DealBook: A Stock Exchange Expands Its Global Reach

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

Bits Blog: Google Expands Its Boundaries, Buying Waze for $1 Billion

A screen shot of the Android version of Waze, a social mapping service used by millions of drivers around the world.

6:55 p.m. | Updated

Google announced on Tuesday that it had closed its deal to buy Waze, a social mapping start-up that features real-time traffic data provided by users to help drivers find the fastest route to a destination.

Google did not disclose the purchase price in its blog post announcing the acquisition. But a person with knowledge of the transaction said it was $1.03 billion.

The acquisition highlights the increasing importance of location data in our on-the-go lives, whether it is in finding a place to eat or navigating an unfamiliar road.

Waze has drawn a particularly passionate base of nearly 50 million users around the world. In any given month, about one-third of them turn on the app to access the company’s directions. Waze passively tracks their movements via GPS to generate live information about roads and traffic. And users can add their own information about accidents, police speed traps and road hazards.

Google said Waze would remain separate from its own Maps service. Some of Waze’s real-time traffic data will feed into Google Maps, however, and Google plans to incorporate its powerful search capabilities into Waze.

“We’ll also work closely with the vibrant Waze community, who are the DNA of this app, to ensure they have what’s needed to grow and prosper,” Brian McClendon, the Google vice president responsible for its geographic products, said in the post.

Google and Waze declined to make any executives available for an interview.

But in his own blog post, Waze’s chief executive, Noam Bardin, said, “Nothing practical will change here at Waze. We will maintain our community, brand, service and organization — the community hierarchy, responsibilities and processes will remain the same.”

Mr. Bardin indicated that he and other Waze employees planned to remain with the company. Its product development team will remain in Israel, where Waze has most of its operations.

An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of Waze’s chief executive. He is Noam Bardin, not Noah Bardin.

DealBook: France Expands Inquiry Into Tax Evasion at UBS

Michael Buholzer/ReutersThe Swiss bank UBS in Zurich.

8:41 a.m. | Updated

PARIS – UBS, the biggest Swiss bank, is the target of a widening tax evasion investigation in France, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Friday, an indication that the lender’s problems with the French government are growing.

A French judge on Thursday placed UBS AG, the Swiss parent company, under formal investigation on suspicion that it illegally sold banking services to French citizens that helped them to set up secret accounts abroad, according to Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, the spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office. The Swiss bank also was identified as an ‘‘assisted witness,’’ a less serious status, in a concurrent investigation of suspected money laundering and tax evasion, she said.

The expanded inquiry comes just a week after the bank’s local subsidiary, UBS France, was put under formal investigation on similar suspicions. In the French legal system, a formal investigation, sometimes compared to an indictment in the American system, can drag on for years, and does not necessarily lead to charges or trial. An assisted witness is required to answer prosecutors’ questions with a lawyer present, but is thought less likely to ultimately face charges.

Yves Kaufmann Lobato, a UBS spokesman in Zurich, sought to play down the significance of the latest development, noting that the investigation had been the subject of news reports since early last year.

‘‘We will continue working with the authorities in France within the applicable legal framework to arrive at a resolution to this matter,’’ he added, citing a bank statement.

The investigators are examining the question of whether bankers from the Swiss parent company broke a French law against “illicit solicitation” by actively approaching potential French clients.

According to a report on Friday in the French newspaper Le Monde, UBS bankers regularly sought to ingratiate themselves into networks of affluent people, mingling at sporting events and concerts in order to seek out possible clients for tax evasion. At least 353 French citizens suspected of evading taxes through UBS have been identified, and the French government has sought administrative assistance from the Swiss government in four cases, the newspaper reported, without citing its source.

Mario Tuor, a spokesman for the Swiss Federal Finance Ministry in Bern, declined to comment on the case, saying the details were confidential.

There is a broad push in the United States and Europe to stop offshore banks from aiding tax cheats. Switzerland – where the secrecy laws punish banks for revealing client data – has been in an uncomfortable spotlight. In France, President François Hollande has made ending tax evasion a top priority after his former budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, was found to have set up secret Swiss and Singapore accounts to hide some of his wealth.

UBS itself has been under international scrutiny since 2008, when the United States Justice Department threatened to indict it for conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. In 2009, UBS eventually agreed to pay a $780 million fine to avoid prosecution, and turned over data on 4,450 client accounts held by United States citizens suspected of evading taxes.

Obama administration officials followed that case with a broad push to expose all the American accounts hidden behind Swiss banking secrecy laws. With about a dozen Swiss lenders facing the possibility of indictment in the United States, the Swiss government agreed last month on a framework for banks to hand over information on American clients, a deal it hoped would permanently end the threat of United States prosecution. That agreement still must be approved by the Swiss legislature.

UBS said on Friday that it ‘‘fully supports the strategy of Switzerland to limit itself to the management of declared assets.’’

‘‘We believe that Switzerland and the countries of the E.U. need to find a solution for the past,’’ according to a statement from the bank. ‘‘This is an industry issue that UBS has taken significant steps to resolve since 2009. UBS does not tolerate any activities intended to help its clients circumvent their tax obligations.’’

Offit Kurman Expands Real Estate Practice

Jim Ettelson has joined the Philadelphia office of Baltimore-based Offit Kurman, where he will head up the firm's real estate practice.

As LPL Financial Expands, Scrutiny of Its Practices Intensifies

The company, LPL Financial, has 13,300 brokers, 6,500 offices, 4.3 million customers — and a growing list of problems with regulators.

At a time when many big-name brokerage firms are losing market share, LPL executives in San Diego have guided the company out of obscurity to become the nation’s fourth-largest brokerage firm — after Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch — and the largest in much of rural America, where it specializes.

Now, as investors weigh whether to jump aboard the stock market’s record-breaking rally, LPL is one of the biggest firms trying to connect them with stocks, bonds and other products. But the low-cost model that has aided LPL’s explosive growth has brought with it shortcomings that point to the difficulties regulators face in overseeing far-flung financial advisers.

As LPL has expanded, state and federal authorities have censured the company and its brokers with unusual frequency. LPL brokers have been penalized for selling complex investments to unsophisticated investors, for speculative trading in customer accounts, and, in a few cases, for outright stealing from clients.

“LPL is on our radar screen more than any other firm,” said Lynne Egan, who oversees securities regulation in Montana. Last fall, Ms. Egan brought a case against LPL, accusing it of failing to supervise a broker. She said her office is preparing to bring another case against the company, involving multiple brokers.

In the last year and a half, state regulators in Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, Oregon and Pennsylvania have penalized LPL for failing to oversee its brokers properly. Brokers at the company have faced the most common industry reprimand more frequently than brokers at its large competitors since the beginning of 2012, according to a review of data from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, the industry’s self-regulator.

Executives for the firm declined to comment for this article, but a spokeswoman, Betsy Weinberger, said in a statement that LPL had taken “steps to enhance our overall platform, including investing in our compliance process and oversight capabilities to support our growth. We remain steadfast in our commitment to serving investors and doing the right thing.”

Ms. Weinberger said the company increased its risk and compliance budget 5 percent last year and 11 percent this year.

LPL was created in 1989 through a merger of two older brokerage firms, Linsco, of Boston, and Private Ledger, of San Diego. It grew to national prominence after 2005, when two large private investment firms, TPG Capital and Hellman & Friedman, bought LPL and financed a number of acquisitions from California to New York. LPL went public in 2010, and its stock has been up slightly since then.

LPL’s rapid growth, and the problems that came with it, reflect forces that are changing the way millions of ordinary Americans interact with Wall Street. Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, prominent firms like Merrill, which long catered to individual investors, have lost brokers and customers.

Many investors have turned instead to independent brokerage firms like LPL. Unlike employees of the industry giants, LPL brokers are essentially contractors. They get LPL e-mail addresses and come under LPL compliance but pay for office space and staff.

For LPL and its brokers, it is a lucrative arrangement. With overhead costs relatively low, the company can pass a large percentage of commissions and fees — upward of 80 percent — back to its brokers. LPL has said that such a model is also an advantage for investors because the company does not have its own investment products, like the mutual funds created by the big banks, that it wants to push onto its customers.

But analysts say that the high commissions leave LPL less money for compliance and can attract brokers interested in skirting the rules. Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said that LPL’s management had done a good job expanding the company and improving its compliance technology, allowing brokers with high standards to do well. But he said the scattered nature of its offices was an Achilles’ heel that exposed the company to lawsuits and regulatory risks.

“If the Indians run off the reservations, you have no one guarding the borders,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 22, 2013

An earlier version of a chart with this article misstated a metric in determining the frequency of regulatory actions. It is the number of regulatory actions per 10,000 advisers, not per 1,000 advisers.

Hasbro Expands Transformers Brand Into New Media

The toy maker started the Transformers franchise with a Japanese partner in 1984. The concept — robots disguised as everyday objects — was originally aimed at 5-year-old boys. But as those boys have grown up and had children and even grandchildren, Hasbro has expanded the brand into other media and added new toy lines to appeal to everyone from toddlers to adults.

Take Rescue Bots, for example.

The main Transformers brand contains mature themes, with big robots battling for control of the planet. To engage children ages 3 to 7, Hasbro introduced Rescue Bots in 2011, featuring toy robots as first responders.

“The goal there is to take what you have and bring an age-relevant message, which is to get away from the battle and the fighting and focus on the heroic nature of Transformers,” said Jay Duke, global vice president for the Transformers brand at Hasbro.

That was enough to convince Ryan Yzquierdo, who has been a Transformers fan since he was 7, that Rescue Bots were a good way to introduce Transformers to his 3-year-old daughter.

“Each toy focused on a different motor skill, which was a big selling point for me and my wife,” said Mr. Yzquierdo, who started a Web site, Seibertron.com, devoted to Transformers in 2000.

When buying toys and games for their children, parents often look to favorites from their own childhood. Their nostalgia for beloved toys from their past helps create a bonding experience with their little ones.

Toy makers have long tried to build enduring brands that can be passed down to the next generation. Those intellectual properties are cheaper to develop because the toy companies do not have to pay a licensing fee to an outside partner. They also bring in added revenue through licensing fees paid by other companies, like makers of apparel and school accessories.

In Transformers, Hasbro has one of the most valuable brands among toy makers. In 2011, the year the third Transformers movie was released, Hasbro recorded $960 million in sales from products related to Transformers and Beyblade, a spinning top game, according to the company’s latest annual earnings report.

When it was developed in 1984, Transformers consisted of a toy line and an animated television series.

But in 2007, Hasbro began a new strategy to build the brand into a worldwide franchise that now includes live-action movies, video games, publishing and even theme park rides.

“There are not a lot of brands like that in the world that have that strong emotional resonance across generations,” said John A. Frascotti, global chief marketing officer at Hasbro.

For older boys, Hasbro has extended the brand into mobile apps, video games and comic books. For adults, the company has licensed an annual Transformers convention called BotCon and organizes events at conventions like Comic-Con International in San Diego.

But the growth of the Transformers franchise has had its pitfalls, too. When there is not a Transformers movie rumbling through theaters, the toy line stumbles. Hasbro reported net income of $130.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2012, a 6.3 percent decline from the previous year. Sales in its boys business fell 23 percent in the quarter from the same period in 2011, the year the last Transformers movie came out.

Analysts say it is important for Hasbro to keep the Transformers brand fresh in non-movie years.

“Hasbro focuses on these big, home-run movies. When they don’t have one, they get punished for it,” said Jaime M. Katz, an analyst at Morningstar.

Investors expect sales in the boys category to decline this year as well, but to rebound in 2014 when the next Transformers movie is released, said Felicia R. Hendrix, a Barclays analyst. “The real problem around this is that their boys’ line seems to be very movie-driven,” Ms. Hendrix said, adding that Hasbro should try to make the brand more evergreen.

Toward that end, the company showed previews of two new Transformers toy lines, Beast Hunters and Construct-Bots, last month at the annual Toy Fair in New York. The Beast Hunters theme, which features robots that morph into predatory animals, will encompass several areas, including television, toys and licensing, while Construct-Bots will allow boys to build their own Transformers.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.