Advancements in financial technology combined with economic and political pressures have compelled global trade organizations to seek innovative strategies for managing trade credit risk and short-term commercial liquidity needs across borders. From the proliferation of distributed ledger platforms and supply chain financing networks to reforms in trade policy, this period of disruption has also brought new opportunities for businesses engaged in cross-border commerce. In this post, we will examine several modern trade finance mechanisms that have emerged as popular solutions for facilitating ..read more

Running a successful small business is much harder than it looks: everything you do, every decision you make ultimately affects your bottom line. One of such important choices you’ll face early on is deciding whether to hire employees or enlist the services of independent contractors. Like most business decisions, this one also comes with financial and legal implications. While both employees and independent contractors have their advantages (and disadvantages), the question remains: which one is more cost-effective for you? Employees: Pros and Cons There’s a reason why most big companies hir ..read more

The Circularity Report of 2022 revealed that only a small fraction, 8.6%, of the global economy was circular as of 2020. Facing this challenge head-on, are innovators like ICL Group (NYSE: ICL), PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP), and 3M (NYSE: MMM). They are breaking away from the “use and discard” mentality, and advancing circular economic models that emphasize reduced waste and lower environmental footprints. Leading Innovators in Circular Economy Circular economies are about transforming waste into valuable resources that can be recycled, repaired, and reused. Whether it’s crafting clothi ..read more

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an example of a generative AI system. There has been a generative AI boom in which machine-learning models can not only learn to forecast based on datasets, but they can also be trained to generate new data rather than just deductions from datasets. Open AI is requesting a collaboration to generate an open-source dataset for training language models. The algorithm’s general breakdown relies on a wide supply of publicly available data, producing text sequences with specific relationships. Patterns would emerge from the words, predicting the following sentence. Understanding ..read more

The Bank of England has decided to pause interest rates. This follows the Federal Reserve decision yesterday to pause interest rates. The decision to pause rates follows recent official inflation data when the rate of price rises came in lower than expected. Core UK inflation – which excludes energy, food, alcohol, and tobacco – fell by more than expected, from 6.9% in July to 6.2% in August. The current rate of inflation is 6.7% with the BOE target rate set at 2%. MPC voted by a majority of 5–4 to maintain Bank Rate at 5.25% UK GDP is estimated to have declined by 0.5% in July CPI inflation ..read more