Business
Royal Mail given go-ahead to scrap second-class post on Saturdays
Business reporter
Royal Mail will start to deliver second-class letters on every other weekday and not on Saturdays to help cut costs, the industry regulator has said.
Ofcom said a reform to postal service was needed as people are sending fewer letters each year, so stamp prices keep rising as the cost of delivering letters goes up.
The changes mean second-class letters will be delivered either on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, or on Tuesday and Thursday, in a two-week cycle.
Royal Mail welcomed the changes, which will take effect on 28 July, but the move was criticised by some consumer and business groups.
Under the current one-price-goes-anywhere Universal Service Obligation (USO), Royal Mail has to deliver post six days a week, from Monday to Saturday, and parcels on five from Monday to Friday.
Ofcom says Royal Mail will have to continue to deliver first-class letters six days a week.
“These changes are in the best interests of consumers and businesses, as urgent reform of the postal service is necessary to give it the best chance of survival,” said Natalie Black, Ofcom’s group director for networks and communications.
However, just changing Royal Mail’s obligations will not improve the service, she said.
“The company now has to play its part and implement this effectively.”
Royal Mail estimates it will take 12 to 18 months to implement the changes across its network.
It has been piloting the changes to delivery since February in 37 of its 1,200 delivery offices, and said it was “keen to move ahead with deployment as soon as possible”.
Ofcom estimates that Royal Mail could save between £250m and £425m a year by making the changes.
Royal Mail’s parent company, International Distribution Services (IDS), said Ofcom’s announcement was “good news for customers across the UK”, and that it would support a “reliable, efficient and financially sustainable Universal Service”.
Martin Seidenberg, IDS chief executive, said the changes reflect the “realities of how customers send and receive mail today”.
Ofcom is also making changes to Royal Mail’s delivery targets.
The company will have to deliver 90% of first-class mail next-day, down from the current target of 93%, while 95% of second-class mail must be delivered within three days, a cut from the current 98.5%.
However, there will be a new target of 99% of mail being delivered no more than two days late to incentivise Royal Mail to cut down on long delays.
Ofcom has fined Royal Mail three times since 2020 for missing delivery targets – £1.5m in 2020, £5.6m in 2023, and £10.5m in 2024.
Consumer group Citizens Advice said Royal Mail had a “woeful track record of failing to meet delivery targets, all the while ramping up postage costs”.
Tom MacInnes, Citizens Advice director of policy, said Ofcom had “missed a major opportunity to bring about meaningful change”.
“Pushing ahead with plans to slash services and relax delivery targets in the name of savings won’t automatically make letter deliveries more reliable or improve standards,” he said.
The UK Greeting Card Association also criticised the move, saying it was “concerned that a reduction in the second-class service, would lead to a reliance on uncapped, unregulated first-class mail that is increasingly unaffordable for businesses and consumers alike”.
The Liberal Democrats said Ofcom’s announcement was a “deeply worrying decision that could leave countless people who rely on these deliveries in the lurch”.
“People need to know that their post will arrive on time so they can go about their lives, and this move flies right in the face of that,” said the party’s business spokesperson, Sarah Olney.
The Department of Business and Trade, which oversees Royal Mail, said: “The public expects a well-run postal service, with letters arriving on time across the country without it costing the earth.”
People now use the postal service in a different way, so “it’s right the regulator has looked at this,” it said.
“We now need Royal Mail to work with unions and posties to deliver a service that people expect, and this includes maintaining the principle of one price to send a letter anywhere in the UK,” a spokesperson added.
The number of letters Royal Mail delivers has fallen from a peak of 20 billion in 2004-05 to 6.6 billion in 2023-24.
Since 2008, Royal Mail’s revenues from letters have fallen from £6.9bn to £3.7bn.
However, the price of stamps has continued to rise. Since 2022, Royal Mail has hiked the cost of a first-class stamp from 85p to £1.70.
Despite pushing up prices, in 2023-24, Royal Mail made a loss of £348m.
Alongside the delivery changes, Ofcom also said it had launched a review of pricing and affordability on Thursday, “which will consider concerns that many people and organisations have raised about stamp prices”.
Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the change to less frequent second-class deliveries “will be music to the ears of Royal Mail’s new owner”.
The £3.6bn sale of Royal Mail to Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EP Group was cleared by shareholders in April.
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.)
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