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A flight booking might originate in Singapore, price in USD, settle through a Thai acquirer, and fail because the card was issued in Japan. That’s the reality of travel payments – and it’s why payment orchestration has shifted from a nice-to-have to a must have infrastructure.

For global merchants, especially in travel and digital commerce, the problem isn’t just having multiple payment providers. It’s that each one has different performance characteristics, coverage gaps, and cost structures depending on the market. Without an orchestration layer, you’re flying blind – routing the same way regardless of issuer, acquirer, or geography, and absorbing failure rates that compound directly into lost revenue.

Orchestration brings intelligence to that complexity. Dynamic routing, smart retries, local payment method coverage, real-time monitoring – these aren’t features, they’re the operating system for a merchant that wants to grow globally without rebuilding their payment stack in every market they enter.

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How are merchants improving conversion rates through smarter cross-border payment routing?

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The single biggest lever most merchants are under-using is routing intelligence. In cross-border transactions, the difference between a 60% and an 90% success rate often comes down to which acquirer processes the transaction – not the customer’s intent or card validity. Yet most merchants still route statically, either by default or by cost.

Smart merchants are changing that. Dynamic routing – where each transaction is evaluated in real-time and sent to the acquirer most likely to approve it based on card BIN, issuer country, transaction value, and historical performance – can move success rates materially within weeks of implementation.

That’s the foundation. On top of it, the levers that compound the gains are: local payment methods that customers actually trust (not just card alternatives), frictionless authentication that doesn’t kill conversions mid-flow, intelligent retry logic for soft declines, BNPL or EMI options for high-value purchases and real time monitoring to identify & fix failure points. In travel specifically, where average order values are high and cart abandonment at checkout is costly, getting all of these right isn’t optimisation – it’s margin.
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What are the key challenges of merchant onboarding across fragmented APAC markets?

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APAC isn’t a single market – it’s fifteen markets wearing the same label. The regulatory environment in Indonesia looks nothing like Singapore’s. Thailand’s preferred payment methods are different from the Philippines’. India has a domestic card network mandate. Japan still runs heavily on convenience store payments and bank transfers. Any merchant trying to expand across the region quickly discovers that a payment stack built for one market will fail in the next.

The specific challenges we see most often: local licensing and compliance requirements that vary not just by country but sometimes by payment method within a country; the need to integrate with local acquirers or wallets that have no global API documentation; and customer-side preferences that diverge sharply from what worked in a merchant’s home market.

The merchants who scale fastest are the ones who don’t try to solve each market individually. A platform that provides a unified integration layer – where local payment methods, acquirers, and compliance requirements are abstracted behind a single API – compresses a 12-month market entry into something far more manageable. That’s the infrastructure bet worth making early.

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How are real-time payments and multi-rail ecosystems reshaping checkout performance in the region?

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Real-time payment rails – UPI in India, PromptPay in Thailand, PayNow in Singapore, and QRIS in Indonesia – have fundamentally raised the baseline expectation for checkout speed across APAC. Consumers who experience instant settlement domestically don’t accept a three-second card authorisation lag when they travel or shop cross-border. That gap is where merchants are losing transactions they shouldn’t.

The more interesting shift is the emergence of multi-rail strategy. It’s no longer a question of “cards or wallets” – sophisticated merchants are making real-time decisions across card networks, local A2A rails, digital wallets, and BNPL schemes simultaneously. The routing logic becomes: which rail gives this specific customer the fastest, cheapest, most likely-to-succeed path to payment completion?

When that’s done well, checkout performance improves on every dimension – speed, reliability, cost, and conversion. The merchants pulling ahead in APAC right now are the ones who’ve stopped treating payment methods as a compliance checkbox and started treating multi-rail access as a competitive advantage.

The post A Conversation With Nakul Kothari, Head of APAC And Middle East At Juspay On Payment Orchestration appeared first on 91̽��.

Its co-founder and CTO, Igor Kulatov, has spent thirteen years building infrastructure ahead of the categories it later belonged to. He worked on machine-to-machine messaging at the IoT startup, before the market had a name for IoT.

As engineering co-founder and CTO of NAGA Group AG, the German fintech that completed one of the fastest IPOs in the history of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange Scale segment in 2017, he built exchange-grade trading infrastructure and oversaw a regulated crypto integration seven years before the EU’s MiCA framework took force. We spoke with Igor about five years of running autonomous commerce in production, and about the forecasts he expects the industry to miss.

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Tell Us About Aurora Borealis. What Does The Company Do?

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Our systems buy, sell, price, settle and reconcile with our counterparties’ systems at machine speed. A procurement happens, money moves, inventory updates, both sides record the trade for audit and no human approved that transaction. People set the policy and the spending boundaries; the agents operate inside them.

We work in digital licensing settlement, enterprise software procurement and marketplace inventory routing for some of the largest publishers of games and software in the world. Until this year we had written almost nothing about the work. The systems either run or they fail, and our customers pay for the first. The conversation around agentic commerce has now reached a point where the people who have operated it in production for years should join it.

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You Were Building This Before “Agentic Commerce” Existed As A Term: How Did You Get Here?

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I never set out to be early; it kept happening. I worked on machine-to-machine messaging before IoT became a buzz word.

At NAGA I designed multi-protocol normalisation for the broker gateway, the problem of making heterogeneous systems speak through one interface, which MCP and A2A standardised years later.

Then at NagaX we built a crypto integration in 2017, seven years ahead of MiCA.

Aurora Borealis started from a practical observation: in B2B digital commerce, the transactions between large counterparties are repetitive, rule-bound and high-volume. Software handles that better than people do.

In 2020 we built it that way from day one — designed for fully autonomous operation, no humans in the transaction path.

We called it engineering. The industry named it agentic commerce four years later.

Trading infrastructure gave me one habit I still rely on. When systems move money with no one watching in real time, you learn what has to be true about your architecture before you can sleep at night. Autonomous commerce demands the same habit.

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Agentic Commerce Is One Of The Biggest Stories In Tech Right Now. What Is The Industry Getting Wrong?

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The pace and the shape of B2B adoption. The headline forecasts, with Gartner’s $15 trillion in agent-intermediated B2B spending by 2028 the most quoted, assume a consumer flywheel: the technology works, adoption explodes. I have run the verticals where production volume exists today for five years, and our curve looks nothing like that. It moves slower, vertical by vertical, and regulation, trust and liability set its speed.

Regulation drives B2B adoption rather than lagging it, because counterparties withhold scale until their lawyers can defend the framework. Each time we onboard a counterparty in a regulated jurisdiction, their general counsel opens with a version of the same question: what happens when the agent commits a five-million-dollar error under our delegation? Until that answer holds up, delegation stays small.

Trust compounds per counterparty in B2B.

A consumer platform can serve a million new buyers on a single Prime Day because the brand precedes the relationship. Our system starts each new relationship at zero and bootstraps it through small, low-stakes transactions before the trust graph supports real spending authority. Over five years that bootstrap has taken months per counterparty. We found no way around it, and I have seen no one else solve it.

Liability closes the loop. A consumer absorbs a $20 agent mistake; a $5 million autonomous error in B2B becomes a board-level event, and the insurance that would let a CFO authorise delegation at material scale does not exist. The E&O carriers I have spoken to give the same answer: too little loss data to price the exposure.

The market will still grow large, on a longer horizon than the headlines allow. Gartner, the same firm projecting $15 trillion, also predicts companies will cancel more than 40 percent of their agentic AI projects by 2027. The five-year curve has been running in narrow verticals since before the term existed, and the firms operating in those verticals today will define the category by 2032.

What Has Running Autonomous Commerce Taught You About Security?

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Take two events from the same agent. It submits a $50 SaaS renewal to a vendor it has paid monthly for two years. Minutes later it submits a $50,000 wire to a counterparty it has never seen, in a jurisdiction the principal never approved, at three in the morning on a Sunday.

An identity stack rates both events identical: valid credentials, valid scope, agent attested. The first keeps the business running. The second ends with someone explaining to the board what happened.

Identity checks read the request shape. The signal sits in the commercial action: the amount against the agent’s pattern, the counterparty’s history, the hour, the match between the action and the plan the principal authorised at session start. Trade surveillance has evaluated commercial actions this way on regulated trading venues since the 1990s.

The agent-security industry is rebuilding that vocabulary from the identity side and it will converge on the surveillance model whether it recognises the lineage or not.�� I came from trading infrastructure and built that way from day one.

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What Is The Hardest Unsolved Problem In The Space?

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Getting two independent companies’ systems to commit a single trade atomically. The protocols announced over the last eighteen months handle identity, authorisation and intent well: who the agent is, what it may do. After that point one side has to debit a ledger, the other has to credit a different one, both have to update inventory and record the trade, and any step can fail halfway through, with no shared coordinator both companies trust.

Inside one organisation, engineers solved atomic commit decades ago. Across organisational boundaries, undoing a trade means executing another one. An agent wires $50,000, a later step fails, and no reverse_wire call exists: the counterparty holds the funds, may have disbursed them downstream, may have provided a service no one can un-provide.

The counterparty has to issue a refund or a credit note, a separate trade with its own dispute path and its own ways to fail. We have engineered around this in production for five years, and the disputes we see begin in the two sides holding different views of which state the trade is in.

The industry files the result under “reconciliation drift” or “settlement risk”, comfortable names for unsolved atomicity. The first deployment that hits real scale without solving it will learn the difference in production.

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What’s Next For You And For Aurora Borealis?

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Aurora Borealis keeps running and growing the commerce engine.��

The layer I want to build next is the infrastructure every company entering agentic commerce will need before it can transact at all. Merchant systems have to be rebuilt for buyers made of software: machine-readable catalogs, programmatic negotiation, settlement that commits cleanly. Defence has to operate at the speed of the transactions and read their commercial meaning.

And merchants need a way to verify that an agent holds the authority and the policy boundaries it claims. The companies entering this space carry payments expertise, or security, or AI, and almost never more than one. I intend to keep building at that intersection.

What I am building assumes the category arrives in a fixed order. The vertical settles first, the one where regulators have already answered who pays when an agent commits a five-million-dollar error. Trust comes next, counterparty by counterparty, the way ours did across months of small transactions before the graph could carry real spend. Volume comes last. Most of the money chasing this space has the order reversed, and I expect a lot of it to stall in front of the first general counsel who wants that liability question answered before anything scales.

Igor Kulatov is co-founder and CTO of Aurora Borealis, which has been operating fully autonomous B2B commerce infrastructure since 2020, handling programmatic procurement, settlement, and dispute resolution between independent software systems across five countries, for digital goods.

He previously served as CTO and engineering co-founder of NAGA Group AG, a Frankfurt-listed fintech, where he built exchange-grade trading-platform infrastructure and oversaw a regulated crypto integration that preceded the EU MiCA framework by seven years.

The post A Chat With Igor Kulatov, Co-Founder And CTO Of Aurora Borealis: Five Years Running Autonomous B2B Commerce In Production appeared first on 91̽��.

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Taxmingo is a product-led tax technology platform built to simplify how businesses manage tax compliance and regulatory obligations. We are leveraging technology, automation, and data intelligence to transform what has traditionally been a complex and manual process into a seamless digital experience.

For many businesses, compliance remains one of the most challenging aspects of operations. Tax regulations continue to evolve, reporting requirements are becoming more sophisticated, and businesses often struggle with fragmented processes and limited visibility into their compliance status. At Taxmingo, we see this challenge as a technology problem that can be solved through innovative product design.

Our vision is to become the digital infrastructure that powers compliance for businesses across emerging markets, helping them stay compliant, reduce risk, and focus on growth.

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How did you come up with the idea for the company?

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The idea for Taxmingo came from observing a significant gap in the business ecosystem. While sectors such as banking, payments, and commerce have undergone remarkable digital transformation, tax compliance has remained largely dependent on manual processes, disconnected systems, and traditional service models.

Business owners were spending considerable time and resources trying to navigate regulatory requirements that should have been easier to manage. The experience was often reactive, inefficient, and frustrating.

I believed there was an opportunity to rethink compliance from a product perspective. Rather than building another advisory business, the goal was to create a technology platform that could simplify compliance through automation and intelligent workflows.

We wanted to build a solution that would enable businesses to manage compliance with the same convenience and efficiency they experience with modern financial technology products. That idea became the foundation upon which Taxmingo was built.

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Tell us about your core product or service.

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At its core, Taxmingo is a software platform designed to help businesses manage tax compliance more efficiently.

Our platform enables businesses to monitor obligations, manage filings, access regulatory insights, automate repetitive processes, and maintain compliance through a centralized digital environment. We combine technology with expert knowledge to create solutions that are practical, scalable, and user-friendly.

What differentiates Taxmingo is our focus on creating a proactive compliance experience. Instead of responding to compliance issues after they occur, businesses can use our platform to stay ahead of regulatory requirements and make more informed decisions.

As the platform evolves, we are focused on building intelligent features that provide greater visibility, automate complex workflows, and reduce the operational burden associated with compliance management.

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What most excites you about the industry?

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What excites me most is the rapid evolution of regulatory technology and the growing recognition that compliance can be transformed through innovation.

Governments around the world are digitizing tax administration systems, businesses are embracing cloud-based technologies, and advances in artificial intelligence are creating entirely new possibilities for automation and decision-making.

This convergence presents a unique opportunity to redefine how compliance is managed. For decades, compliance has been viewed as an unavoidable administrative task. Technology is changing that perception by making compliance more transparent, efficient, and strategic.

I believe we are only beginning to see the potential of what technology can achieve in this space. The opportunity to build products that remove friction from business operations and create meaningful value for organizations is incredibly exciting.

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What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome along the way?

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One of the biggest challenges has been driving adoption of a new approach to compliance.

Many businesses are familiar with traditional methods and may not immediately recognize the advantages of a technology-driven compliance platform. Building trust and demonstrating value requires continuous engagement, education, and product excellence.

Another challenge has been balancing innovation with reliability. Compliance is a mission-critical function, and users expect the highest levels of accuracy, security, and consistency. As a technology company, we must continuously innovate while maintaining the trust our users place in our platform.

While challenging, these experiences have reinforced our commitment to building solutions that are both innovative and dependable.

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What is your number one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

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My advice is simple. Solve a real problem.

The strongest businesses are built around genuine customer challenges rather than market trends. Spend time understanding your users, listen carefully to their pain points, and focus relentlessly on creating value.

Equally important is resilience. Entrepreneurship is a journey filled with uncertainty, setbacks, and continuous learning. Success often comes to those who remain adaptable, persistent, and committed to their vision even when progress feels slow.

If you stay focused on the problem you’re solving and continue improving your product, opportunities for growth will follow.

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What can we hope to see from Taxmingo in the future?

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The future of Taxmingo is centered on innovation, scale, and impact.

We are investing in technologies that will make compliance increasingly automated, intelligent, and accessible. Our roadmap includes deeper automation capabilities, enhanced data insights, smarter compliance monitoring, and greater integration with the broader business and financial ecosystem.

We also see significant opportunities to leverage artificial intelligence to simplify complex compliance processes and provide businesses with more proactive guidance.

Our long-term ambition is to become the leading digital compliance platform for businesses across emerging markets. We want to empower organizations with the tools and intelligence they need to navigate regulatory requirements confidently and efficiently.

Ultimately, Taxmingo is building more than a compliance solution. We are creating technology that helps businesses operate with greater confidence, reduce complexity, and unlock sustainable growth in an increasingly digital economy.

The post Interview with Ebenezer Ojo, Co-Founder At Taxmingo And MENA40 Judge appeared first on 91̽��.

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Sectigo is, at its core, the bedrock of digital trust.��

If you’ve browsed the web, made a secure payment, or accessed a corporate network today, there’s a high probability we were the ones quietly ensuring that connection was safe.��

We are the most innovative provider of certificate lifecycle management (CLM), helping organisations secure human and machine identities while reducing the hidden risks of modern digital trust. As certificate volumes grow and lifespans shrink, unmanaged certificates are becoming a source of outages, compliance exposure, and operational disruption.��

We are one of the world’s largest and most reputable commercial certificate authorities (CAs), with over 700,000 customers, including 65% of the Fortune 500, and more than 20 years of experience in establishing cryptographically secure identities.

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What makes Sectigo unique?

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The challenge organisations are now facing is no longer just managing certificates, it’s managing them at scale. Manual processes can’t keep up with certificate sprawl, shorter certificate lifespans, and accelerating cryptographic change.

What sets Sectigo apart is our ability to turn CLM into a coordinated, scalable system, delivering simplicity at scale.

With Sectigo Certificate Manager (SCM), we enable orchestrated automation, which coordinates certificate activities across systems, teams, and environments rather than automating isolated tasks. This enables teams to manage digital trust as a cohesive operational function, reducing complexity while improving resilience and control at scale.

The outcome is simple, consistent operations at scale, reduced risk, and the ability to manage digital trust as a cohesive function rather than a fragmented set of activities.

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How has the move to 47 day certificates changed your industry?

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This is one of the most significant shifts the industry has ever experienced. As certificate lifespans shrink, organisations are now a part of a world where certificates renew every six months (200-day certificates), and by March 2027 will renew every three months (100-day certificates), and eventually monthly renewals (47-day certificates) by 2029.

This shift fundamentally changes the operating model for certificate management and the entirety of the digital trust ecosystem. What was once an occasional task is becoming a continuous process. Organisations can no longer manage trust at a human pace, they need systems that operate at machine speed.

For customers, this shift is less about doing things faster and more about eliminating entire categories of hidden risk. When orchestrated automation is in place, outages, compliance gaps, and operational disruption are dramatically reduced.
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How has Sectigo evolved with the certificate management space?

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We’ve evolved from being ‘just’ a certificate provider to a CLM platform for managing digital trust at scale, bringing simplicity to an increasingly complex problem.

As machine identities have expanded across cloud, AI-driven workflows, containers, and connected devices, CLM has become far more complex and far more critical. We’ve responded by building a cloud-native CLM platform that moves beyond renewals to coordinate the full lifecycle, from discovery and deployment through renewal, replacement, governance, and crypto-agility.

This shift reflects where the market is heading: from isolated certificate tasks to a more integrated, orchestrated approach to managing trust across the enterprise.

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Why is Sectigo making this change now?

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Because the pace of change in digital trust has accelerated beyond what traditional approaches can support.

Shorter certificate lifecycles, increasing certificate volumes, and the growing urgency of post-quantum readiness are creating a level of complexity that most organisations aren’t equipped to manage manually.

At the same time, visibility gaps across environments are introducing real business risk, from outages and failed transactions to compliance exposure and customer impact.

Sectigo’s evolution is a proactive step to help organisations move ahead of that risk, with a simpler, more controlled way to manage certificate lifecycle operations as scale and change continue to expand.

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What can we expect from Sectigo in the future?

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You can expect us to continue leading the evolution of automated CLM.

That includes advancing how organisations prepare for post-quantum cryptography (PQC), while also expanding how automation is applied across increasingly complex environments.

We’re focused on making digital trust more seamless, more visible, and easier to control at scale, so organisations can adapt as new technologies, identities, and cryptographic standards emerge.

Ultimately, our goal is to make managing digital trust as reliable and predictable as any core infrastructure, something organisations can depend on without the operational burden.

The post A Chat With Kevin Weiss, CEO Of Sectigo On How The World’s Leading Certificate Authority (CA) Is Changing Into A Comprehensive Digital Trust Powerhouse appeared first on 91̽��.

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Lightspeed is a global ePOS and payments provider that helps ambitious hospitality and retail businesses in over 100 countries to improve efficiency and performance. In the UK, venues like Big Mamma Group, Poke House and Mamma Dough use Lightspeed.

My role focuses on helping hospitality businesses navigate one of the toughest economic climates in recent years through technology and operational innovation. I lead our EMEA hospitality strategy and work closely with operators to understand the real pressures they’re facing – such as elevated labour costs, tight margins or changing customer expectations – and show them how technology can help them operate more efficiently and grow sustainably.

In 2025, we celebrated 20 years of Lightspeed. Our CEO, Dax Dasilva, originally founded the company to give smaller retail merchants access to the same level of technology that large chains were using. Since then, Lightspeed has expanded into hospitality and grown into a platform that combines ePOS, payments, loyalty and AI-powered insights to help venues run more efficiently.

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The UK hospitality industry has faced a difficult few years, from inflation and staffing pressures to changing consumer habits. What do you see as the biggest challenges operators are dealing with right now?

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There’s no doubt the hospitality industry is still operating under immense pressure. Despite hospitality being one of the UK’s biggest employers and the backdrop to so many important social moments, operators continue to face challenges around elevated costs, squeezed consumer spending, and business rate reforms.

From speaking to our customers on the ground, we know that margins are tight as inflation continues to affect everything from ingredients to utilities and rent. At the same time, consumers are becoming much more selective about where and how often they dine out. Lightspeed research showed that by the end of 2025, 44% of Brits expected to reduce their dining out spending due to inflation. This combination of higher operating costs and weaker consumer spending is making it increasingly difficult for venues to thrive.

Business rates are adding to the strain, especially for independent operators that don’t have the same resources as larger companies. While reforms could help, there are still concerns about whether the system fairly reflects the realities of running different types of hospitality businesses.

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Despite those challenges, are there any opportunities emerging for hospitality businesses in 2026 that perhaps didn’t exist a few years ago?

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Absolutely – it’s tough out there for hospitality but it’s not all doom and gloom. One of the biggest opportunities we’re seeing is the shift towards experience-led dining, with 36% of UK diners saying this is important for restaurants to offer. As purse strings tighten, people can be more selective with how they spend their money, so venues that can offer memorable, personalised experiences are standing out. That could be anything from curated tasting menus and immersive events to hyper-local concepts that a venue’s community would be interested in.

Technology has also levelled the playing field. Independent venues now have access to enterprise-grade tools such as Lightspeed, which provide one place for operations like inventory management, advanced reporting, integrated payments or benchmarking against competitors. At our annual Edge Summit event in London, we launched a new tool and updates to our existing technology to help our customers navigate the changing hospitality landscape.

Data is a huge part of this too. A few years ago, many operators didn’t have instant access to insights about customer behaviour. Today, they can understand purchasing patterns, peak trading times, guest preferences and loyalty trends in real time, which allows them to make smarter commercial decisions and deploy different measures so that they can compete more effectively and grow.

The benefits of getting this data through an integrated platform where you can actually make changes are also huge. When you’re running a busy restaurant, the last thing you want to be doing is trawling through spreadsheets at the end of a shift. Using a technology tool that tracks all parts of your operations means you’ve got this information at your fingertips whatever the time of day and even if you aren’t at the restaurant, saving time that can then be spent on delivering better guest experiences.

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Lightspeed’s latest research looks at changing consumer dining habits, including menus tailored to people on weight loss journeys. Are hospitality businesses becoming more responsive to health-conscious and personalised dining trends?

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Consumers are becoming far more intentional about what they eat, and hospitality businesses are starting to adapt with changes like calorie labelling or calling out clean ingredients on menus. Our research found that 55% of Brits now look for ingredients with specific health benefits – like high protein, fibre or gut-friendly properties – and nearly half are willing to pay more for them.

At the same time, the rise of weight management medications is changing how we dine out. People still want the social experience of restaurants, but many are eating smaller portions and 27% are more conscious of portion sizes than they were two years ago.

Having smaller plates and lighter options on their menus can help operators to answer better to changing consumer habits, while also reducing operational costs and drawing in a new type of customer to their venues. During a time where increasing footfall is important to hospitality, this kind of menu innovation could be the difference between a diner choosing your restaurant over a competitor.

Your research also explores how technology can improve the dining experience itself. What kinds of innovations are customers actually responding positively to, and where do you think businesses sometimes get it wrong?

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Guests respond best to technology when it makes the dining experience smoother, faster and more personalised. There is interest in this, with 40% of diners believing that AI-powered tools like personalised recommendations or voice-assisted ordering would be beneficial in hospitality, particularly when they help remove friction rather than add complexity.

But convenience alone isn’t enough, it’s the execution which matters. Reliability is one of the biggest drivers of a positive experience, with 43% of diners saying it’s a priority, alongside smooth coordination between front and back-of-house teams. Customers notice very quickly when systems don’t work together seamlessly.

Where businesses sometimes get it wrong is over-automating the experience. Hospitality is still fundamentally about the human connection, so the most successful operators are using technology to support staff and improve service, rather than replace the personal element altogether.

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Major sporting events like the World Cup can create huge revenue opportunities for hospitality operators. From a technology and operations perspective, how can venues best prepare for these high-demand moments?

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Looking back at the UEFA Euro 2024 tells us a surprising, yet important, story for operators to remember ahead of the World Cup this year.

Interestingly, one of the highest-grossing days of the entire tournament wasn’t a matchday, but the Saturday before the final where England were due to play. It became a peak anticipation moment, with fans gathering ahead of the game and venues seeing a significant uplift in trade. Average transactions per location exceeded £6,000 on that day – the highest recorded during the Euros period – driven by a combination of tournament excitement and already strong weekend footfall. The venues that performed best recognised that it wasn’t just the matches themselves driving revenue, but the wider social occasions and build-up around them.

These venues didn’t get lucky – they put the right technology into place to help them succeed before the Euros even began. This World Cup season, tools like Lightspeed Pulse can help operators to monitor their live performance, especially if they have multiple venues. This can help them to see sales revenue, where service is slowing and how each hour is tracking against expectations, because this is what can make the difference between making a profit or a loss during one of the biggest sporting events of the year.

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Looking ahead, how do you see the hospitality industry evolving over the next few years, and what role do you think technology will play in shaping the future of dining and guest experiences?

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I think the industry will become significantly more data-driven, personalised and experience-focused.

Consumers will continue to expect convenience and personalisation as standard, and the focus on having a wide range of choice on the menu won’t go away. For operators, technology is going to become the way that they can manage these changing tides to remain competitive.

Adopting AI and automation is going to be the – I would even say most necessary – part of this, particularly when it comes to forecasting, inventory management, and customer insights. However, I don’t think hospitality will become less human. If anything, technology will allow operators to focus more on genuine guest interaction by removing operational complexity.

We’ll also continue to see consolidation around connected platforms rather than fragmented systems. Operators want simplicity, visibility and flexibility, and technology providers will need to deliver solutions that support the entire journey, from back-of-house operations to guest engagement.

Ultimately, the venues that succeed will be the ones that combine operational efficiency with exceptional customer experiences. Technology is becoming the foundation that enables both.

The post A Chat With Liam Crooks, Managing Director Of EMEA Hospitality At Lightspeed appeared first on 91̽��.

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I have been in web hosting for a long time. I built up my first hosting brand from my bedroom at 16, and eventually sold that at 29. I left the industry for a while and built some other businesses, but hosting always draws you back. But in that first business it was based in a fixed location in an industrial part of England, very much tied to one physical datacentre and a local customer base. Hosting.com wasn’t going to be like that.

By 2023 technology had evolved far enough that we could do things differently, but there were very few hosting companies that built a global platform. We realised that we could build a truly global hosting company, grow it through acquisitions and then deeply integrate onto a single platform. And we could do it worldwide – everything from the infrastructure to the support teams to the billing.

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Tell us about your core product or service

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We run millions of websites for hundreds of thousands of clients around the world. Our core product is managed web hosting, where we provide the infrastructure, security, performance and support that businesses need to keep their websites and applications online and running. Around that we also provide domain names, email services, security tools and increasingly more services that our customers need to be successful online. But our strength and really the reason that we built trust with our users is that our hosting platform is technically rock solid.

Our customers range in size, including everyone from small blogs, side businesses, agencies and developers, through to larger international companies running critical parts of their operations using hosting.com. We also work a lot with the agency community and dev community with WordPress. We have datacentres in 12+ locations from Australia to London, and technical teams supporting those hosting customers in a dozen global offices too.

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What does scale really look like in infrastructure M&A?

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There is a flywheel for us of acquiring hosting brands, integrating them into the platform we build, delivering benefits to the clients, and building a great hosting brand like hosting.com. Each one of them needs the other; we need scale to be able to build a brand and support the teams to do a great job, we need to integrate to be able to improve service and provide a brilliant product, and we need a great brand at hosting.com in order to support the M&A.

Leaving aside the origination, financing and legal side of M&A, technical infrastructure M&A for us is integration, integration, integration. We say internally that we are continuously driving down tech debt. That is critical for us to keep on top of because it’s how we can run things efficiently and keep sane as we grow. Sometimes the businesses we buy are running old 20 year-old systems, and so we move them to our platform and invest heavily in new hardware and datacentres to ensure we can offer the best service. We know that even if we could maintain a legacy platform now, when we are three times the size we would wish we had done the work.

For example, if we want to roll a configuration change, we can run that now on tens of thousands of web servers with a single command. If we didn’t integrate, and even on the smaller businesses we acquire, this might be manual or haphazard work.

So the work involves bringing acquisitions together, standardising systems and processes, then improving security, strengthening the support and maintaining service quality, all while ensuring the business grows. The model has worked for us as it’s allowed us to build a platform that handles more complexity, meaning it’s more robust and reduces risk for customers’ businesses, and for us, handles more customers and more websites, meaning we’re able to grow it and develop a pipeline of future M&A.

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How is managed hosting evolving in the AI era?

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Managed hosting is becoming even more important in the AI era because the risk is shifting from infrastructure uptime alone to the whole deployment and security stack.

A lot of people can now build something quickly with AI. People who ten years ago would’ve never expected to code now have an expectation to build on a daily basis, and we’re seeing that in practice across sectors. But they don’t realise that building applications and websites is only the first step. What matters is what happens when that application is live, like whether it is patched, monitored, backed up, protected from attacks and managed properly. And it’s also where hosting infrastructure has a massive part to play. It goes beyond just providing servers, but being a trusted operating partner to keep websites and apps online and secure.

On a management layer, the patching velocity has also increased for us – with Mythos and equivalent tools the speed that we can react to CVEs is a sign of our professionalism.

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Why is “vibe coding” without deployment discipline creating the next generation of security risks?

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The risk isn’t just in AI making it much easier for non-developers to create applications, but more in the discipline around deployment, testing, patching and security being skipped. Yes, people can now “vibe code” something quickly on a laptop and stitch together a web app that previously would’ve taken someone weeks. But that does not mean they are thinking about what happens when it is exposed to the internet. And it definitely does not mean they automatically understand the safety protocols drilled into developers early in their coding journeys.

The post A Chat With Seb de Lemos, CEO At hosting.com On How He Built A Global Platform For Hosting appeared first on 91̽��.

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Tech companies build AI for the environments they know: laptops, desktops, corporate desks. Frontline workers don’t sit at any of those. As a result, most organisations are treating 80% of their workforce as an afterthought in their AI strategy.

The cost of that is a two-tier workforce. Frontline workers feel disconnected from headquarters, which hits morale and internal sentiment. In industries like logistics, retail, and manufacturing, this shows up as high talent turnover, and longer onboarding times.��

There’s also a security problem. When frontline staff don’t have secure, company-provided AI and digital tools, they turn to consumer apps to solve day-to-day problems. That’s shadow IT at scale, with all the data and compliance risk that comes with it.

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For a leader trying to picture this, what does AI-enablement actually look like for someone who doesn’t use a laptop? How do you make it work on their personal devices?

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It has to be mobile-first and friction-free. A courier or supermarket assistant can’t type long, complex prompts into a desktop dashboard in the middle of a busy shift. For them, AI has to be a secure, intelligent assistant in their pocket.

In practice, that means meeting them on the device they already use. Imagine a frontline worker who needs to check an updated safety policy or compliance regulation mid-shift. Instead of digging through a binder or hunting for a password for an old corporate intranet, they ask a question in plain language: “What’s the protocol for handling this specific return?” The AI on their employee engagement app answers in seconds, drawing on the company’s own approved and governed documentation. That’s the difference between information existing and information being usable. And it completely democratizes access to that information, regardless of shifts or location.
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It’s one thing to launch an app, but getting people to actually use it is the real test. What kind of growth and efficiency are your clients seeing when they get this right?

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Frontline workers want to be connected to the wider company, and they want answers faster. The Staffbase

found that poor internal communication was cited by 60% of employees who had considered�� leaving, across both desk and deskless roles. When employees have an employee engagement platform they actually trust, one that delivers clear, relevant information in the flow of their work, the operational gains are immediate. Managers spend less time relaying information. Workers have the autonomy to solve problems instantly. And critical updates actually reach the people they’re meant for. AI also allows employees across countries to access the same information in their own languages, solving the problem of scaling communication globally without losing the message in translation.

Looking ahead, what do you think the next phase of this AI revolution looks like? How do you see the relationship between business leaders and their frontline teams evolving over the next year or two?

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The conversation is shifting from technology to people. The question is no longer what AI can do, but whether employees trust the answers it gives them, and whether those answers actually reach the frontline.The companies that get this right over the next two years will be the ones that treat the frontline not as a recipient of communication, but as part of it.

The takeaway for leaders should be that your AI strategy is only as strong as your most disconnected worker. If the information your AI draws on isn’t trustworthy, and if it doesn’t reach everyone, it won’t make your business smarter. It will just make the gaps more visible, faster.

The post A Chat With Frank Wolf, Co-founder And Chief Strategy Officer At Staffbase On How The Frontline Is The True AI Efficiency Success appeared first on 91̽��.

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The biggest shift is that disputes are increasingly about people rather than traditional brand assets. A logo or stock image is easy to manage; a person’s likeness – their face, their voice, their identity – is far more valuable and far more contested. The same shoot now gets sliced across organic and paid social, regional sites, retail screens and AI-assisted variations, to name a few, and a lot of that usage drifts beyond what the talent originally agreed to.

At the same time, athletes, actors and creators are tracking where their likeness appears much more closely than before because they know what it’s worth. So you have fragmented, expanding use of someone’s identity on one side and rising scrutiny on the other, mediated by contracts buried in email threads and PDFs. When a question arises, neither side has historically had a reliable way to prove what was agreed, and there has been no third-party mediator to enforce it.

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What is the growing commercial value of name, image and likeness rights?

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A person’s name, image and likeness have quietly become an asset class in their own right. US college sport is the clearest example: NIL went from effectively zero in 2021 to a market estimated at well over $1.5 billion a year, and that’s just one part of the market Add professional athletes, actors, musicians, creators and the estates of the deceased, and likeness rights are now a meaningful, recurring revenue stream rather than a one-off fee. Regulators are also starting to take notice.

In the UK, for example, the government is now reviewing whether to introduce dedicated personality rights protections in response to AI. Crucially, the bigger shift is moving from the single image to the underlying right itself: the ability to license a face or voice repeatedly, across markets and over time. That changes the stakes. When a likeness is worth this much, it deserves the same rigour we apply to any valuable asset: clear ownership, accurate records and the ability to prove and enforce what’s been granted. That’s the gap TrueRights exists to close.

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How are outdated licensing workflows creating risk for both talent and advertisers?

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Most rights still live across multiple spreadsheets, PDFs and inboxes, with the actual assets sitting in a separate library. There’s rarely one place that answers the basic questions: who can use this image, where can they use it, and until when? For advertisers that creates real exposure: running an asset whose usage window has quietly expired, or beyond the territory it was cleared for, and discovering the problem only when a takedown notice or invoice arrives mid-campaign.

For talent, the same opacity means appearances they can’t see and therefore can’t be paid for. In most cases, neither side is acting in bad faith; the systems simply can’t keep pace with how content now moves, and manual processes don’t scale to thousands of assets across dozens of channels. A shared, authoritative record turns those ambiguous, after-the-fact arguments into something both sides can check in advance.

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What could better rights infrastructure and provenance systems look like in practice?

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What the industry really needs is a single, authoritative record that travels with every asset. Each image or clip would carry verifiable provenance such as who appears in it, who shot it, what consent was given, and exactly what’s been licensed. This includes the term, the territories, the permitted media. Before anything goes live, teams could check in seconds whether the intended use is in scope, and the system flags it automatically if it isn’t. When rights expire, everyone knows.

When a likeness is used, it’s logged, so talent is paid accurately and on time. The simplest way to think about it is as a trusted clearing system with a shared source of truth that brands, agencies and talent all trust, with a clean audit trail behind every decision. That’s precisely what we’re building at TrueRights: infrastructure that makes the rights as easy to verify as the image itself, so good actors can move quickly and with confidence.

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How are AI and digital media increasing pressure on existing rights management systems?

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AI has broken one of the core assumptions underneath most rights systems, that there’s a finite set of known assets to track. A face or voice can now be synthesised or altered from very little source material, creating endless derivatives at huge speed and almost no cost. The scale is already significant: the number of deepfake files online jumped roughly sixteen-fold between 2023 and 2025, and close to half of US deepfake scams last year used a celebrity’s likeness.

Legacy tools simply weren’t designed for content that can be generated faster than anyone can log it. It leaves the industry asking two urgent questions: is this likeness authentic, and was its use authorised? Provenance is the answer. We need a verifiable signal of where content came from and what rights attach to it. Without that layer, brands struggle to prove authenticity and talent struggles to defend their likeness. It’s why rights infrastructure has gone from useful to essential.

The post A Conversation With Benjamin Woollams, Founder and CEO At TrueRights On Image Rights Disputes appeared first on 91̽��.

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is the product. DeepWisdom is the company behind it. We launched Atoms AI in January 2026, with the aim of helping startups to take the next step from “vibe coding” to complete “vibe business” creation, through the deployment of autonomous AI teams. Instead of pinning their hopes on simple prototypes, with Atoms AI, entrepreneurs can build a fully functional business, capable of active operation, rather than simply pitching for funding. As such, we’ve already attracted more than 1 million customers from more than 100 countries.��

We’re also the team behind MetaGPT and OpenManus, two open-source multi-agent projects on GitHub.

We’re backed by Ant Group and Cathay Capital, who led a $31 million round earlier this year.

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What do you think makes your offering unique?

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We’ve moved beyond simple AI coding. The ability to bypass expensive professionals and use AI to code and product/platform build using natural language prompts completely revolutionised business, helping��

startups of all levels to actually begin. But the vibe business is so much more than that. Atoms AI supports the full cycle, from idea generation and launch to iteration and marketing.��

We’re there not just to build prototypes but to help businesses launch, operate, and iterate. Our multi-agent approach more closely mirrors real-world workflows, which isn’t just more scientific but more helpful and widely deployable than single-model coding tools. Ultimately, we’re giving people access to specialist skills with the previously needed budget.��

Traditionally, if someone had no experience in marketing, for example, it took time and money to build the requisite knowledge – search engine optimisation, Google Ads campaign management, build a backend. Now, with Atoms AI, anyone can do that quickly and efficiently.

How has your offering and approach evolved?

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The first step in the journey was MetaGPT. It’s a concept that I’ve had in mind since high school. I’d always wanted to create a machine that creates itself. As a teenager, I expected that it would solve many problems in the world. And throughout my career, I’ve tried to achieve that in many ways.��As an open-source multi-agent framework, that’s what MetaGPT is becoming. And it’s led to the creation of OpenManus.��

OpenManus is a project built by a group of young researchers in our team.��It’s basically a fully open-source, community-driven AI agent framework designed to replicate the features of the viral Manus AI agent. Atoms AI was built upon that framework, but is more specialised.��

Rather than providing a general purpose platform, Atoms AI is an end-to-end platform designed to autonomously build, launch, and scale full-stack businesses, empowering solopreneurs to do more.��
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What can we see from your company in the future?

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We have a few exciting projects in the pipeline. The first, that I can actually mention, is our Seedance 2.0 Partnership Launch, with ByteDance, which will hopefully take us into new markets, new verticals, and new customer segments.��

More generally, in the next 12 months, our goal is to build a product that helps users generate income automatically. So, by the end of this year, users will gain access to the first abstraction layer of MetaGPT: a system that can translate ideas into executable business workflows.

Then, in the next three years, we aim to enable AI to evolve autonomously. Users will only need to define the rubrics: the goals, evaluation criteria, and strategic direction. The AI will then build, test, and improve itself over time. In this model, humans no longer need to manage every execution detail. Their role shifts toward validating ideas, identifying promising directions, and deciding how deep each opportunity should go.

The post Interview With Alex Wu, Founder And CEO Of Atoms AI, AI-Powered Platform That Turns Ideas Into Working Products appeared first on 91̽��.

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Checkatrade has played a major role in raising standards across the home improvement industry, building greater trust through stronger vetting, verified reviews and increased pricing transparency. This has helped millions of consumers feel more confident when finding and hiring tradespeople.

That said, a wider shift in consumer behaviour has created the opportunity to take the home maintenance experience one step further. As ‘click of a button’ services like Uber and Deliveroo have transformed consumer expectations, people increasingly expect instant pricing, seamless digital payments and the ability to book a specific timeslot, including evenings and weekends, in just a few clicks. Checkatrade Express is designed to bring that same simplicity and convenience to home maintenance, allowing consumers to book a tradesperson as easily as they would order a takeaway. With instant booking and clear upfront pricing, Express removes much of the hassle traditionally associated with finding and booking a professional. What may once have taken three days can now be arranged in three minutes.

The services currently offered through Express are designed to help customers tackle their ‘never-ending to do list’ with ease. Jobs range from oven cleaning and door hanging to garden clearance and wall painting. Customers simply describe the job they need doing and receive an instant upfront price before booking. They can combine multiple small tasks into one appointment, choose preferred time slots and pay securely through the Checkatrade platform. Checkatrade then matches the booking with a trusted local tradesperson ready to complete the work.

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What does digitalisation look like for the home improvement sector? What role do AI and new technologies play?

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Checkatrade Express is the latest innovation milestone in Checkatrade’s wider evolution beyond its origins as a simple trade directory. True digitalisation isn’t just about listing tradespeople online – it’s about creating a seamless end-to-end experience, from discovery and upfront pricing to real-time scheduling and secure digital payments. This reflects a growing consumer appetite for convenience, automation and technology that removes friction from everyday tasks.

As new technologies become more integrated into the sector, maintaining trust remains essential. Checkatrade will continue to verify trade identities, ensuring they pass up to 12 checks before joining the site, as well as continually verifying reviews to help ensure transparency and confidence for consumers. While AI and automation have an important role to play, technology works best when combined with strong data, established workflows and human oversight. The goal is to make the experience faster and simpler without losing the trust the platform is built on.

The adoption of technology through Express reflects a broader shift across Checkatrade’s ecosystem. Our product, TradeMore, helps tradespeople integrate AI-powered tools such as smart inboxes and automated quoting into their day to day operations, reducing admin and allowing them to focus on the hands-on work that makes them money.
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How do you plan to modernise the trade industry in line with the likes of Uber and Deliveroo?

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I’m fortunate to have experienced this evolution first-hand through my time at both Uber and Deliveroo. What made those businesses so successful was their ability to turn traditionally fragmented and time-consuming experiences into something simple, seamless and on-demand. At Uber, for example, I helped to facilitate the rollout of upfront pricing – a key movement which shifted the ‘instant industry’ away from estimate based pricing. And at Deliveroo, I set up Islandwide Delivery in Singapore, using generous rider incentives to double or even triple the restaurant selection customers would see in more remote areas. This opened up the variety of services consumers would access on demand, and was a key growth driver for the brand.

These developments – in both sector depth and price based innovation – now exist within home maintenance. At Checkatrade Express, I’m taking my prior experience to help the industry from a largely offline, manual process to a more connected and frictionless digital experience.

So, how will we achieve this? At the core of Express is the intelligent use of technology to improve speed and convenience for both customers and tradespeople. Express uses AI-powered systems to assess factors such as local availability, skills, travel distance and preferred appointment times to quickly match customers with the right service – and the right vetted tradesperson – for the job.

Pricing is another key area of innovation. Home maintenance is complex because no two homes or jobs are exactly alike, making standardised pricing difficult. By using technology to process large amounts of job and pricing data, Express can provide customers with transparent upfront pricing before work begins, helping remove uncertainty from the process. This approach also helps differentiate Checkatrade Express within the market. While platforms such as Airtasker and Taskrabbit focus primarily on connecting users with tradespeople, Express is focused on bringing transparent, upfront pricing to home services at scale – all underpinned by the reassurance that our exhaustive vetting process gives to consumers.

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What makes Checkatrade the right business to drive this forward?

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Checkatrade is the only business which is well placed to combine convenience with verified, trusted tradespeople. As a long time player in the home improvement space, the brand has built deep trade expertise and a strong nationwide network of tradespeople across a wide range of categories. We’ve also built a team with experience from some of the world’s leading marketplace businesses, putting us in a strong position to help modernise the home maintenance experience for both consumers and tradespeople alike. This combination is key to the next stage of innovation in the home improvement sector, which we’re pursuing through the launch of Express.

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