FIVE Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On 11 February, the Reserve Bank of India released draft guidelines that seek to make banks more accountable for the financial products they sell to individuals. The guidelines aim to prevent banks from mis-selling various financial products, especially life insurance plans that double up as investments.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Trump administration is considering new national security tariffs on a half-dozen industries in the wake of a Supreme Court decision last week that invalidated many of the president’s second-term levies. The new tariffs being considered could cover industries such as large-scale batteries, cast iron and iron fittings, plastic piping, industrial chemicals and power grid and telecom equipment, according to people familiar with the plans.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In the regulatory tussle over supervision of India's clearing houses, the European Union blinked first. Ending a three-year standoff over supervision of the Clearing Corp.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Boosted by powerful new artificial-intelligence tools, Silicon Valley startups are running leaner than ever, spawning new benchmarks like revenue-per-employee and even talk of the billion-dollar, one-person company. AI coding products like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, along with AI tools for sales, marketing and other functions, have reduced the need to hire, some founders and Silicon Valley insiders say.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On 14 February, the boards of Religare Enterprises Ltd (REL) and Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL) approved a demerger of its insurance and financial services businesses into two separate listed entities. REL will retain control of Care Health Insurance, while lending, broking, investment, and ancillary activities would be transferred to RFL.

New Delhi/Bengaluru: Embattled entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal-owned artificial intelligence venture, Krutrim, is being propped up almost entirely by business routed through venture-capital- and public-investor-backed Ola companies — raising fresh questions among experts over governance and the use of shareholder-backed resources to support a promoter-owned unit.Krutrim SI Designs Pvt Ltd, which Aggarwal set up through his family office in the summer of 2023, reported revenue from operations of ₹101.7 crore for the year ended March 2025, according to its financials filed with the ministry of corporate affairs. Of this, ₹90.8 crore or 90% of revenue came from two group entities: Ola Electric Mobility and ANI Technologies.Ola Electric Technologies Pvt Ltd, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Ola Electric Mobility Ltd, accounted for ₹23.87 crore, while Ola Cell Technologies Pvt Ltd, the other subsidiary of the listed company, brought in ₹2.29 crore, according to the review of the financials by Mint.

Mint on 19 February.Concerns around the death knell for the IT services sector comes after India’s $283 billion IT sector lost at least $45 billion in market value in the first six weeks of this year.The knee-jerk reaction came after OpenAI’s GPT 5.3-Codex and Anthropic’s Claude 4.6-Cowork demonstrated abilities to automate tasks such as sales invoicing, legal processes and more, which is handled by TCS, Infosys, and HCLTech. Shares of these IT firms fell 10-14% in five days, after Anthropic and OpenAI’s launches.Still, like Altman, many believe that AI could actually lead to being a new growth vector for IT services.“Enterprises won’t splurge on AI until they see clear business returns, and for them, the big takeaway will be to ensure that it works with legacy systems and gives actual benefits—none of which should kill the middleware layer of technology firms,” Ana Paula Assis, senior vice-president and chair for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific at IBM, told Mint.On 9 February, analysts at brokerage firm Investec also argued in favour of the tech outsourcers, and said they “should benefit from legacy code modernization, migration of legacy SaaS (software as a service) applications, building AI foundation layers for enterprises and physical AI, among other opportunities.”On 15 February, analysts at Kotak Institutional Equities also questioned if OpenAI and Anthropic’s advancements were hyped more than what there were worth.“Benchmarking results (of AI models) aligned more with incremental improvements rather than a large step-up in capabilities.

₹1,800 billion in FY20 to ₹2,400 billion in FY25. Within this, branded ethnic wear grew faster, at an 18–20% CAGR, lifting the organized segment’s share from about 11% to nearly 19% between FY19 and FY22.Even so, the unorganized segment still accounts for roughly 70-75% of the market, leaving significant room for organized players to expand while intensifying competition.Manyavar commanded roughly 38% share of India’s branded men’s ethnic wear market as of FY22, the latest available data, underscoring its dominance within the organized segment.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. President Trump’s new plan for tariffs puts his trade agenda on a collision course with the midterm campaign season. Just hours after his main tariff rationale was invalidated by the Supreme Court on Friday, Trump announced he would implement new levies under two separate legal authorities—one short term, another longer lasting.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. SEOUL—North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un kicked off his country’s most important political event in half a decade with confidence, gearing up for an era of military expansion and defiance as a self-declared nuclear power. The 9th Party Congress, where North Korea’s leadership sets out its foreign policy and economic and military goals for the next five years, opened Thursday with a celebratory atmosphere.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Drones are revolutionising logistics, swiftly moving everything from medical supplies to diagnostic samples across challenging terrain. Leading Indian drone companies have been at the forefront of this shift, adapting their technology to navigate the country's complex geography and climate.

Vedanta Ltd is in a race against time to shore up production levels at its oil and gas business that has declined each of the past 10 years.Higher production levels could bolster the business's financials, helping it fend for itself when it is housed in an independent company named Vedanta Oil & Gas Ltd.Over the past decade, ageing oil blocks have more than halved production at Vedanta’s oil and gas vertical from 211 thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day (kboepd) in FY15 to 103.2 kboepd in FY25. During the first nine months of FY26, average output stood at 89.1 kboepd—below the 95-100 kboepd guidance given by the company at the beginning of the year.To be sure, falling production at ageing blocks is a problem endemic to the oil and gas sector, with peers like Reliance Industries and Oil and Natural Gas Corp.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." That quote is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, though the Indian independence leader never said it. To the crypto industry, the apocryphal phrase is a popular mantra.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Real estate has long been a favoured asset for Indian investors, but owning commercial property comes with high entry barriers. Large upfront capital, long-tenure loans, tenant management, maintenance hassles and illiquidity make direct ownership cumbersome.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MIDLAND COUNTY, Texas—Perched in the control room of a Chevron rig, an operator steered a drilling bit thousands of feet under the arid surface of the Permian Basin. As he did so, he received real-time directions from a specialist in Houston, some 477 miles away.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI : India’s technology outsourcing services are likely to “die out" over the next five years, as artificial intelligence automates most software programming and quality engineering tasks, according to Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and early-stage investor in OpenAI—the world’s most valuable AI startup.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Raamdeo Agrawal, co-founder of Motilal Oswal Financial Services, says the next trillion dollars of India’s market capitalization could create more wealth than the last. Drawing on decades of market cycles, the ace investor, speaking at the Mint Money Festival on 14 February in Mumbai, argued that compounding on a larger base, deeper participation and improving corporate profitability could make the coming decades disproportionately rewarding for patient investors.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It was a counterintuitive message that Ganesh Mohan, managing director of Bajaj Finserv Mutual Fund, delivered to a hall of eager investors at the Mint Money Festival 2026. Speaking on 14 February at the NSE Atrium in Mumbai, Mohan focused not on markets or products, but on a relationship that often damages both confidence and capital – the one between investors and their own minds.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. At the Mint Money Festival 2026, where several attendees gathered to hear leading investment and personal finance experts share insights on managing money, a panel discussion on ‘How to Invest in Mutual Funds in Today’s Environment’ offered timely guidance on where investors should be allocating their money, what they should avoid, and what returns they could they realistically expect from their mutual fund investments over the long term.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If this winter feels strange, it’s not in your head. In the eastern U.S., residents have been suffering through one of the most frigid seasons in recent memory.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. At the Mint Money Festival in Mumbai on 14 February, an audience poll revealed that people are more concerned with the Union Budget creating jobs and improving the government’s fiscal health than delivering tax breaks. Monika Halan, founder of Dhan Chakra Financial Education, decoded Budget 2026 for households to explain what really matters for jobs, taxes, investments and long-term financial security.