How Businesses Can Streamline Bank Payment Approvals

August 25, 2026

Making payments to banks can be a time-consuming aspect of your business. Passing requests through several people, having some murky guidelines, and having a mess of paperwork can create delays. A proper approval procedure assists companies in maintaining their spending plans within reason and making payments on time. Here is how businesses streamline bank payment approvals:

1. Set Clear Approval Rules

The first thing that needs to be done is to determine who can approve each payment grouping in particular. Businesses can designate caps for payments, departments, purposes, or the risk of the supplier. For instance, a normal expense might require just one approval, but might require two approved persons to sign off on a larger expense.

Having clear rules will also limit confusion with regard to staff handling payments when there are peak times, or when a staff member is absent. An ACH authorization form may be beneficial to record authorization for specific electronic payments and establish uniformity in the record of payment. Companies must also check with their bank on what they require, as requirements may differ from payment services.

2. Centralize Payment Requests

One uniform procedure makes it easier to manage payment requests. Businesses can use a system for managing requests, or a shared workflow, rather than relying on emails or paper documents. All requests should contain the following information: amount, name of the person, the reason/purpose, documents attached, and the requested payment date.

A central workflow provides visibility of what needs to be done to the approver(s). It also minimizes the possibility of an inbox error, whereby you could end up approving the same payment twice. Getting all the information at the same time and in the same place will help reviewers make a quick and informed decision.

3. Use Smart Approval Workflows

In addition to reducing the number of repetitive operations, automation can also remove the need for workers to be in charge of everything. A payment workflow may schedule a request to the right approver, reminding them to make a decision, and keep a history of when a decision was made. Businesses can also set up various approval workflows to process payroll, suppliers, refunds, and unusual transactions.

4. Monitor Delays and Exceptions

The streamlined process requires ongoing check-ups. Finance managers will see the time it takes to get approvals, which process steps are blocking approval, and which transactions are getting repeated corrections. Patterns can help identify issues, including unclear approval limits, undelivered documents, or swamped reviewers.

Businesses also need to distinguish regular payments from abnormal ones. A simple invoice could go through the system, but high-dollar or unusual invoices might be subject to further review. By doing this, you will ensure that normal transactions go smoothly.

In conclusion, responsibilities, reliable information, and appropriate controls are important to making efficient payments approved at the bank. Reducing unnecessary delays is possible by centralizing requests, adopting structured workflows, and closely examining abnormal transactions. The idea is not just to accept payments more quickly. Rather, it is to provide a process that is streamlined, reliable, and simple for staff to follow.

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Retirement Planning When Nobody Is Doing It For You

August 25, 2026

If you’re salaried, a portion of your retirement happens by accident. Provident fund is deducted whether you think about it or not, gratuity accrues quietly, and many employers run an NPS contribution alongside. None of it is sufficient on its own, but it means that even an inattentive employee arrives at sixty with something. If you run a business, freelance, consult or practise independently, none of that machinery exists — which is why so many self-employed people go looking for the best retirement plan in India only in their late forties, having built a successful practice and almost no retirement corpus. There is no default, no deduction, and nobody sending a reminder; whether a pension plan ever gets started depends entirely on you.

The harder problem is that the money is usually there. It just goes back into the business, because that always feels like the higher-return decision.

“My business is my retirement plan”

This is the sentence that does the most damage, and it isn’t stupid — for many people the business genuinely is the most valuable thing they own. The problem is that it’s a retirement plan with three conditions attached.

It has to be sellable. A lot of small businesses and professional practices are worth very little without the founder in them. If the client relationships are yours personally, if you’re the reason people come, there may be no transferable asset at all.

It has to be sellable when you need it. You don’t choose the year you want to retire and the year the market is willing to pay for your business independently. Health can force the timing.

And it has to be worth what you think. Owners routinely carry a valuation in their heads that no buyer would agree to.

None of this means the business is a bad asset. It means it’s an illiquid, concentrated, single-point-of-failure asset — which is exactly the kind you shouldn’t have your entire retirement resting on.

Work out what you’re actually aiming at

Start with the number, because without one you’ll keep deferring. Take current household spending, strip out what disappears in retirement, add what grows — healthcare above all — and inflate it to the year you plan to stop. Then work out the capital needed to sustain that for thirty years. A retirement calculator turns this into a ten-minute exercise, and it’s worth running it more than once with different inflation and life-expectancy assumptions to see which one your plan is most sensitive to.

Do this even if the answer is uncomfortable. A target you’re behind on is more useful than no target.

Contributing when income is irregular

The standard advice — fix a monthly SIP and forget it — assumes a salary. When income arrives in lumps, quarterly or seasonally, a fixed monthly commitment either gets set too low to matter or gets cancelled in a lean quarter.

Two approaches work better.

Pay yourself a salary. Decide a figure the business transfers to you monthly regardless of how good the month was, and treat retirement contributions as a deduction from that, exactly as an employer would. The discipline comes from the structure, not from willpower.
Contribute by percentage, not amount. Commit to a fixed share of every payment received — 15%, 20%, whatever is realistic — moved out on the day it lands. Good months contribute more, lean months contribute less, and nothing has to be cancelled.

Both beat the common pattern of investing whatever is left at year end, because there usually isn’t any.

The gaps salaried people don’t have

Health cover. No employer policy means you’re buying your own, and buying it early matters. Cover taken in your thirties, maintained continuously, avoids the exclusions and loading that come with buying after a diagnosis. This is not optional — a single hospitalisation can undo a decade of contributions.
Life cover. If the business carries debt, or your family depends on the income, term cover is doing a job no business asset can. Note that underwriting is harder when income is irregular: keep clean ITRs, because insurers will ask for them.
Separation. Keep business and personal finances properly apart. When the two are blended, retirement savings get treated as working capital during the first bad quarter, and they don’t come back.

Converting it later

The other thing salaried retirees have is a structure at the end — a provident fund balance, sometimes an annuity purchased from it. You’ll need to build that conversion yourself.

The principle is the same either way. Identify the portion of your monthly costs that must be guaranteed — food, utilities, medicines, insurance premiums — and cover that with income that arrives regardless of markets or business conditions. Keep the rest invested for growth and discretionary spending, and hold a real emergency buffer, which matters more for you than for anyone salaried.

If you’re starting late

Plenty of people read this at forty-eight rather than thirty-two. The levers are fewer but they’re real.

Direct windfalls straight in — a large project payment, a good year, the proceeds of an asset sale. Consider working longer, which does double duty by adding contribution years and removing funding years. And be honest about the business exit: if it isn’t sellable, start building the retirement corpus outside it now, at whatever rate you can manage.

The advantage of self-employment is control. You decide what the business pays you and when. Use that to pay yourself last as well as first — the version of you who stops working still has to eat.

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The Philippines’ Security Trap

August 24, 2026

By Dan Steinbock

The recent school shootings are a tip of an iceberg of a vast private-security industry, Filipinos recruited into foreign wars, expanding U.S. military access and rising defense expenditure.

These converging phenomena intersect through poverty and violence, corruption and weak institutions.

The Philippines has experienced an unprecedented wave of campus gun violence in Tacloban and Zamboanga, occurring within a span of just two months. These school shootings have shattered the idyllic self-image of a peaceful nation.

Internationally, school violence has become increasingly linked to the Western online far-right through “764,” a faction of a decentralized, global extremist ecosystem known as “The COM” (The Community).

Targeting, grooming, sadism, neo-Nazism

These Western-based digital threat actors are actively targeting, grooming, and radicalizing vulnerable youth.

Ordinary Filipinos take the vast scale of security as given because it has become normalized.

Emerging in the early 2020s, 764 is a decentralized, internationally operating online sextortion network, with penchant for sadism. In 2023, Bradley Cadenhead, who founded the network at 15, was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Presumably, 764 is part of the Order of Nine Angles, with decades of neo-Nazi ideology and activism.

Currently, the Philippine school violence incidents are few and their causes remain contested. But the public debate is already moving toward security responses: tighter school access, armed protection, digital surveillance, controls on violent online content and stronger police-school coordination.

Yet, more securitization does not resolve the challenge of excess securitization. What’s needed is addressing poverty, social exclusion, bullying, institutional corruption and the wide availability of firearms.

In international view, Philippine society already contains an extraordinary density of guards, police, firearms and surveillance.

A huge security ecosystem – and export engine

Ordinary Filipinos take the vast scale of security as given because it has become normalized. In international perspective, it is typical to countries where poverty remains rampant.

Industry and government sources put licensed private security personnel at roughly 500,000, with industry estimates historically reaching about 700,000 employees when other security personnel are included.

This is a mass labor market, not a niche occupation. Guards protect condominiums, malls, banks, hospitals, schools, factories and private estates. The sector creates demand for firearms, uniforms, vehicles, CCTV, access systems, communications, training and security software.

Above it sits the formal state apparatus: police and an increasingly modernized Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). Around it is a growing contractor ecosystem—logistics, maintenance, construction, maritime protection, intelligence, cybersecurity and defense IT.

Beyond the Philippines lies another layer: Filipinos working for foreign private military and security companies, including major Western contractors and specialized maritime and executive-protection networks. Digital platforms now openly advertise such work; “Silent Professionals,” for example, lists contract executive-protection positions in Manila.

The Philippines is not just importing security. It is increasingly exporting security labor.

From labor migration to covert military recruitment

The most disturbing extension is the recruitment of Filipinos into foreign conflicts. Philippine authorities warned in February that overseas employment offers were being used to lure Filipinos into foreign armed forces, including Russia’s war against Ukraine.

There is a fair amount of hypocrisy in this, however. For years, Filipino fighters have been recruited to the West’s post-9/11 wars.

In Empire’s Labor: The Global Army That Supports U.S. Wars (2019), geographer Adam Moore demonstrated how these U.S. overseas wars rely heavily on “third country nationals” recruited from nations like the Philippines and Bosnia.

Typically, military contractors pay Filipino workers significantly less than U.S. personnel, facilitating what is described as “war on the cheap.”

Ever since the failure of postwar industrialization, the Philippine has built one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated labor-export systems. Recruiters, overseas employment networks, remittance channels and millions of workers accustomed to migration have created infrastructure that is now exploited by military recruiters and traffickers.

Big contractor money, expansive US military footprint

The foreign contractor pipeline expanded dramatically after 2003, when the Iraq War created huge demand for third-country labor. KBR became the dominant U.S. logistics contractor, employing thousands of workers across Iraq. Subcontractors recruited Filipinos at strikingly low wages.

KBR remains a major U.S. government contractor: its 2025 revenue was about $7.8 billion. DynCorp, a major Iraq/Afghanistan contractor, was acquired by Amentum, whose 2025 revenue reached $14.4 billion.

Iraq/Afghanistan created mass demand. The post-2014 period shifted toward specialized security, maritime protection, intelligence and technical contracting. Ukraine and renewed Middle East tensions have reopened recruitment channels, increasingly through digital platforms.

The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) has expanded access to Philippine sites, with U.S. infrastructure investment already exceeding $80 million and further funding planned. This is not simply symbolic. Philippine defense modernization is accelerating.

Here’s the contradiction: Greater military capability can reduce vulnerability by strengthening deterrence. But it embeds the Philippines deeply in a permanent regional security architecture: bases, exercises, logistics, missiles, aircraft, intelligence, cybersecurity and foreign defense suppliers.

New conflicts must be generated to sustain the profit margins.

GDP, poverty and corruption: the vicious circle

The security economy is already substantial. Philippine GDP reached ₱28 trillion in 2025. Defense alone now equals roughly 1.5% of GDP in budgetary terms, although imported weapons do not translate one-for-one into domestic value added.

Public order, private security, defense logistics, construction, physical security and cybersecurity broaden the domestic ecosystem. A reasonable analytical estimate remains roughly 2.5–3% of GDP, or about $12–15 billion annually, for the identifiable domestic security economy and its immediate ecosystem.

Foreign security contractors may add perhaps $0.5–1 billion in Filipino earnings, a segment of the remittance income.

All these billions of dollars are away from ordinary Filipinos’ development, social transfers and welfare.

Prosecutions matter, but trials alone do not reform procurement, political finance, contracting or patronage.

A deeper problem is political economy. Poverty supplies security labor. Insecurity creates security demand. Security spending creates contracts and employment. And weak procurement and political institutions create opportunities for rents.

The flood-control scandal—now involving hundreds of investigations—shows how genuine public needs become vehicles for political-business extraction.

Prosecutions matter, but trials alone do not reform procurement, political finance, contracting or patronage. And selective prosecutions make things even worse.

Without structural reforms, corruption undermines development, perpetuates poverty and thereby reproduces insecurity.

As the Philippines is becoming more securitized, it is growing increasingly insecure.

The commentary was released by The Manila Times on Aug 24, 2026

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About the Author

Dr Dan Steinbock, an expert of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore).

The Bargaining Table is Writing America’s Workplace AI Rules

August 24, 2026

By Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

A new report shows that union contracts are becoming one of the strongest practical safeguards American workers have against disruptive workplace AI. The NewsGuild-CWA now has roughly 85 to 90 contracts with explicit AI provisions, while agreements in journalism, entertainment, and video games increasingly require notice, consent, bargaining, or limits on replacement. These examples expose a larger management failure: most employers still treat employee participation as an obstacle to AI adoption rather than as operating infrastructure.

A deployment process that excludes the people responsible for quality can scale mistakes faster than it creates value.

That approach creates avoidable resistance. Workers often learn about new AI tools after executives have selected vendors, redesigned workflows, or announced job cuts. Leaders then interpret anxiety, skepticism, and workarounds as irrational opposition to technology. In reality, employees are responding rationally to a process that asks them to absorb risks they did not help define.

Union contracts offer a better model, even for companies with no unionized workforce. Their value comes from forcing management to answer concrete questions before deployment. What work will the system perform? Which decisions remain human? What data will management collect? Who can challenge errors? How will productivity gains affect staffing, pay, workload, and training? What happens when the tool fails?

Consider the Washington-Baltimore News Guild’s dispute with Politico. The union challenged AI products that produced inaccurate material without negotiated safeguards or adequate editorial review. An arbitrator found that management had violated the collective bargaining agreement, and Politico later dismantled the tools. The lesson reaches beyond journalism. A deployment process that excludes the people responsible for quality can scale mistakes faster than it creates value.

The ZeniMax workers’ agreement with Microsoft provides another useful template. It requires management to notify the union and bargain before introducing certain AI systems, while framing AI as a tool that should support workers rather than replace them. SAG-AFTRA’s contract similarly establishes consent, notice, compensation, and bargaining rules around digital replicas and synthetic performers. These provisions translate vague commitments to responsible AI into enforceable operating practices.

Most American workers lack access to those protections. Federal data show that only a small share of the workforce has union representation, with especially low rates in computer and financial occupations. Waiting for Congress to create a comprehensive national system leaves millions of employees dependent on whatever governance their employer chooses to provide.

Executives should borrow five disciplines from collective bargaining now.

First, require advance notice for material AI deployments. Employees should learn what the system will do, what data it will use, which roles it may change, and when decisions remain subject to human review. Notice should arrive before implementation, not after resistance appears.

Second, create representative design groups. Include frontline employees, managers, technical specialists, legal and security staff, and people whose jobs face the greatest change. Give them authority to test assumptions, identify failure modes, and recommend workflow changes. Participation without influence becomes theater.

Third, negotiate measurable boundaries. Define prohibited uses, required human approvals, appeal procedures, monitoring limits, quality thresholds, and conditions for pausing deployment. A principle such as “AI will augment workers” means little until leaders specify which tasks, decisions, and staffing actions it covers.

Fourth, connect productivity gains to credible workforce plans. When AI reduces effort, companies should explain whether they will reinvest time in higher-value work, reduce workload, improve service, retrain employees, or eliminate positions. Workers do not need promises that every job will remain unchanged. They need honest explanations of who gains, who bears risk, and what support accompanies transition.

Fifth, establish enforcement and review. Employees need a channel to report failures without retaliation, leaders need named responsibility for corrective action, and major deployments need scheduled reassessment. Governance should evolve as tools, workflows, and risks change.

Some executives will object that bargaining-style processes slow innovation. Poorly designed participation can produce delay. Yet unilateral deployment often creates hidden costs through low adoption, shadow AI, weak data quality, litigation, turnover, and rework. Fast purchasing does not equal fast value.

The deeper lesson from union AI provisions concerns trust. Employees support change more readily when they can influence how it affects their work, see that management has considered their expertise, and believe that leaders will share benefits and address harms. Those conditions improve the information available to decision-makers while reducing defensive resistance.

Companies do not need to wait for a union campaign or federal mandate. They can create internal AI agreements that specify notice, participation, boundaries, workforce consequences, and enforcement. The organizations that adopt these disciplines voluntarily will make better technology choices and face less disruption. The bargaining table is showing executives what responsible AI adoption looks like. Management should pay attention before workers decide they need a formal seat there.

A governance process that lacks evidence of influence should count as incomplete, regardless of how many employees attended workshops or surveys.

Companies should also disclose how they measure the success of these agreements. Useful indicators include employee adoption, error reporting, workload distribution, appeal outcomes, training completion, service quality, and the number of deployments paused or changed after worker feedback. These measures reveal whether participation improves performance or merely produces meetings and documents.

Boards have a role as well. They should ask whether management consulted affected employees, documented dissent, tested alternatives, and assigned accountability for harms. Directors routinely scrutinize financial controls and cyber risk. Workforce AI deserves the same attention because a failed deployment can damage operations, retention, reputation, and legal compliance simultaneously. A governance process that lacks evidence of influence should count as incomplete, regardless of how many employees attended workshops or surveys.

Adapted from: The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026). https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/aibook

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About the Author

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky was named “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times for helping leaders overcome frustrations with Generative AI. He serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Dr. Gleb wrote seven best-selling books, and his two most recent ones are Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams and ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI. His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, CBS News, Fox News, Time, Business Insider, Fortune, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His writing was translated into Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Korean, French, Vietnamese, German, and other languages. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, with 8 years as a lecturer at UNC-Chapel Hill and 7 years as a professor at Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Leading in a Liminal World: Optionality, Partnerships and New Capability

August 23, 2026

By Shameen Prashantham

Over the past six years, “liminality”, the unsettling in-between state, has become permanent. The three dimensions leaders need to seize opportunity must now evolve into ongoing strategic orientations, argues Shameen Prashantham.

In 2020, as the world wrestled with the pandemic, I argued that leaders were grappling with what anthropologists call “liminality” – an in-between threshold spanning a vanishing “before” and an unknowable “after.” Liminality, I suggested, represented both crisis and opportunity because it was a double-edged sword: confounding, because it strips away the familiar cognitive, social, and institutional scaffolds we depend on, yet liberating, because it opens the possibility of new ways of seeing, connecting, and growing.

Liminality on Steroids

Half a decade later, liminality is no longer a moment; it is the environment. We are leading in a world that feels persistently betwixt and between. The post-World War II geopolitical order has frayed, but its replacement remains stubbornly unclear. The digital revolution, supercharged by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is a prolonged, generative, and utterly unpredictable transformation. As such, the world feels like there’s liminality on steroids.

Unlike the covid era, which required leading through a liminal episode, today’s challenge is leading in a liminal world. Three dimensions of liminality – ambiguity, community and potentiality – remain the essential map. The corresponding leadership responses, however, must evolve from one-off crisis maneuvers into ongoing strategic orientations.

To see what this looks like in practice, consider two contrasting examples that bookend the liminality of our time.

Two navigators of our liminal world

In 2019, Microsoft made a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, then a small, research-driven organization. That initial bet has since evolved into a multi-layered, multi-billion-dollar partnership – at its core, a response to deep ambiguity. In the mid-2010s, no one knew which AI architectures would prevail. Rather than simply trying to forecast the future, Microsoft chose to set a series of options: investing in OpenAI, building its own internal AI research, integrating generative models across its product suite, and positioning Azure as the preferred cloud for AI workloads. It was a move made in the fog of liminality.

At the other end of the spectrum is Carl Breau, a Canadian entrepreneur. Breau has spent the last decade building and running a manufacturing SME business, specializing in LED lighting, out of China while recently acquiring an SME client of its manufacturing services in Canada. His world is one of geopolitical liminality – shifting tariffs, escalating rhetoric and politicized supply chains. Unlike Microsoft, Breu survives by reading it closely and adapting continuously. His story is one of quiet success through constant recalibration in the face of liminality.

These two cases anchor a three-part leadership agenda in a liminal world:.

1. Ambiguity: From Efficiency to Optionality

Pervasive liminality is characterized by ambiguity: the sense that old rules no longer apply and new ones haven’t yet been written. In a liminal world, the management reflex to optimize for efficiency becomes risky because efficiency presumes stability. Optionality, by contrast, preserves the ability to pivot as the landscape reveals itself.

Microsoft’s engagement with OpenAI exemplifies optionality as strategy. Rather than committing to a single technological path, it maintained multiple bets and built an ecosystem – spanning cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and applications – capable of capturing value across different possible futures.

Carl Breau’s approach reflects a grittier, entrepreneurial version of the same principle. By maintaining operations in China while establishing a North American base, he has created room to maneuver. When tariffs shift or political sentiment turns, he can reconfigure production and positioning.

Similar patterns are emerging across contexts. Firms under geopolitical pressure, such as Huawei, are being pushed to build technological and market alternatives – optionality not by choice but by necessity.

Some AI startups I have spoken to recently have very different teams operating out of different places to keep their options open of serving both the West and China. In one case, there were teams in San Francisco and Shanghai, in fact operating out of different legal entities, to take advantage of the strengths and opportunities of the respective ecosystems. In such circumstances Singapore stands out as a location that can become a platform for optionality, by deliberately maintaining openness across geopolitical divides.

Across these contexts, optionality tends to take three recurring forms: portfolios of products and business models, portfolios of places, and portfolios of partners.

2. Community: Partner Proactively, Without Passivity

Liminality introduces fluidity in community, reshaping the social fabric of business – some bonds weaken but new ones may be possible, including partnerships among actors dissimilar to each other in geography, capabilities, or institutional logic. The key is to build such connections intentionally rather than retreat into familiar networks.

Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI is again instructive. As I document in my book Gorillas can Dance, Microsoft had spent years building a startup partnering capability, but even they needed a different playbook to navigate the AI world. In 2019, Microsoft took the unconventional step of investing in an AI-focused organization that had been initially created as a non-profit. This was an intentional bridging of a highly dissimilar pair: a platform giant and a scrappy, mission-driven research lab. It was co-evolutionary in the sense that both actors changed in parallel, meaning that the partnership was itself a liminal space for them.

On a different scale, Carl Breau’s partnerships are more improvised but no less intentional. Operating a China-based business as a Westerner, and now straddling two national bases, he has had to become a professional insider-outsider, weaving trust in contexts where suspicion is the default. Breau’s partnerships with dissimilar others are forged with Chinese factory managers and North American clients. His approach is active: leaning into, rather than avoiding, geopolitical tension.

One of the new “gorillas” of the AI era, Nvidia’s Inception program for startups has a clear “building block” synergy as it equips thousands of startups with compute, tools, and technical support, embedding its architecture at the core of diverse ventures. The one-to-many interface is essentially that of a funnel (not a cohort), allowing startups to graduate to greater levels of support around go-to-market access and introductions to venture capital networks.

Additionally, third-party specialists continue to be prominent. One of the companies I had previously studied, Plug and Play, continues to operate as an ecosystem orchestrator, structuring interactions across a global network of startups, corporations, and institutions through accelerators, curated dealflows, and AI Centers of Excellence.

In each case, the emphasis is the same: community does not simply evolve – it must be constructed through deliberate, and often uncomfortable, engagement across boundaries.

3. Potentiality: Building an Institutional Capability

The third dimension of liminality is potentiality – the untapped human capability that can emerge when old competencies are no longer sufficient.

Capability learning now translates into a requirement for a new institutional capability: the capacity to continuously make sense of the macroenvironment, in particular the interplay of geopolitics and AI-driven digital disruption. Microsoft’s journey into AI is a story not just of a smart bet, but of an institutional sensing capability that developed over many years.

For Carl Breau, this capability is intensely personal and equally vital. He must be his own institutional sensor: tracking political discourse in China and North America, interpreting subtle shifts in customs enforcement, reading local business sentiment, and constantly asking, “What does this mean for my physical manufacturing capacity, my logistics, my brand?”

At the same time, capability building in a liminal world is not only about high-level sensing; it also unfolds in more grounded ways. C Park, a Chinese firm I encountered in Johannesburg, exemplifies this by positioning itself as a China-South Africa Digital Innovation Hub: it equips young South Africans with e-commerce and livestreaming skills while gaining access to local talent.

The African context also highlights another dimension of capability: coping with constraint. For instance, MTN Ghana’s recently announced ambition to support AI development, while very welcome, must realistically contend with limited access to 5G and reliable power, implying that innovation will often need to be frugal.

During a research visit to Cambridge I encountered Fellows at the Judge Business School working on a Centre for Frugal AI. Their premise is simple: in much of the Global South, the priority is not frontier performance but doing more with less. Capability building in a liminal world, therefore, is not only about advancing the technological frontier, but also about adapting it creatively under constraint.

Leading Without Closure

Liminality is disorienting, but it is also where novelty emerges. The shifts outlined – from efficiency to optionality, from passive positioning to proactive partnership, and from static expertise to continuous sense-making – form an operating logic for a world that resists closure.

Microsoft and Carl Breau differ vastly in scale and context, yet they share a common instinct: they do not wait for uncertainty to resolve. They move forward with options in hand, partners alongside them, and a disciplined attentiveness to emerging patterns.

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About the Author

Shameen Prashantham is a Professor of International Business & Strategy, and Associate Dean, at China Europe International Business School. He is the author of Gorillas can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups.

U.S., Canada Fail to Reach Tariff Deal, Deepening Trade Tensions

August 23, 2026

The U.S. has imposed 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods after Washington and Ottawa failed to reach a trade agreement. The new duties affect about $20 billion worth of Canadian exports, including products such as hockey sticks, though they cover only a small share of Canada’s trade with the U.S.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended negotiations and said Canada would retaliate “dollar for dollar.” The two sides had appeared close to a deal that could have reduced tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos, but talks broke down after disagreements over additional concessions.

The latest tariffs could make broader negotiations over the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement even harder. They also put already struggling industries at greater risk of job losses and business closures, adding another layer of uncertainty to the economic relationship between two longtime allies.

Related Readings:

25 States Sue Trump Over New Global Tariffs

Trade Deals Face Fresh Doubts After Supreme Court Ruling on Tariffs

Trump Raises Global Tariffs to 15% After Supreme Court Setback

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The Ebola Escalation is a Global Health Emergency

August 21, 2026

By Dan Steinbock

After three months, the Ebola crisis in Central Africa has crossed a critical regional threshold. Concurrently, it reflects the emerging US/China division—and possible complementarity—of global health power.

In late May, the principal question was whether the newly declared outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with spillover into Uganda, could still be contained. Today, the DRC epidemic has become the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record and the fastest-spreading yet recorded, with more than 4,000 confirmed cases and nearly 1,900 deaths. Transmission has expanded across five DRC provinces.

The crucial transition is not just quantitative. It is operational.

This is no longer a test of DRC’s public-health system. It is a test of Africa’s ability to manage a major epidemic amid conflict and displacement—and of whether the United States and China can cooperate, compete or simply coexist in providing the global public goods required to contain it.

Uganda offers an important counterexample. After receiving an imported infection from DRC, it stopped transmission and declared the outbreak over in July. Ebola can still be contained when surveillance, political authority and health capacity function together. Unfortunately, the reverse is true as well.

What has changed since May?

Then, the objective was still to contain the outbreak before it escapes. In August, it is to manage an epidemic that has already escaped its original containment zone.

In May, there were 125 confirmed cases in DRC and nine in Uganda. The outbreak was concentrated primarily in Ituri, with concern about its movement into North and South Kivu and across the Ugandan border. WHO had already declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

Today, reported infections exceed 4,000. Ituri remains the epicenter, but Haut-Uele and Tshopo have joined North and South Kivu as affected provinces. Community transmission is driving a large share of new cases, while contact tracing is increasingly unable to reconstruct transmission chains.

The crucial transition is not just quantitative. It is operational. The epidemic has moved faster than the machinery designed to stop it.

2026-0810 The Ebola outbreak (FIG) (1) (1) — *Ebola crisis on Aug. 10, 2026*

American health power

The crisis exposes two very different—but increasingly overlapping—forms of international health power.

The American model has historically rested on scale: financing, epidemiological surveillance, laboratories, scientific research, emergency logistics, NGOs and institutional support for WHO and partner governments.

After much initial hesitation and reluctance, the U.S. response to Ebola has become substantial. Washington’s additional $242 million commitment announced in August brings total U.S. assistance to approximately $512 million, making America the largest contributor to the current response.

But the credibility of that role has been weakened by the disruption and retrenchment of U.S. international health programs.

The contradiction is striking: Washington is now spending heavily to fight an epidemic after the response has deteriorated, while earlier cuts weakened some of the preventative infrastructure designed to stop such crises earlier.

That is the economics of epidemic neglect: prevention is cheap, whereas emergency response is expensive.

Chinese model

China’s model is different. Beijing has emphasized rapid bilateral assistance, emergency supplies, medical expert teams and cooperation with African institutions.

In June, China announced emergency assistance to DRC and the African Union and dispatched medical experts. A second Chinese team followed in July, while another team was sent to Uganda.

China has explicitly linked the response to its broader China-Africa health partnership and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation.

China’s approach is less dependent on the large donor architecture habitually associated with Western development assistance. It is state-to-state, operational and visibly bilateral, while simultaneously reflecting South-South cooperation.

Aid as strategic infrastructure

The U.S. financial contribution, technical capacity and long-established public-health infrastructure remain indispensable. China’s growing operational presence does not replace that capacity. But it can augment it. That’s the real issue – whether the two systems can complement one another.

What the world need is not geopolitical friction but the combination of unique strengths: that is, American capital and scientific infrastructure, Chinese field capacity and bilateral networks, African institutional ownership, and the WHO coordination.

Yet, the danger remains the reverse. That global health becomes another arena of strategic rivalry in which Washington is both withdrawing yet competing for influence, while Beijing’s activities are being targeted, even as fragmented institutions struggle to contain disease.

For African governments, the practical question is simple: Who arrives, who brings supplies, who trains personnel, who strengthens laboratories, who helps keep hospitals functioning—and who stays after the cameras leave?

China has been particularly effective as a reliable long-term partner. Beijing’s official response explicitly emphasizes solidarity with Africa and a “community with a shared future.”

The United States brings enormous financial resources, scientific networks and accumulated epidemic-response experience. But the Trump administration has little interest in long-term aid structures, which the Democratic administrations have been reducing as well.

Three scenarios

In a recent scare, a riverboat heading toward Kinshasa was feared to include a suspected case. Though not confirmed, the episode demonstrated how rapidly an eastern DRC epidemic could become a national and potentially international concern.

In the foreseeable future, three scenarios matter.

Contained but costly (most likely scenario). International, Chinese, American, African and WHO resources eventually bring transmission under control. DRC suffers thousands of additional infections and major humanitarian damage, but neighboring states largely prevent sustained secondary transmission. Unfortunately, this is increasingly a management scenario rather than a victory scenario.
Protracted Central African epidemic (increasingly plausible). Transmission continues for many months, repeatedly appearing in new communities and health zones. Uganda remains contained, but DRC becomes trapped in recurrent outbreaks. The long-term consequences would include weakened health infrastructure, disrupted vaccination and maternal care, deeper displacement and substantial economic losses.
Regionalization (the dangerous tail). Repeated exportations establish sustained transmission in another neighboring country or several countries. The Great Lakes and Central African transport networks become part of the epidemic rather than merely potential escape routes.

Currently, a COVID-style global pandemic remains unlikely: Ebola is not an airborne respiratory virus and there is no evidence of such a transformation. The more realistic nightmare is a multi-country African epidemic requiring recurrent international intervention.

The real geopolitical lesson

The Ebola crisis is becoming a test of something larger than epidemic control. The post-Cold War health order was heavily dependent on American resources, Western institutions and multilateral organizations.

China is now providing an alternative source of capital, personnel and state-to-state engagement.

But setting aside the Cold War ideologues, the question is not whether China will replace America. It is whether the two can still cooperate when cooperation is most valuable.

The epidemic has already demonstrated the cost of delay. It is also demonstrating the limits of geopolitical fragmentation.

For Washington, the lesson is that retreat from global health does not eliminate global health risks. If anything, it is likely to make the eventual management of those risks more expensive.

For Beijing, the lesson is that visibility and bilateral assistance create influence, which is ultimately judged by sustained outcomes.

For Africa, the lesson is more fundamental: health security is national security. You can’t build prosperity without peace, stability – and healthy human capital.

You can’t build prosperity without peace, stability – and healthy human capital.

For the international system, the inconvenient truth remains the same as in May, but now on a vastly larger scale: Epidemics are cheapest to stop at the periphery. Once they become entrenched in fragile states and connected to regional mobility networks, containment becomes exponentially harder and geopolitics becomes part of the disease itself.

This is not a theoretical issue. Nor is it any longer a matter of principle. It is a matter of time – and that time is running out.

Written on August 11, the commentary was first released by China-US Focus (US/Hong Kong), Aug. 19, 2026

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About the Author

Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net

The Rise of AI-Driven Program Management

August 20, 2026

By Raghu Chirra

How FinTech Teams Predict Release Risk Before Production

FinTech engineering organizations face a major contradiction in their operations. They face demands from consumers and regulatory agencies, demand consistency in both quality and compliance. The situation is further worsened by the always evolving expectations. Further they do not have the luxury of waiting for the right opportunities as competitors remain aggressive in finding the same solutions. For a long time, program managers sought to reconcile the many forces by using dashboards. However, such approaches have gradually declined in effectiveness. Contemporary FinTech delivery has become so complex that manual oversight cannot keep pace, especially given the integration of external forces, including regulations.

AI-driven program management is positioned as a solution for the identified gap. It avails a new set of tools that do not merely depend on past data but also on predictive capabilities, specifically in relation to the likelihood of failure for impending releases or whether there are noteworthy compliance concerns before any line of code is directed to the production phase.

Why Traditional Program Management is Unsuccessful in FinTech

Classic program management tooling was designed to achieve visibility and not prediction. Jira boards and RAG-status reports are meant to create clarity on the current status of projects. They often fail in addressing a common question for contemporary executives: what is the possibility of the proposed release leading to a disaster?

In FinTech, the cost of not having the right answer to the above question can be catastrophic. For instance, failure of a payment pipeline would cost more than just an apology. It may imply regulatory reporting shortcomings. Traditional status reports are primarily reactive. They only inform on occurrences that have already taken place. By the time one sees a red status on the dashboard, the associated risk has probably been impacting the system for some time, hidden under signs no human pays attention to, such as a cluster of recurring defects and a gradually deteriorating pass rate for a test suite. The bottom line is that none of the crises just occur without often preceding underlying unseen signals.

What AI-Driven Prediction Actually Looks Like

AI-driven program management is not a replacement for the program manager. Instead, it provides a forward-oriented instrument panel. Such systems use the data that is traditionally available within most FinTech SDLC environments, including frequency of deployment, communication patterns, incident history, and others, to provide future-inclined insights. The primary difference is the inclusion of trainable machine learning models that can identify sets of signs that have led to failures or delays in the past. Resultantly, none of the metrics is analyzed in isolation.

The FinTech environment is often associated with some recurring patterns:

Code churn concentration at the end of a sprint. When most of the changes to a ledger or payment service are implemented during the 48 hours preceding a release, the historical link to defects after release is strong. AI models can automatically use such association to issue warnings after assessing possible impact on related services.
Test debt accumulation. Teams working to deliver under strict timelines can easily skip or temporarily halt tests. A model tracking test coverage trends over time is capable of identifying such drift long before the involved team notices the test suite has lost its trustworthiness.
Dependency risk across teams. In FinTech, releases are, in most cases, interdependent. For instance, a checkout flow might rely on a checkout flow from a different team. AI systems with the ability of spotting such dependencies can predict a risk when the speed within an upstream team slows down.

The output is not a vague announcement that a project is at risk. A helpful implementation entails the provision details on the level of risk involved, likely outcome when unaddressed, and the actions that can be taken towards mitigation.

From Reactive Firefighting to Preemptive Governance

The practical shift resulting from this is significant. Instead of a program manager learning about a risk during a go/no-go meeting, they would get signals long before the risk materializes and have ample time to take appropriate mitigation actions. The use of AI implies that less time is spent in seeking status update, leaving more time for the interpretation of model outputs, identifying the signals that need action, and making judgment with the essence of human input.

This also alters the interaction between FinTech organizations and regulators and auditors. A release risk model with validation using data from past events and documented data accuracy can become a defensible story in governance. Every release is effectively analyzed for potential risk and accorded a mitigation plan, leading to a stronger position than having a status report with a green checkmark.

Where the Technology Still Needs Human Judgment

Though has multiple advantages over the traditional options, it is worthy being direct on its limitations. For instance, the reliance of these products on historical data implies that the outcome are only as good as the quality of historical data they are fed with. FinTech organizations with limited past incidents might not have sufficient data to effectively singingly for risks before they materialize. AI-driven program management is also linked to a high risk of alert fatigue. If a model categorizes most of the releases as high-risk, teams might start ignoring its signals. To get the most from treating AI-driven risk prediction, human judgment remains critical, with the best outcome being when such resources are consider, human judgment remains critical, with the best outcome being when such resources are considered a second option. While the models might direct where problems are likely to come from, it is the human involvement that makes quality decisions because of the need to understand the domain and regulatory contexts.

Getting Started

For FinTech engineering leaders looking into the possibility of adopting this shift should prioritize starting small. Instead of starting with an advance level. They should start by feeding real production incident data spanning at least a year from the date of initiation. The organization should also introduce a culture of pairing each risk score with a documented human decision as early as possible. The intention would be to prove the accuracy of the model in signaling risks and the implications they had on subsequent human decisions.

The teams that get this right will benefit from more than the ability to ship faster. They will also do so with a level of confidence unheard of in the traditional setting.

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About the Author

Raghu Chirra – IT professional passionate about technology, AI, and digital transformation. I turn business challenges into simple, scalable, and impactful solutions. Experienced in project management, product delivery, Agile, SaaS, and AI-driven initiatives. Always curious, always learning, and focused on creating technology that makes a real difference.

U.S. Government Debt Passes $40 Trillion, More Than Doubling in a Decade

August 20, 2026

The U.S. government’s debt has crossed the $40 trillion mark, reaching $40.05 trillion on Tuesday. That’s more than double the $19.4 trillion recorded a decade ago, with years of large budget deficits and pandemic-era spending driving the increase.

The government recorded a $432.3 billion deficit in July, bringing the year-to-date shortfall close to $1.8 trillion. At the same time, Treasury yields have climbed as investors weigh rising government borrowing, heavy corporate debt issuance linked to AI investment and uncertainty around inflation and interest rates.

The cost of carrying the debt is also growing. Interest payments have reached nearly $1.2 trillion this year, making them one of the government’s largest expenses after Social Security and Medicare. With borrowing costs rising alongside the debt itself, the $40 trillion milestone is putting renewed attention on the sustainability of U.S. government finances.

Related Readings:

The Unravelling of Dollar Hegemony: Debt, Rentier Power, and the Crisis of US Global Dominance

International Financial Institutions and Western Hegemony: Debt, Austerity, and the Exploitation of the Global South

Senate Budget Bill Faces Backlash Over Health Cuts and Soaring Debt Projections

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The Last Mile of Global Business

August 20, 2026

A company can be strategically ready to enter another country before the documents supporting that expansion are in place.

The business may have settled on its structure and already begun working with local advisers, only to discover that a U.S. corporate record still needs to pass through an international recognition process before a foreign institution can rely on it. At that point, what looked like paperwork becomes an execution issue. A transaction that makes sense commercially can still slow down because the documents connecting one legal system to another were considered too late.

That is the part of international expansion where companies such as Apostille-USA operate. The U.S.-based document-authentication company helps businesses and individuals prepare American documents for use abroad, where the recognition process depends on where a record originated and where it ultimately needs to function.

For executives, the broader lesson is that international readiness has a documentary layer. A company can have the capital, legal structure, and commercial rationale for a move abroad while still lacking records that are ready to be accepted there.

When Strategy Reaches Execution

The issue becomes clearer once an expansion plan begins producing actual transactions.

A foreign subsidiary may need evidence that its U.S. parent remains in good standing. Someone acting for the company abroad may need a Power of Attorney that can be recognized locally. An executive relocation can bring educational or professional records into the same process, even though those documents have little to do with the corporate transaction that prompted the move.

Apostille-USA encounters these records at the point where their domestic purpose gives way to an international one. A Certificate of Good Standing may have been routine when it was issued in the United States, but once it is being presented overseas, the receiving institution needs a reliable way to recognize the authority behind it.

“Companies spend a great deal of time making sure an international expansion works strategically, but document readiness is part of making sure that strategy can actually be executed,” said Apostille-USA CEO Rugi Kavamahanga. “A company can be commercially ready to enter a market before its documents are ready to function there.”

That distinction can matter in transactions where timing is already tight. If recognition requirements are considered only after a document has been prepared or executed, the company may discover that another certification is required before the record can move forward. The consequence is rarely dramatic enough to appear in the expansion strategy, but it can still hold up the work that strategy depends on.

The Infrastructure Extends Beyond Corporate Records

Document readiness also reaches further into international commerce than traditional corporate filings suggest.

Export transactions depend on records that foreign governments and commercial parties use to understand what is moving across a border and where it came from. The U.S. International Trade Administration describes the commercial invoice as one of the principal documents customs authorities use when assessing duties, while some countries separately require a Certificate of Origin even when similar information already appears on the invoice.

The exact treatment of those records depends on the destination, which is why Apostille-USA’s work can extend from corporate and professional documents into commercial records connected to trade. The underlying issue remains the same even when the transaction changes. A document created in one system must arrive in another form that the receiving authority is prepared to trust.

This is where international document recognition begins to look less like an administrative specialty and more like infrastructure. It supports the transfer of corporate authority across borders, but the same principle can also sit behind the movement of goods or the people responsible for managing an overseas operation.

Trust Does Not Follow One Global Route

The difficulty is that international recognition is not standardized.

The Hague Apostille Convention has simplified the use of public documents among its Contracting Parties by replacing traditional legalization with a single apostille issued by the competent authority where the document originates. The Convention now has 130 Contracting Parties.

That framework covers a large part of international business, but it does not cover every destination. The U.S. Department of State draws a direct distinction between apostille certificates for Hague Convention countries and authentication certificates for countries outside the Convention.

The United Arab Emirates illustrates the difference. UAE authorities continue to use an attestation framework for documents issued abroad, and their current procedures distinguish certain commercial records as well. UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs guidance, for example, routes commercial invoices and Certificates of Origin through a dedicated attestation process.

For Apostille-USA, those differences mean that the destination has to remain part of the document discussion from the beginning. Two companies may be pursuing nearly identical commercial objectives abroad while the U.S. records supporting those transactions follow different recognition paths.

“The business purpose can look almost identical from one market to the next while the documentary path changes underneath it,” Kavamahanga said. “That is why we think of authentication as part of international execution, rather than something that begins after the rest of the planning is finished.”

The distinction becomes particularly important for companies expanding across several jurisdictions. Success in one market can create a reasonable expectation that a similar document will work the same way in the next, even though the recognition framework may have changed as soon as the destination did.

The Last Mile of Global Business

Much of international expansion is concerned with making a company economically and legally capable of operating somewhere new. Document recognition deals with what happens when those plans have to become credible to institutions outside the United States.

That work is largely invisible when it goes well. The foreign authority receives a record it can recognize, the transaction continues, and the authentication process disappears behind the larger commercial objective.

Its importance becomes much clearer when something is missing.

Apostille-USA views that point between domestic validity and foreign recognition as part of the infrastructure supporting global commerce. The company’s role is narrow compared with the strategy behind an acquisition, foreign expansion, or international trade relationship, but the records moving through its authentication work can be what allow those larger decisions to take effect across legal systems.

For executives, document readiness therefore belongs earlier in the conversation. A company is not fully prepared to operate across borders simply because its strategy works on paper. The documents carrying its authority, identity, and commercial activity into another jurisdiction have to work there too.

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