CEO Financial News

Worley boss Chris Ashton has singled out artificial intelligence as a top priority, setting up a new working group to investigate how it can incorporate the emerging technology into its global engineering business.

Rakuten, the Japanese technology conglomerate has been scaling up its presence in India with bets across fintech, content streaming, analytics, healthcare and telecom, CEO Sunil Gopinath says, in a freewheeling chat with ET’s Subhrojit Mallick.How has your business in India scaled up over time? We started off primarily building a technology business from here that will support or cater to Rakuten’s businesses globally. We started with 100 employees and have scaled to 2000 now. First, we started with 24/7 support, then we did ecommerce, then we did ID management, which is similar to Aadhaar.

Domino’s chief executive Don Meij has promised that menu item prices won’t be lifted this year as the pizza chain tries to reposition as the best value operator in fast food amid intense cost-of-living pressures for households.

The NSW Greens have proposed an amendment to force accounting firms structured as partnerships with more than 100 partners to pay 5.45 per cent payroll tax on their partner income.

Woolworths Group boss Brad Banducci expects food prices to continue to come down this year, but says consumers are noticeably pulling back spending at its discount chain Big W where shoppers are shunning bigger items such as small appliances.

APA Group is seeking to raise $750 million in new equity to help fund the acquisition of remote power assets from Alinta Energy in its biggest move yet into the electricity sector, opening up a new avenue of growth.

startup Kombai has raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Foundation Capital, the Pune-based company said on Tuesday. The funding also saw participation from some chief technology officers and software startup executives as angel investors. Kombai, founded by two former Mindtickle senior executives, said it will use the capital to continue investing in research and development, accelerate improvements to its base models, build compatibility with a range of libraries and frameworks used by developer teams and elevate the developer experience around the product. The company builds new artificial intelligence models that can understand and code user interface (UI) designs like humans. It is also set to launch its public research preview on Wednesday. With a mission to make frontend development more efficient for the 5 million frontend and 15 million fullstack developers around the world, Kombai lets developers with design files get production-quality UI code with just one click per component. The UI code can then be downloaded or copied into integrated development environments, modified and incorporated in codebases. User experience (UX) has become increasingly important for businesses, because of which user interfaces have become more and more sophisticated, leading to increased demand and complexity of frontend development, Kombai cofounder and CEO Dipanjan Dey said. “Developers still spend a significant amount of their working time, ranging from 25% to 75%, on procedural code such as styles (CSS), DOM (HTML), and framework-specific boilerplate,” Dey said.

Global Capability Centers (GCC), or captive technology facilities of large global lenders and MNCs, such as Citi, Deutsche Bank and T-Systems, are strengthening their Indian presence in their 2.0 avatar after having partially scaled down operations in the country around 10-15 years ago. The global captives had sold a part or even their entire operations to Indian IT companies, mostly during the global financial crisis, to focus on core operations instead. But they now see India as a crucial profit and value-addition centre, helping their global headquarters in finance, supply chain, research and development (R&D) operations, building digital and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Deutsche Bank, which sold their captive to HCLTech in 2004, said its GCC has already onboarded over 2,500 hires so far this year and expects the trend to continue in the similar range for the rest of the year.

In a current class action lawsuit in the United States, the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) has openly pushed the EOS community to reject the proposed settlement with Block.one, the business that created the EOS blockchain. On August 8, 2023, the information was published on the ENF's official Twitter account.

Hydrogen fuel cell company HDF Energy aims to become a bigger player in the Southern Hemisphere by using part of an old Holden car factory to manufacture 12-metre metal “boxes” containing fuel cells providing electricity.

Rugby Australia will gain control over key management, coaching and talent decisions at the country’s five Super Rugby clubs in a major restructure designed to dramatically improve performance and unify the sport.

Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, says it served 41.6 million passengers in the first half of this year

Through successful fundraising, acquisitions and a marketing campaign to lure financial advisors put off by the pending Charles Schwab-TD Ameritrade mega-merger, Altruist has established itself as a significant player on the asset custody market with ambitions to grow even larger.

John Warnock, who helped invent the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, has died

Pilots at American Airlines have approved a new contract that will raise their pay more than 40% over four years

Macy’s heavily discounted spring goods to make room for fall and holiday merchandise in the face of customers’ cautious spending in a challenging economy

Dick’s Sporting Goods profit slipped in its second quarter and missed Wall Street’s expectations as the retailer cut its full-year profit outlook, citing worries over theft at its stores

British competition regulators have opened a new investigation into Microsoft’s revamped bid to buy video game maker Activision Blizzard

Threads users, get happy – you will finally be able to use the social media platform without an app

The Biden administration is spending $150 million to help owners of small parcels of forestland partner with private companies willing to pay them for carbon offsets and other environmental credits

The last time you could lock in a real (inflation-adjusted) yield with inflation-adjusted Treasuries (TIPS), the world was still cleaning up the mess from the financial crisis. A lot has changed since then, but current yields for 5- and 10-year TIPS securities have come full circle.