Business
What is an Isa and how might the rules change?
Cost of living correspondent
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to announce changes to tax-free Individual Savings Accounts (Isas) on Tuesday.
It its thought she may set out new rules to encourage more investment in stocks and shares Isas.
What are Isas and how much money can you save in them?
An Individual Savings Account (Isa) is a savings or investment product which is treated differently for tax purposes.
Isas are offered by a host of banks, building societies, investment companies and other financial providers.
Any returns you make from an Isa are tax-free, but there is a limit to how much money you can put in each year.
The current £20,000 annual allowance can be used in one account or spread across multiple Isa products as you wish.
These accounts do not close automatically at the end of the tax year. When the next tax year begins, you can open a new Isa or – in some cases – can keep adding money to your existing accounts.
You have to be 18 to open an Isa. You also have to live in the UK or be a member of the armed forces or a so-called Crown servant who works abroad.
Isas were first introduced by then-chancellor Gordon Brown in 1999, but the annual allowance and the way they work have changed several times since then.
What is the difference between cash Isas and stocks and shares Isas?
Cash Isas are typically offered by banks or building societies, and function like a normal savings account.
Savers pay in money and interest gets added on top.
With regular saving accounts, once the interest goes above a certain threshold, you start to pay income tax.
A basic rate taxpayer can earn £1,000 in savings interest a year before paying tax. For higher rate taxpayer the limit is £500, but additional rate taxpayers don’t have any allowance – they pay tax on all their savings income. Those on low incomes may get an extra allowance.
When the money is saved in a cash Isa, the interest is tax-free, however much you earn.
Cash Isas are very popular, with millions of savers holding billions of pounds in them.
Stocks and shares Isas work in much the same way.
However, instead of simply being held in an savings account, the money is invested in shares in companies, unit trusts, investment funds or bonds.
Unlike other investments any returns are protected from income tax and capital gains tax.
Crucially, while the returns can be greater, so too are the risks. The amount of money you have in a shares Isa can go down as well as up.
What other types of Isa are available?
Junior Isas allow young people to save – or let their parents save for them – until they reach 18 – when they can access regular Isas.
Lifetime Isas (Lisas) are designed to help people save towards a deposit when buying a first home, or for retirement. Savers can put in up to £4,000 a year and the government adds an extra 25%.
However, critics argue the rules about how they work are too strict, and some savers have fallen foul of property purchase price limits.
Innovative Finance Isas let people use other types of financial arrangements such as peer-to-peer loans, without going through a bank.
How might the Isa rules change?
Despite a lot of media speculation, the chancellor has not yet set out her plans.
Documents released by the Treasury as part of the Spending Review in June said only that the government was “looking at options” for Isa reform.
It wants to “get the balance right between cash and equities [shares] to earn better returns for savers, boost the culture of retail investment, and support the growth mission”.
However, there is an expectation that Reeves will make an announcement at the annual Mansion House speech in the City of London on 15 July.
Many experts think she will reduce the annual allowance for putting money into a cash Isa.
Some have argued that she should scrap cash Isas completely, but that is considered extremely unlikely.
Why might the government cut the cash Isa limit?
It is thought the government wants to encourage savers to put money into stocks and shares Isas instead of cash Isas. This could potentially benefit British companies, and boost economic growth in the UK.
Many investment companies which sell stocks and shares Isas back the change, while banks and building societies who dominate the cash Isa market are against it.
Those in favour say there are billions of pounds languishing in savings accounts, which do not need to be accessed in a hurry.
They say that money could be better used for personal, and the greater, good by being invested in stocks and shares in the long-term, rather than sitting in savings accounts.
They want any change to the Isa rules to go hand-in-hand with other reforms to encourage personal investing.
What are the pitfalls of cutting the cash Isa allowance?
Opponents say there is little evidence that the move would encourage people to invest in shares instead of saving in cash.
They warn many people may not save at all, or would simply pay more tax on any money held in non-Isa accounts.
Building societies, in particular, point out it would also reduce the amount of money they receive from savers’ deposits which can then be lent out as mortgages or other loans.
As a result, the cost of borrowing could rise.
Business
Why AI alone can’t guarantee business success, expert cautions
As companies around the world race to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), strategy expert Shotunde Taiwo urges business leaders to look beyond the hype and focus on aligning technology with clear strategic goals.
Taiwo, a finance and strategy professional, cautions that while AI offers transformative potential, it is not a guaranteed path to success. Without a coherent strategy, organisations risk misdirecting resources, entrenching inefficiencies, and failing to deliver meaningful value from their AI investments.
“AI cannot substitute for strategic clarity,” she explains, stressing the importance of purposeful direction before deploying advanced digital tools. Business leaders, she says, must first define their objectives, only then can AI act as an effective enabler rather than an expensive distraction.
Taiwo stated that many organisations are investing heavily in AI labs, data infrastructure, and talent acquisition without clearly defined business outcomes. This approach, she notes, risks undermining the very efficiencies these technologies are meant to create.
For example, a retail business lacking a distinctive value proposition cannot expect a recommendation engine to deliver meaningful differentiation. Similarly, manufacturers without well-structured pricing strategies will find limited benefit in predictive analytics. “AI amplifies what’s already there,” she adds. “It rewards businesses with strong foundations and exposes those without.”
According to Taiwo, the true value of AI emerges when it is guided by intelligent, strategic intent. High-performing organisations use AI to solve well-defined problems aligned with commercial goals, often framed by business analysts or strategic leaders who understand both operational realities and broader business priorities.
She cites Amazon’s recommendation engine and UPS’s route optimisation algorithms as models of effective AI deployment. In both cases, technology served a clear purpose: boosting customer retention and streamlining logistics, respectively. When guided by strategy, AI becomes a force multiplier, enhancing forecasting, enabling automation, and improving personalisation where workflows are already well-defined.
On the other hand, even the most advanced AI systems falter in the absence of sound strategy. Common pitfalls include deploying machine learning models without a business case, focusing on tools rather than problems, collecting data without a clear use, and optimising narrow metrics at the expense of enterprise-wide goals. These missteps often result in underwhelming pilots and disillusioned stakeholders, issues strategic professionals are well-equipped to navigate and avoid.
In this sense, AI adoption can serve as a strategic diagnostic. Taiwo suggests that when business leaders struggle to define impactful AI use cases, it often reflects deeper ambiguity in their organisational direction. Key questions, such as where value is created, who the primary customer is, or which decisions would benefit most from improved speed or accuracy, are not technical, but fundamentally strategic.
AI, she says, acts as a mirror, revealing strengths and weaknesses in how a business is positioned, differentiated, and aligned across functions. Strategic leaders and business analysts are uniquely positioned to interpret these insights, inform course corrections, and guide effective technology investments.
Looking ahead, Taiwo argues that strategy in the AI era must be data-literate, agile, ethically grounded, and above all, human-centred. Leaders must understand what data they have, and how it can be harnessed, without needing to become technologists themselves.
Organisations must be nimble enough to act on AI-driven insights, whether through supply chain reconfiguration or dynamic pricing. Ethics, too, are critical, especially as AI increasingly impacts areas such as hiring, lending, and content moderation. “AI is not a replacement for strategy – it is a reflection of it,” she said.
In organisations with clarity and discipline, AI can unlock significant value. In those without, it risks adding cost and complexity. The responsibility for today’s leaders is to ensure that technology serves the business, not the other way around.
Business
XTransfer: Pioneering AI-Driven Transformation in B2B Foreign Trade Payment
HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach Newswire – 11 July 2025 – In the era of global economic integration, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face both unprecedented challenges and exciting new opportunities. XTransfer, the World’s Leading & China’s No.1 B2B Cross-Border Trade Payment Platform, is empowering over 700,000 SMEs across more than 200 countries with innovative financial solutions. The company’s relentless pursuit of technological advancement, especially in artificial intelligence (AI), is redefining the standards of risk control and digital transformation in the foreign trade finance industry.
XTransfer supports global SMEs with secure and seamless cross-border payments.
TradePilot: The First Large Language Model in Foreign Trade Finance
At the core of XTransfer’s innovation is TradePilot, the first large language model (LLM) tailored for the global foreign trade financial sector. Starting development in 2023, TradePilot was designed to leverage cutting-edge AI technologies, such as multimodal information extraction, long-context processing, and AI agents, to address the unique complexities of B2B international trade.
TradePilot’s journey has been marked by rapid iteration and real-world validation. In June 2024, two versions of TradePilot outperformed both domestic and international LLMs, including GPT-4, in a professional knowledge assessment, winning first place. This achievement highlights not only XTransfer’s technical prowess but also the rising maturity of China’s AI ecosystem in mission-critical financial applications.
Enhancing Risk Control and Anti-Money Laundering
One of the most significant applications of AI at XTransfer is in risk management, particularly anti-money laundering (AML) controls. B2B cross-border trade introduces data challenges, transactions are often fragmented, unstandardized, and partially offline, making it hard to monitor and assess risks. Traditional banks, reliant on manual AML checks, have struggled to efficiently serve SMEs due to high costs and operational inefficiencies.
XTransfer’s solution is a data-driven, automated AML risk control infrastructure, powered by TradePilot. By transforming unstructured business and transaction data into structured, analyzable formats, TradePilot enables precise risk prediction and real-time anomaly detection. For example, the system can flag suspicious export patterns that deviate from a country’s industrial profile or automatically match buyer and seller information across various documents, such as proforma invoices and logistics papers, enhancing both compliance and operational efficiency.
The results speak for themselves: what once required laborious manual intervention can now be handled at scale, allowing banks and financial institutions to serve SMEs with the same rigour and security as multinational corporations. This boosts financial inclusion and levels the playing field for smaller businesses in global trade.
Intelligent Customer Service and Digital Empowerment
Beyond risk control, AI infuses every side of XTransfer’s product ecosystem. The company’s intelligent customer relationship management (CRM) system leverages TradePilot for enhanced semantic understanding, emotion recognition, and effective response generation. Since integrating TradePilot, XTransfer’s AI-driven customer service resolution rate has soared from 13% to over 84%, dramatically improving user satisfaction and operational scale.
XTransfer’s CRM also features AI-powered tools such as multilingual letter writing, instant website building, and the pioneering “AI Employee” service. These innovations help SMEs with limited technical or language resources to efficiently reach global buyers, manage operations, and establish an online presence, in as little as 30 seconds. Over 10,000 foreign trade businesses have already benefited from these services, lowering the barriers to digital adoption and accelerating their international growth.
Commitment to Data Security and Future Outlook
XTransfer’s technological architecture is built on robust, distributed computing principles, ensuring high performance and reliability. The company adheres strictly to international and regional laws regarding data privacy, employing encryption, access controls, and audit mechanisms to safeguard user data.
Looking forward, XTransfer aims further to promote the adoption of its AI-powered TradePilot model, thereby accelerating the digital transformation of the B2B foreign trade finance sector. Weitong Li, Senior Technology Director of XTransfer, emphasises that the successful deployment of TradePilot is both a testament to XTransfer’s innovation and a catalyst for smarter, safer, and more accessible global trade.
As foreign trade becomes increasingly intelligent and data-driven, XTransfer stands at the forefront, empowering SMEs to explore broader markets and seize new opportunities in the evolving global economy.
Hashtag: #XTransfer #AI #Tradepilot #LLM #LargeLanguageModel #Crossborder #Payment #SMEs
https://www.xtransfer.com
https://www.linkedin.com/company/xtransfer.cn
https://x.com/xtransferglobal
https://www.facebook.com/XTransferGlobal/
https://www.instagram.com/xtransfer.global
The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.
About XTransfer
XTransfer, the world-leading and China’s No.1 B2B Cross-Border Trade Payment Platform, is dedicated to providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with secure, compliant, fast, convenient and low-cost foreign trade payment and fund collection solutions, significantly reducing the cost of global expansion and enhancing global competitiveness. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in Shanghai and has branches in Hong Kong SAR, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, the UAE, and Nigeria. XTransfer has obtained local payment licences in Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, and Australia. With more than 700,000 enterprise clients, XTransfer has become the industry No.1 in China.
By cooperating with well-known multinational banks and financial institutions, XTransfer has built a unified global multi-currency clearing network and a data-based, automated, internet-based and intelligent anti-money laundering risk control infrastructure centred on SMEs. XTransfer uses technology as a bridge to link large financial institutions and SMEs around the world, allowing SMEs to enjoy the same level of cross-border financial services as large multinational corporations.
XTransfer completed its Series D financing in September 2021 and achieved unicorn status. The Company possesses a diverse composition of international investors, including D1 Capital Partners LP, Telstra Ventures, China Merchants Venture, eWTP Capital, Yunqi Capital, Gaorong Capital, 01VC, MindWorks and Lavender Hill Capital Partners.
For more information, please visit: https://www.xtransfer.com/
Business
Microsoft Veteran Devender Bansal Joins MLAI Digital as CEO & Co-founder for Global business (APAC and EMEA) to Drive Agentic AI Innovation
VMPL
New Delhi [India], July 11: MLAI Digital, the rapidly growing deep tech startup in the Agentic AI space, has leveraged its strategic footprint and product innovation by announcing this appointment of Devender Bansal as CEO (APAC and EMEA).
Devender is a technology leader with more than 2.5 decades in enterprise transformation. Prior to this, he was in charge of driving technology sales for Microsoft’s Cloud and AI business in corporate accounts across India and Southeast Asia, forging partnerships with CXOs, expanding technical teams and capturing market share across major verticals.
“MLAI Digital’s bold vision for Agentic AI, paired with the hustle and agility of a startup, really struck a chord with me,” said Devender. “We’re building something that doesn’t just automate work — it reimagines how intelligence is orchestrated across the enterprise.”
As CEO & Co-founder for APAC and EMEA, Devender will lead MLAI’s global expansion across these regions, focusing on product scaling, strategic alliances, and vertical-specific AI deployment. His goal? To build a global Agentic AI brand – a new category of intelligent systems designed to reason, act, and evolve autonomously.
The firm’s leadership in the BFSI, & strong presence in manufacturing and logistics sectors have started seeing early success for the global venture, with solutions like real-time fraud detection & predictive asset maintenance.
“We’re thrilled to have Devender onboard,” said Arpit Gupta, CTO & Founder, MLAI Digital. “His strategic mindset, deep tech acumen, and experience scaling businesses will be invaluable as we take MLAI Digital to new markets.”
Devender is equally excited about the team he’s joining. “MLAI team is one of the smartest & agile set of people to interact with,” he shared. “They’re not just building AI, they’re building it right, with purpose, ethics, and a forward-looking mindset.”
With this leadership addition, MLAI Digital is accelerating growth plans. The entity will focus on innovation concern, partnerships, and making real-world impact.
“Together, we’ll harness Agentic AI to redefine industries and position MLAI Digital as an innovation leader,” Devender added.
Media Contact:
MLAI Digital Private Limited
Email: headit@mlaitech.io
Website: www.mlaidigital.com
(ADVERTORIAL DISCLAIMER: The above press release has been provided by VMPL. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
(This content is sourced from a syndicated feed and is published as received. The Tribune assumes no responsibility or liability for its accuracy, completeness, or content.)
-
Funding & Business1 week ago
Kayak and Expedia race to build AI travel agents that turn social posts into itineraries
-
Jobs & Careers1 week ago
Mumbai-based Perplexity Alternative Has 60k+ Users Without Funding
-
Mergers & Acquisitions1 week ago
Donald Trump suggests US government review subsidies to Elon Musk’s companies
-
Funding & Business1 week ago
Rethinking Venture Capital’s Talent Pipeline
-
Jobs & Careers1 week ago
Why Agentic AI Isn’t Pure Hype (And What Skeptics Aren’t Seeing Yet)
-
Education3 days ago
9 AI Ethics Scenarios (and What School Librarians Would Do)
-
Education4 days ago
Teachers see online learning as critical for workforce readiness in 2025
-
Education1 week ago
AERDF highlights the latest PreK-12 discoveries and inventions
-
Education4 days ago
Nursery teachers to get £4,500 to work in disadvantaged areas
-
Education6 days ago
How ChatGPT is breaking higher education, explained