Finance
In a shift, Biden to bar most fossil fuel financing overseas
President Joe Biden is poised to back restrictions on international funding for oil and gas projects in a move that could free up billions of dollars for clean energy and crystallize his climate legacy.
It marks a shift from the United States’ approach over the past three years. Biden joined a group of wealthy nations in 2021 to restrict financing of coal-fired power plants in other countries but hasn’t support efforts to expand those restrictions to other fossil fuels.
Now, his administration and those of a handful of other rich countries are expected to call for curtailing public financing for oil and gas projects internationally at a virtual meeting Tuesday of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — a group of 38 countries that collaborate on issues of trade and finance — according to three people who are familiar with the administration’s plans.
“It will have a huge impact and, I think, really leave a strong climate legacy for the Biden administration,” said Kate DeAngelis, deputy director of international finance at Friends of the Earth.
The U.S. is expected to back a so-called emission threshold that would prevent the U.S. Export-Import Bank and other publicly funded export credit agencies from financing carbon-intensive energy projects. That would be in line with interim guidance by the Biden administration to end international fossil fuel financing that was never made public but was viewed by analysts at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
It’s likely the last chance the administration would have to push for an agreement at the OECD. President-elect Donald Trump, who has attacked climate science and promised to drill for more oil at home, is unlikely to support ending fossil fuel investments abroad when he takes office in January.
The move comes amid pressure by climate activists to deliver on a promise Biden made when he took office in 2021 to end overseas financing of all carbon-intensive fossil fuel projects. The U.S. joined dozens of other countries later that year at climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, in agreeing to stop funding international fossil fuel projects before 2023. Reaching an agreement now, they say, would put rules in place that are tough to unwind, forcing the incoming Trump administration to comply with the deal or pull out of it.
A spokesperson from the Trump transition didn’t respond to a question about how the administration would treat such an agreement but said voters elected Trump based in part on promises he made while campaigning to lower energy costs for consumers.
“When he takes office, President Trump will make America energy dominant again, protect our energy jobs, and bring down the cost of living for working families,” spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in an email.
Jake Schmidt, senior director for international climate at NRDC, thinks the Biden administration would have supported the agreement if Vice President Kamala Harris had won the election. But Trump’s victory might be pushing the administration to act more quickly.
“They clearly realized the end of the year is fast approaching and their ability to secure a climate win is rapidly winding down,” he said.
‘Finish the job’
The meeting will center on an export credit agency agreement among the European Union and 10 other wealthy nations: Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.
It follows a 2021 deal by the U.S. and other rich countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to end public investments in coal power projects that don’t capture and store their emissions.
Earlier this year, the European Union proposed to extend the coal prohibition to cover oil and gas, except in limited circumstances that align with the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The idea has earned the support of Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom, among others, but the U.S. has so far not backed it publicly or offered an alternative. That will change Tuesday, when the U.S. is expected to support a separate plan for establishing emission thresholds.
Export credit agencies currently offer billions of dollars in financing for fossil fuel projects, prompting pressure from climate activists who are calling on Biden to fulfill his earlier pledges.
But the U.S. Export-Import Bank has continued to approve financing for fossil fuel projects internationally despite a Biden executive order that instructed federal agencies to end such support.
That matters because although the Treasury Department represents the U.S. in OECD negotiations, the Ex-Im Bank would need to implement any decision reached under it. The Ex-Im Bank has previously said that its charter prevents it from discriminating against specific industries such as oil and gas.
Schmidt of NRDC said an emissions threshold could be seen as a “cleaner and clearer” way to set restrictions than the EU proposal, which could allow for more loopholes if countries don’t explicitly define what types of projects are compatible with the 1.5 C limit.
One remaining challenge, however, will be getting South Korea to join the agreement, particularly amid the political turmoil gripping the nation following a failed effort by President Yoon Suk Yeol to establish martial law. Agreements made at the OECD must be done by consensus.
Last month, three Democratic senators sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan urging them to use the Tuesday meeting “to fulfill a key and durable promise on international energy finance.”
“Having the senators weighing in was an important reminder that the White House needs to finish the job,” said Schmidt.
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.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a landmark review on Monday that proposes recommendations to regulate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial decisions made by consumers.
The review, titled the Mills Review, anticipates that both consumers and firms will start delegating “more financial decision-making to AI systems,” including for agreements, initiating transactions, and executing decisions “within agreed parameters.” One of the key findings of the review outlined that while AI can help bridge advice gaps and “support growth,” there remain risks “associated with fraud, cyber security, and consumer harm.” Conducting the review, Sheldon Mills highlighted that “AI can also amplify risks: bias, discrimination, exclusion, opaque decision-making (particularly when multiple AI models interact), misleading or hallucinatory advice and erosion of consumer trust.”
The review stated that presently, one in five adults in the UK are “already open to AI making decisions for them,” particularly when decisions feel “complex or high stakes.” It found that roughly 26 percent of the population “trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice” with little awareness that such platforms provide no “formal routes to recourse” or protections.
Overall, the Mills Review identified four areas that it anticipates will be impacted by AI in the financial sector: “the transformation of firms,” “new consumer journeys,” “a reshaped competition landscape,” and “amplified financial crime and cyber risk.” The FCA projected the shift in how consumers and firms consult AI to take place by 2030.
The Mills Review put forth seven “priority” recommendations to be considered by the FCA Board. It recommended that any transitions to autonomous AI models be monitored and that regulatory frameworks and perimeters be adapted and secured. The review called for the strengthening of “system-wide coordination and oversight,” the scaling up of the FCA’s AI Lab to enable it to support AI models and innovation for agentic finance, and an “AI-enabled agentic supervisory model” to be built and adopted. Finally, it recommended that a trusted “public-interest AI-enabled financial capability service” be developed.
The FCA announced, in the press release, that it will launch an AI “good and poor practice publication” in late 2026.
-
Fitness2 minutes agoWellness Wednesday: Exercise & heart disease
-
Movie Reviews10 minutes ago‘The Guest’ Review: Trine Dyrholm Gives a Scorcher of a Performance in a Gutsy Danish Party-Gone-Wrong Drama
-
World20 minutes ago
Le Pen, France’s Far-Right Leader, Launches Her Presidential Campaign
-
Lifestyle1 hour agoWe unpack the 2026 Emmy nominations : Pop Culture Happy Hour
-
Technology1 hour agoGet a $30 credit when you reserve Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy phones
-
World1 hour agoCritics say Turkey’s verbal attacks on Israel have crossed into antisemitism
-
Politics1 hour agoWATCH: Dana White drops 2028 hints while raving about his favorite Trump cabinet secretary
-
Health1 hour agoKatie Couric couldn’t remember the year or the president during frightening brain episode
