’t have a large retail deposit base, which adds flexibility to funding sources at a time when interest-rate moves are becoming more volatile, he said.

After the deal is completed, Fifth Third’s total assets will exceed $250 billion, crossing a critical asset threshold that comes with stricter capital, liquidity and compliance requirements. It will not cause disruptions in its financial results, though, because the bank has been preparing for the new protocols for a few years since it bid to buy the failed First Republic Bank out of government receivership, Spence said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

“We’re going to be able to leverage Fifth Third’s retail discipline and proven de novo strategy to build out a leading position in the Texas market, where Comerica has a foothold, and be able to leverage Comerica’s incredible expertise and credit culture in the middle-market across the broader Fifth Third platform,” Spence said.

Comerica has been under pressure from an activist investor group to sell to a large bank. In July, HoldCo Asset Management LP publicly pushed the management for a sale, citing underperformance of the lender’s shares. They’ve gained just 20% over the past 25 years through Friday as the KBW Bank Index climbed 67%. The company has been cutting expenses to improve earnings.

Shares of Fifth Third fell 2% at 10:11 a.m. in New York, while Comerica rose 13%.

Comerica was hit a bit harder during the regional-bank crisis, to a large extent because of its concentration on big-ticket commercial deposits that made it more at risk of deposit flight, CEO Curt Farmer said on an conference call with analysts discussing the transaction. It had to pull back from lending to tackle the funding pressure and exited at least one business line, he said.

“The lack of a retail, more granular deposit base made our deposits a bit more flighty, a little easier to move large, chunky commercial deposits, and it took us a bit to recover from that,” Farmer said on the call.

Comerica began conversations well over a year ago with the board to search for options, including both mergers and acquisitions and organic growth, Farmer said. The bank looked for companies to buy but failed to find targets that were particularly attractive, putting it on a path to being sold instead, he said. The conversations began before summer and became more serious entering the third quarter, with Fifth Third emerging as the top candidate, Farmer said.

“For us, it was really about the timing being right. It is an environment where I think scale makes a difference,” Farmer said, citing increased costs to run a bank.

Among this year’s other large deals, PNC Financial Services Group Inc. announced it would take over FirstBank Holding Co. for about $4.1 billion, giving it $26.8 billion in assets and branches in Colorado and Arizona. Pinnacle Financial Partners Inc. agreed to combine with Synovus Financial Corp. in an all-stock transaction valued at $8.6 billion.

Comerica’s stockholders will receive 1.8663 Fifth Third shares for each Comerica share they hold, or about $82.88 per share based on the Oct. 3 closing price. When the deal is completed, Fifth Third shareholders will own roughly 73% of the combined company.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was financial adviser to Fifth Third and Sullivan & Cromwell was legal adviser. JPMorgan Chase & Co. advised Comerica and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz was legal adviser. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods also served as financial adviser to Comerica.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV has begun correcting some of Pope Francis’ more questionable financial reforms and decisions, canceling a law Monday that had concentrated financial power in the Vatican bank.

Leo abrogated the 2022 law that had decreed that management of the Holy See’s assets was the “exclusive responsibility” of the Institute of Religious Works, or IOR.

In his first-ever executive decree, Leo published a new law Monday that says the Holy See generally does use the IOR, but can turn to non-Vatican banks in other countries if the Vatican’s investment committee “deems it more efficient or convenient” to do so.

The law was the clearest sign yet that Leo is starting to fix some of Francis’ more problematic decisions and is recalibrating the Vatican's centers of power, after Francis tended to lean heavily on the advice of the IOR and its top manager.

The 2022 law had taken many in the Vatican by surprise since it appeared to contradict the Holy See's founding constitution. The constitution says the patrimony office, APSA, is responsible for administering the Vatican’s real estate and financial holdings.

Even Francis realized the problem and had intended to fix it, Vatican officials said, but died in April before he could.

Second significant reform decision

It was the second significant move that Leo has taken in as many weeks to reform some of Francis’ decisions. On Sept. 27, Leo removed a top administrator in the Secretariat of State and sent him to Paris to serve as ambassador to UNESCO.

Monsignor Roberto Campisi had been close to Francis, and the late pope made him president of a new fundraising commission that was formed to drum up donations for the cash-strapped Holy See.

The commission’s statutes and members were announced while Francis was in the hospital, on Feb. 26, and included only Italians with no professional fundraising experience.

The lack of qualified fundraisers and absence of any Americans immediately raised questions about the commission's credibility. Americans are among the biggest donors to the Holy See, but also demand levels of transparency and accountability that the Vatican hasn’t always followed.

Campisi's transfer suggests Leo is planning to revamp the commission and perhaps name new members who would lend the commission more gravitas and credibility with key donors.

The new law was announced on the same day that Leo met with the Knights of Columbus, the influential U.S. Catholic charitable organization that is a major donor to the Holy See. In his remarks, Leo thanked the knights for their latest charitable project: the restoration of Bernini’s baldacchino canopy over the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica.

A long-running financial trial

Monday also saw another dramatic development in the Vatican's long-running financial trial, which saw a cardinal convicted of embezzlement, among other charges. Francis saw the trial as a sign of his commitment to financial reform, but it was beset by procedural irregularities and defense complaints that their clients' fundamental rights were being trampled in an absolute monarchy.

The trial is now in the appeals phase, and Vatican prosecutors are scrambling to salvage their case after making a basic procedural error in their appeals filing, and apparently another error after the filing was ruled inadmissable.

On Monday, the appeals court adjourned the trial until Feb. 3. That will apparently give time for the Vatican's high court to weigh in on the prosecutors' motions. The court is made up of four Francis loyalist cardinals, none with a juridical background.

Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva asked Donald Trump to remove tariffs on the country’s goods and sanctions on top officials in the first extensive conversation they’ve held since the US leader thrust the South American nation into the center of his global trade war.

The pair of leaders agreed to hold an in-person meeting soon, with Lula suggesting a potential encounter at a summit of Southeastern Asian nations in Malaysia later this month, Brazil’s government said in a readout of the Monday call that lasted about 30 minutes.

Trump, it said, has tapped Secretary of State Marco Rubio to lead ongoing trade negotiations with Brazil. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The call is the clearest sign yet of a thaw in US-Brazil relations that deteriorated rapidly after Trump imposed 50% trade levies on many Brazilian goods and sanctions on a Supreme Court judge in a bid to stop the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted on coup attempt charges in September.

The call, which Finance Minister Fernando Haddad characterized as “positive,” followed a seconds-long encounter at the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month, when Trump said he and Lula had “good chemistry” and had discussed a meeting to talk over their differences.

US and Brazilian officials have since begun working to arrange an in-person meeting between the two presidents, while high-level channels have also reopened.

Vice President Geraldo Alckmin resumed talks with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick last week, while Haddad is expected to meet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Washington later this month.

Brazil has aimed to use the talks to resolve what it considers misunderstandings over trade and other issues between both governments. A central point of contention is the legal framework for US social media companies operating in the country, especially after the Brazilian Supreme Court’s temporary suspension of Elon Musk’s X last year.

Trump and other administration officials also spent months trying to pressure Brazil to drop the charges against Bolsonaro, one of the US leader’s closest allies in Latin America.

Bolsonaro’s legal woes resulted from a 2023 insurrection attempt against Lula’s government that drew comparisons to the US Capitol attacks that followed Trump’s 2020 defeat. A federal grand jury indicted Trump on multiple criminal counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, charges that were ultimately dropped after his victory last year.

“That’s very much like they tried to do with me, but they didn’t get away with it, at all,” Trump said of Bolsonaro’s trial last month.

Lula has regularly blasted Trump for attacking Brazilian sovereignty and attempting to intervene in domestic affairs, a message that helped boost his popularity ahead of a 2026 presidential election in which he plans to run again.

But the leftist leader has also maintained that he’s open to talks with the US - Brazil’s second-largest trading partner - as long as he’s treated as an equal.

Brazil’s private sector has joined efforts to improve dialogue between the two countries, with leading companies and industry groups called on to provide input about their sectors.

Gold will become Australia’s second-most-valuable commodity export, overtaking liquefied natural gas, after the precious metal’s “extraordinary surge” to record prices, the government said.

Revenues from bullion will jump to A$60 billion ($39.6 billion) in 2025-26, - the 12 month period to next June - up from A$47 billion in the prior year, and almost double the total two years ago, the Department of Industry, Science and Resources said in a report. The surge will partially offset expected revenue declines in other commodities, including iron ore.

Gold has punched to successive highs over the last 12 months - making it one of the top performing commodities - as central banks boost holdings, the Federal Reserve cuts US interest rates, and geopolitical instability lifts demand for havens. LNG, meanwhile, has softened, in part as crude oil has weakened, while metallurgical coal, another major export, has also dropped.

“The main driver of upward revisions to export values in 2025–26 has been the extraordinary surge in US dollar gold prices,” the department said in its quarterly snapshot. “The renewed strength in gold prices comes as US interest rates cuts occur - which lowers the opportunity cost of holding gold - and worries rise over the US fiscal outlook and the rate of US inflation.”

Australia is one of the leading gold producers, with output projected to rise from 340 tons in 2025-26, to 369 tons in the following period.

Total resource and energy export earnings, which includes iron ore, oil and gas, as well as metals such as lithium and copper, will total A$369 billion over the 12 months through to next June, about 4% lower on-year, it said. They are forecast to fall further to A$354 billion in 2026-27.

“Global economic uncertainty continues to weigh on other commodity prices and earnings,” the department said. Rising trade barriers - and uncertainty over the level at which such barriers will settle – are disrupting flows between the US and other nations and slowing investment in some sectors, it added.

Iron ore will remain the biggest earner, accounting for about a quarter of commodities revenue, worth A$113 billion in 2025-26. While volumes are projected to increase, prices are in decline as new mines come on line amid a glut of steel in the largest producer, China. Iron ore is seen averaging about $87 a ton, before easing slightly in the next financial year.

That outlook comes as major miner Rio Tinto Group prepares to ship its first cargo of iron ore from the SimFer mine at Simandou in Guinea, Africa. At full production, Simandou will deliver 120 million tons a year, though it will take years before the project hits that capacity.