EUREP Goes Global: The ECB’s Quiet Lender of Last Resort

The European Central Bank has begun onboarding non-euro-area central banks to its enhanced EUREP repo facility. For the first time, the non-euro world has a standing euro liquidity backstop. Currencies internationalise through exactly this kind of quiet lender-of-last-resort plumbing, and

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Banco Azteca: Advancing Financial Inclusion Through Access, Education, and Trust

Banco Azteca has built a distinctive position in Mexico by serving working- and middle-class customers who have historically been overlooked by traditional banking. Its model combines an extensive physical network, digital access, responsible credit, insurance, and large-scale financial education. Banco

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Alejandro Valenzuela: Turning Financial Access into Lasting Capability

Banco Azteca Chairman of the Board Alejandro Valenzuela believes financial inclusion must extend far beyond access to accounts and credit. His leadership agenda combines education, responsible lending, digital innovation, and human support to help more Mexicans build resilience and participate

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Rules over Discretion: What a Chinese-Owned Lithium Expansion Says About Argentina’s Investment Regime

A US$709m expansion of a Chinese-owned lithium project has cleared RIGI, Argentina’s incentive regime for large investments. The approval suggests a rules-based framework with a fixed closing date is beginning to do what decades of discretionary policy could not: convert

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SPP AI Governance Framework: What “Human Oversight” Now Has to Mean

The Society of Pension Professionals’ new framework, Governance in the Age of AI, argues that artificial intelligence needs no new governance regime, only the honest application of duties that already exist. Its most demanding passage is about the people signing

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Buying Credibility: The Hiking Cycle That Keeps Indonesia’s Convergence Funded

Three increases since May, 100 basis points in all, one of them off-cycle. Bank Indonesia has charged domestic borrowers a visible price to keep real yields attractive, portfolio money flowing and Indonesia’s long convergence run financed. July’s surprise hold now

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Free, Capped and Contagious: Why a US Tariff Could Not Stop Pix Going Global

Brazil’s public payments rail has been named in a US Section 301 tariff action for the very design choices that made it ubiquitous. It has come through that first geopolitical stress test with its model untouched and dozens of central

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Earning Through a War: UAE Lenders Bank Records in a Quarter of Conflict

UAE lenders posted record first-half profits through a quarter of regional war, Hormuz shipping disruption and rate uncertainty. At bank level, the numbers point to Gulf banking earnings decoupling from oil and conflict, and to capital beginning to flow out

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The Two-Tier Tariff: Washington Prices Labour Standards into Trade

The Section 301 action that took effect on 24 July prices a social standard into trade policy for the first time: 10 per cent for economies that ban forced-labour imports, 12.5 per cent for those that do not, and a

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The IMF’s Wartime Audit of the UAE: What Gulf Resilience Is Made Of

The Fund’s July health-check names the buffers and instruments that let a diversified Gulf economy absorb a regional war. The harder question, for every neighbouring treasury, is which parts of the kit can be copied. An International Monetary Fund (IMF)

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