Senior banking and payments executives assembled at the Middle East Banking Innovation Summit, and among them was Sends CEO Alona Shevtsova, who joined the debate on how real-time payments, digital wallets and cross-border infrastructure are evolving. Banking, fintech and technology leaders converged on Jumeirah Emirates Towers in Dubai on 17 September for the 17th staging of the Middle East Banking Innovation Summit (MEBIS 2026), and among the industry experts contributing was Alona Shevtsova, CEO of Sends, who took her place in the panel discussion “Payment Innovation in Banking: Real Time, Cross Border and Wallet Driven Evolution,” a session devoted to…
Author: David Ashworth
David Ashworth
David Ashworth spent fifteen years in print and digital journalism covering UK news. He started at a regional evening paper in the North West, moved to a national digital outlet, and spent four years as a business and economics correspondent before going freelance. He writes about the economy, public finances, employment, and the corporate news that lands differently depending on whether you read it from a boardroom or a break room. He files on deadline and prefers evidence to opinion. David lives in Lancaster. He reads the ONS releases before most people have read the headlines about them, and considers the lag time instructive.
A public-record API can rescue a product team from scraping hundreds of government websites one at a time. Reaching an endpoint, though, proves nothing about whether the data behind it suits the workflow you have planned. Integration can run cleanly while the product still stumbles over elementary questions. Does the API reach every jurisdiction on your list? Does one result describe a person, a property, a filing or an event? What does that update date actually record? Can you trace a returned record back to the office that issued it? The same questions surface across many flavours of public data:…
The UK arm of ÜNLÜ & Co, UNLU Securities UK Limited, has secured wider regulatory permissions from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and will trade from now on as UNLU Merchant Bank Limited. This enlarged platform widens what the Group can deliver in London and reinforces the position of ÜNLÜ & Co as a link between Türkiye and international financial markets. LONDON – Now celebrating three decades in business, Türkiye’s leading group for investment services and asset management, ÜNLÜ & Co, has embarked upon a new phase of growth abroad. With broader regulatory permissions now secured, UNLU Securities UK Limited,…
A policy statement delivered by the US Federal Reserve in Washington might seem utterly remote to someone scrolling through property listings in Manchester, or to a Bristol borrower arranging a new deal on their home loan. Yet our financial system is tightly woven together, so the choices made by Fed Chair Kevin Warsh and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) travel across the Atlantic almost instantly. Anyone weighing up whether to fix now, or simply curious about the next move in British interest rates, needs to grasp how American borrowing costs feed into mortgage lending on this side of the…
At an investment firm called Janus, four people spend their days hunting for the next billion-pound business idea. What they actually get is fart-proof underwear, clinical toilets and questionable items of sex furniture, and every promising investment ends in comic disaster. That is the premise of No Big Deal, a British sitcom whose pilot episode went live free on YouTube and can be watched here. The office holds four recognisable types. Derek Tudor is brilliant but unpredictable and cannot keep his thoughts to himself. Lydia de Mabro runs the place in practice, having earned a board seat off the firm’s…