Finance
Rules imposed after financial crisis have ‘gone too far’, Reeves tells City bankers
Rachel Reeves has told City bankers attending her Mansion House speech that regulations put in place to protect the economy after the global financial crisis had “gone too far”.
Speaking at the glitzy annual gathering in the Square Mile on Thursday, the chancellor called the financial services sector the “crown jewel” of the UK economy.
She argued that tighter rules on banks and investment institutions after the 2007-8 crash had created “a system which sought to eliminate risk-taking”.
“While it was right that successive governments made regulatory changes after the global financial crisis, to ensure that regulation kept pace with the global economy of the time, it is important that we learn the lessons of the past,” Reeves said.
“These changes have resulted in a system which sought to eliminate risk-taking. That has gone too far and, in places, it has had unintended consequences, which we must now address.”
The last Labour government had encouraged the City regulator to take a “light touch” approach to regulating the financial services sector, but was then forced to step in and bail out a string of banks when the US sub-prime mortgage crisis prompted a catastrophic chain reaction.
At the time, regulators were accused of failing to rein in the risky behaviours that had led to the crisis, which plunged the UK into recession.
But Reeves suggested she now believed it was time to loosen some of the constraints that were subsequently imposed on the sector.
“We cannot take the UK’s status as a global financial centre for granted. In a highly competitive world we need to earn that status and we need to work to keep it,” she said.
The chancellor set out a series of changes, some of which were proposed by her immediate predecessor, Jeremy Hunt. These include obliging regulators to take into account growth, as well as financial stability; and replacing the current “certification” regime for investment professionals, with a “more proportionate approach”.
The Financial Conduct Authority has already announced plans to streamline its rulebook for firms to reduce compliance costs, in the hope of promoting growth.
Reeves believes that bolstering private investment is key to improving the UK’s growth rate. She has also announced plans for a mega-merger of public sector pension funds, in the hope of unleashing capital to back UK infrastructure projects.
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The chancellor is keen to stress Labour’s pro-business credentials after her first budget, which increased employer national insurance contributions (NICs) from April.
The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, also addressed the Mansion House dinner, stressing the UK’s longstanding support for free trade, as Donald Trump prepares to slap US tariffs on imports.
“I will own up to being an old fashioned free trader at heart. It’s a British characteristic, I like to think. My point is this: amidst the important need to be alert to threats to economic security, let’s please remember the importance of openness,” Bailey said.
Economists have said that if Trump goes ahead with his plan for a universal tariff of 10% on all imports, it could cut the UK’s growth rate next year to a sickly 0.4%.
TORONTO — Insurance provider Intact Financial Corp. says it had higher catastrophe losses and large losses in the second quarter than it initially expected.
Intact Financial reported that its combined catastrophe and large losses were $247 million above its expectations for the second quarter on a pre-tax and net of reinsurance basis.
The combined higher losses amount to $1.08 per diluted common share after tax.
Total catastrophe losses reached $416 million on a pre-tax basis during the second quarter and net of reinsurance.
The company says catastrophe losses in Canada were due to weather events, while commercial fires drove losses in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Intact Financial says the increase in large losses included higher-frequency fire claims as well as other property losses across different geographies.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 8, 2026.
Companies in this story: (TSX: IFC)
The Canadian Press
For a company navigating one of the most consequential transformations in its history, financial clarity is not optional—it is essential. Natura &Co, the Brazilian personal care and cosmetics group behind iconic brands such as Natura and Avon, has long been committed to combining purpose-driven business with commercial performance. After a period of strategic portfolio reshaping, including the divestiture of its Aesop and The Body Shop holdings, the company is now sharpening its focus on profitability and operational excellence across Latin America and global markets.
At the center of that effort sits a deceptively complex challenge: understanding, in real time, which revenue and cost factors are driving or eroding gross margin across a highly diversified business. For years, answering that question meant manual reporting, delayed insights, and finance teams spending valuable time on data gathering rather than analysis.
That’s now changing, thanks to a co-innovation initiative developed together with SAP and Numen, a global SAP partner specializing in digital transformation and enterprise software implementation.
From manual reporting to proactive decision intelligence
The project’s goal was to replace a labor-intensive gross margin analysis process with a generative AI application embedded directly into Natura &Co’s financial workflows. Built on SAP Business AI Platform, SAP’s unified foundation integrating business technology, data, and AI capabilities, the application connects directly to data in SAP S/4HANA to provide finance teams with automated insights and narrative recommendations in real time, without the need for manual data pulls or offline reporting.
The application enables users to explore revenue, cost, and margin drivers interactively, identifying at a glance which elements are protecting or eroding margin performance across markets and product lines. Crucially, human oversight remains central to the design: the AI application generates insights, while finance professionals retain full control over interpretation and decisions.
“The implementation of gross margin analysis using AI in SAP S/4HANA marked an inflection point in the analytical capability of our finance area,” said Rogério Dias Garcia, tech manager, ERP Latam, Natura &Co. “We overcame delays and raised the standard of insights by integrating margin analysis from SAP S/4HANA with a large language model connected via the SAP AI Core layer. This architecture allowed us to provide, in an agile, secure, and completely anonymous manner, a stratified and precise view of gross margin offenders and protectors—discriminating exactly which revenue or cost elements were driving market performance.”
A collaborative architecture for scalable AI adoption
Natura &Co’s application derived from a prototype SAP partner Numen created in early 2024 at SAP’s global Hack2Build on business AI, leveraging the generative AI capabilities of SAP Business AI Platform. The solution was designed and developed through close collaboration between Natura &Co, Numen, and SAP. From the outset, the approach was to align AI adoption with concrete business priorities, ensuring the application would be scalable and production-ready rather than a standalone prototype.
Numen brought deep SAP implementation expertise to the project, combining knowledge of SAP S/4HANA architecture with hands-on experience in building solutions on SAP Business AI Platform. The technology stack—SAP S/4HANA, SAP AI Core, SAP Fiori, and SAP Business Technology Platform—provided the secure, integrated foundation needed to connect financial data with generative AI capabilities in an enterprise context.
“SAP enabled the transformation by providing the technological foundation and expert support,” said Carlos Aravechia, head of Data Design & Intelligence at Numen.
The success of the project has validated a broader conviction at Natura &Co: that generative AI, embedded directly in ERP workflows, can fundamentally reposition finance from a transactional function to a strategic business partner.
A blueprint for other businesses
The Natura &Co project demonstrates a pattern that other organizations can replicate, particularly those running SAP S/4HANA. The combination of structured ERP data with the contextual reasoning capabilities of large language models creates a foundation for decision intelligence that goes well beyond traditional business intelligence tools.
The project was built within a six-month co-innovation sprint and went live in August 2025. It is currently in use across Natura &Co’s Equador operations.
Looking ahead, Natura &Co is already planning the next phase: integrating Joule Agents to further automate the extraction of standard analytical content and deepen the AI-driven optimization of financial processes.
“The success of this initiative validates the transformative potential of embedded AI within our ERP,” Dias Garcia noted. “We are now ready to move forward—deepening these insights and integrating the capability of Joule Agents to maximize the extraction of standard content and further optimize our business decisions.”
For SAP customers evaluating how to move from AI experimentation to AI in production, the Natura &Co project offers a concrete, replicable model: start with a high-value, well-defined business process, embed AI directly into existing workflows, and build in human oversight from the start.
A girl from a disadvantaged rural family in central China topped this year’s gaokao, attracting numerous live-streamers eager to finance her education, which she declined.
The home of 18-year-old secondary school graduate Han Yaping in a Henan province village was recently bustling with live-streamers.
This attention came after Han achieved an impressive score of 699 out of 750 in the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.
She has received offers from China’s two leading universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University.
Han’s accomplishment is particularly remarkable given her family’s impoverished circumstances.
Her mother suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory arthritis affecting the spine, preventing her from working. Her father, who earns a living through farming and odd jobs, serves as the family’s sole provider. Han also has a younger sister.
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