INSIDE

CHINA'S 'BLUE COLLAR' HEADACHE

Business confidence in China has already fallen to its lowest since 2013

EVOLUTION OF LABOUR MARKET

The gig economy is expected to grow to $455B by 2023 year-end in gross volume transactions

Revolutionizing Healthcare Industry

KHUH excelled in introducing many other disruptive solutions in Bahrain’s healthcare sector

EUROPE’S ENERGY CONUNDRUM

Europe is now on the verge of recession, if not already in one, and the worst looks yet to come

BUSINESS DOSSIER

44 Warba Bank pioneered innovative digital-banking services

58 Ahli United Bank of Kuwait bags two accolades

SHADOW BANKING: THREAT TO GLOBAL ECONOMY

The shadow banking peaked at $62 trillion in 2007, Financial Stability Board stated

THE IDEA CALLED METAVERSE: NEW 'REALITY'

Metaverse platform Decentraland is introducing the first metaverse ATM www.internationalfinance.com

Director & Publisher

Sunil Bhat

Editor-in-Chief

Sanjay Kumar

Editorial

Prajwal Wele, Agnivesh Harshan, CL Ramakrishnan, Prabuddha Ghosh

Production Merlin Cruz

Design & Layout

Vikas Kapoor

Technical Team

Prashanth V Acharya, Sunil Suresh

Business Analysts

Alice Parker, Indra Kala, Ayesha Misba, Stallone Edward, Jessica Smith, Rohit Samuel, Brian Johnson, Harry Wilson, Susan Lee, Mark Pinto

Business Development Manager

Sarah Jones, Sid Nathan, Christy John, Alex Carter, Gwen Morgan, Janet George

Business Development Directors

Sid Jain, Ryan Cooper

Accounts

Angela Mathews

Registered Office INTERNATIONAL FINANCE is the trading name of INTERNATIONAL FINANCE Publications Ltd 843 Finchley Road, London, NW11 8NA

Phone +44 (0) 208 123 9436

Fax +44 (0) 208 181 6550

Email info@ifinancemag.com

Press Contact editor@ifinancemag.com

Associate Office Zredhi Solutions Pvt. Ltd. 5th Floor, Sai Complex, #114/1, M G Road, Bengaluru 560001 Ph: +91-80-409901144

Elon Musk fires entire Twitter board

Elon Musk fired the Twitter board of directors and replaced them with himself as the only member. In a company filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Bret Taylor, the former board chairman, and Parag Agrawal, the former CEO, are listed as two of the nine directors who have been fired. After months of legal wrangling, Elon Musk finally completed his $44 billion acquisition of the social networking platform. As he begins his first week as the new chief executive of the corporation, the richest man in the world is thinking about significant changes.

DBS uses DeFi to trade FX

DBS Bank, a significant financial services organisation in Asia is applying decentralized finance (DeFi), a project backed by Singapore’s central bank. DBS said that it had begun a trading test of foreign currency (FX) and government securities using permissioned, or private, DeFi liquidity pools. The project is a part of Project Guardian, an industry-spanning initiative led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The deal involved buying and selling tokenized Singapore government securities like Singapore dollar, bonds and Japanese yen.

Money View raises $75 million

Fintech company Money View announced it has raised $75 million in its ongoing Series E-funding led by UKbased asset manager Apis Partners, at a valuation of $900 million. The company is currently handling assets under management (AUMs) of over $800 million and operating at an annualized disbursal run rate of $1.2 billion with over 40 million app downloads. The current funding also saw participation from Tiger Global, Winter Capital and Evolvence. The funds will be used as growth capital, according to the company.

The eagerly awaited PlayStation VR2 from Sony will go on sale in November, with the headset expected to arrive on store shelves on February 22, 2023. The business announced in a blog post that the virtual reality (VR) headset will start at $550. The headset, controllers, and stereo headphones are all included in the retail box. "We've created the PS VR2 headset with comfort and lighter design in mind," the tech giant said in a blog post.