00:00 Josh Lipton

With the first half of the year coming to a close, we’re taking a look at the M&A landscape. New data from PWC highlight that about 30% of companies are pausing or revisiting pending deals due to tariffs. We’re bringing in Yahoo Finance banking reporter, David Hollerith. David.

00:20 David Hollerith

Hey Josh. So, um, you know, it’s kind of a mixed picture with the deals market right now. We’re seeing that the number of deals year to date compared to last year is actually, um, down, but total volume or in dollar amount, the amount of dollars going into deals so far this year is actually up. So it’s fairly confusing, and we have two big trends that are sort of shaping this market. The first is tariffs or sort of companies’ reaction to tariffs, and that goes back to the PWC stat that you just put out, um, which is just that, um, you know, they’re having to rethink their models and uh, you know, whether or not they can actually, um, do a deal without, uh, you know, taking some sort of impact from tariffs that they didn’t think. And that’s just if they’re in an industry that might be sort of resistant to tariffs or exposed to tariffs, excuse me. Um, and then we have AI, and AI is a huge one, obviously, because, um, tech at this point makes up 50% of, uh, uh, US M&A so far year to date, and that’s up from about 41% from, uh, the same period last year. And within tech, um, AI is kind of taking over in these few big deals that we’re seeing. Um, OpenAI, uh, the investment from, uh, SoftBank, as well as, uh, Salesforce, um, purchasing Informatica, uh, Meta’s, uh, purchase of Scale AI. I could sort of go on with that. But so it’s a market where a lot of the smaller players aren’t really making decisions yet, but it looks not too bad in dollar amount just because we’ve seen all these big players do these AI plays effectively.

02:29 Josh Lipton

All right, David. Thank you for that setup. Appreciate it.

Story Continues

BIO CEO Joris Totté also emphasized the importance of digital financial tools. “Digital payments and e-wallets are powerful tools for financial inclusion, especially in rural communities where traditional banking infrastructure is limited,” he said.

Earlier this year, Amartha convened global players at the 2025 Asia Grassroots Forum in Bali, highlighting the untapped potential of rural economies and laying the groundwork for broader investment and collaboration.

“In our 15-year journey focusing on this segment, Amartha has demonstrated that such potential can be realized through technology built on a deep understanding of the behaviors and needs of the communities we serve. We are grateful for the trust Swedfund, Finnfund, and BIO have placed in us in supporting our mission for greater financial inclusion,” Taufan concluded.

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About Amartha 

Amartha’s mission is to improve the welfare of the grassroots segment, through tailored digital financial services. Founded in 2010, Amartha  is now growing to build a microfinance ecosystem through capital loan, risk segmentation and payment services. Amartha advances the bottom of the pyramid by increasing the competitiveness of MSMEs. Thus, we empower more women’s MSMEs, create jobs and build more inclusive economic growth.

As of March 2025, Amartha, which is licensed and supervised by the Financial Services Authority (OJK), has disbursed working capital loans of more than 35 trillion rupiah to 3.3 million MSMEs, of which more than 90 percent are led by women, spread across more than 50,000 villages throughout Indonesia.

www.amartha.com

About BIO

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The mission of the Belgian Investment Company for Developing Countries (BIO)is to promote the establishment of a strong private sector in developing and emerging countries, to enable them to access growth and sustainable development, within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. BIO was created in 2001 with the Belgian Federal State as sole shareholder. Its ultimate goal is to help strengthen the private sector in developing countries.

 About Finnfund

Finnfund is a Finnish development financier and impact investor. We build a sustainable future and generate lasting impact by investing in businesses that solve global development challenges. We invest 200–250 million euros in 20–30 companies in developing countries each year. Our focus sectors include renewable energy, sustainable forestry, sustainable agriculture, financial institutions, and digital infrastructure and solutions. Today Finnfund’s investments, commitments, and investment decisions total about 1.23 billion euros, half of them in Africa. The company has 97 employees based in Helsinki and Nairobi.

About Swedfund

Swedfund is Sweden’s development finance institution with the mission to reduce poverty through sustainable investments in developing countries. Swedfund has two instruments to fulfil its mission: sustainable investments in the private sector and technical feasibility studies through the Project Accelerator targeting critical infrastructure in the public sector. Swedfund’s investments contribute to the creation of decent jobs and increased access to essential products and services such as electricity and food. Swedfund is a long-term investor and is additional and catalytic through its investments and by mobilising private capital.

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SOURCE Amartha

After decades of halting advances, the field of Accessibility for people with disabilities has reached not a fork in one road—it’s smack in the middle of a bustling (and often contentious) convergence of many forces from many directions.

There are imperatives from legal and moral to societal and financial. Disabilities physical, sensory and cognitive. Politics and profit. Them, me. All crashing into each other in ways never seen before.

There is little consensus on where accessibility will emerge from all this. But if experts agree on anything, it’s that the business community will play a significant role. Progress will rely on good, old-fashioned entrepreneurship and investment in AI-driven communication devices, exoskeletons, consumer products and much more.

“Accessibility has been an ignored space from investment capital,” says Paul Kent, the managing partner of the Disabled Life Alliance, which connects and facilitates deals between private investors and innovators in the accessibility space. “It’s been thought of as a small market, which is ridiculous. There’s a massive return associated with this. A lot of people believe social impact requires less than market-rate returns. But that’s not true. This is not charity. It’s an investible market.”

Forbes’ inaugural Accessibility 100 list gives a unique look at the industry as it stands today, and where it’s headed. The list features the top innovators and impact-makers—from large companies to lone inventors—in sectors like mobility, communication, sports, entertainment and many more. Some make devices like “smart canes” that can tell blind users where things are, from poles to the Starbucks entrance; while others build playgrounds for disabled children, or provide access from everything to the beach, the ballot box and a career in modeling. Profiles of all 100 appear on pages devoted to those categories; for example, education is here.

Featuring companies and people from 15 countries, the list was compiled through more than 400 conversations with industry insiders over nine months, and with the guidance of an expert advisory board. Disabilities considered include physical, sensory and neurodivergent; types of accessibility include digital (technology, websites and so on), physical (access to public transportation and buildings) and experiences (sports, careers and the like). Emphasis was placed on breadth of impact felt now and expected in the near future. This page details the list’s methodology and advisory board.

Current debates over DEI (often called DEIA, the A for accessibility) often overlook one dynamic: the disabled community is the one minority which anyone of any race, gender, age or financial means can suddenly find themselves thrust into. The head of accessibility at a major communications company, who asked not to be identified given the current political climate, calls accessibility a “casualty of war” over DEI policies—such as when the Trump administration stopped providing sign-language interpretation during broadcasts of press briefings, cutting them off to deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens. (The National Association of the Deaf immediately sued.) Likewise, stricter protections for disabled airline travelers instituted by the previous administraion—such as reimbursement for wheelchair damage and better training for flight personnel to increase safety—have been opposed by the airline industry, which is now seeking to delay, dilute, or remove them altogether.

As such conflicts play out, companies and entrepreneurs currently changing the world of accessibility are, in ways surprisingly new, inviting people with all disabilities into design conversations and testing labs, heeding the community’s mantra, “Nothing about us without us.” Recently, as sign-language robotic hands were hailed by outsiders as possibly replacing expensive interpreters—a certainly worthwhile goal—the enthusiasm has obscured the reality that they didn’t really serve the deaf and hard-of-hearing community yet.

“American Sign Language is 70 percent what we call nonverbal markers—it’s your face, how your body moves, not just hand shapes,” says Kelby Brick, the chief operating officer of the National Federation of the Deaf. Usable innovation in the area, he suspects, would require AI-driven avatars that can convey that nuance.

Not all advancements in accessibility are contentious. Many become universal. Closed captioning—originally designed for the deaf—has grown so ubiquitous that it has became one of many examples of what is now called “the curb-cut effect,” so named after sloped curbs designed for people with disabilities wound up benefitting everyone, like those pushing strollers or pulling suitcases. Other instances include electric toothbrushes, speech-to-text and even bendable straws.

Indeed, the preferred approach for many companies has become “universal design,” where products and services are built from the start to serve everyone, rather than winding up immediately unusable by the disabled or clumsily retrofitted after the fact. Several firms, including Accessibility 100 listmakers Deque and Fable, now produce software that checks computer code as it’s written to ensure that accessibility features work out of the box. OXO, also on the list, is a household name (literally) that designs all of its kitchen products to be easy for everyone, from smooth-turning can openers to tongs that close with one hand.

One distinct feature of accessibility innovation is that companies—even direct competitors—enthusiastically share ideas and advances, even code, to hasten innovation for all. For example, Procter & Gamble invented raised icons that blind and low-vision people can feel to distinguish products like liquid soap, shampoo and laundry detergent from each other; the company is sharing them with others to make them standard. “We’re not just trying to do it alone,” says Sam Latif, P&G’s Company Accessibility Leader. “Doing it on a few products is not as impactful as the industry doing it together.”

Apple operating systems have built accessibility features into its software since the 1980s, but when Steve Jobs insisted that the first iPhone have no buttons—making it almost unusable for blind people—it sparked faster and faster feature innovations, like haptic feedback, screen magnification, suppression of flashing content and hundreds more. There are so many, in fact, that Apple recently introduced App Store “Accessibility Nutrition Labels” to let users know how each app serves their specific disability.

“It makes good business sense to make technology that works for everyone—we mean everyone,” says Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s top accessibility official. “Accessibility is some of the most creative work we do.”