Finance
Elon Musk calls to ‘delete’ US finance consumer watchdog agency
Elon Musk has said he wants to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal watchdog that helps protect consumers from predatory financial practices.
The tech billionaire, who has been tapped to run a “Department of Government Efficiency” in the incoming Donald Trump administration, posted “Delete CFPB” on X, the social media site he owns. He added a declaration that the agency, which employs 1,700 people and has an annual budget of close to $700m, is an example of “too many duplicative regulatory agencies” in Washington.
The CFPB is an independent watchdog agency with oversight over banks and other financial institutions, created after the financial crash of 2008 and charged with overseeing consumer protection in the industry.
Musk’s post came in response to a recent podcast clip from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a significant Trump donor, who said the agency’s primary purpose is to “terrorize financial institutions”.
But it was soon reported that Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horwitz, was among other investors who had backed LendUp, an online consumer payday lender, that was shut down by the CFPB in 2018.
The CFPB director, Rohit Chopra, said the company’s lending operations were shuttered “for repeatedly lying and illegally cheating its customers”.
Trump announced a plan for Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to run a new advisory agency, known by the acronym Doge, earlier this month. Musk has said he would like the newly formed commission to cut $2tn from federal government running costs – approximately a third of all government spending.
Trump has said Doge and its new “efficiency” tsars would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” to “restructure Federal Agencies”.
Ramaswamy and Musk – whose X bio is now headlined: “the people voted for major government reform” – outlined plans for a “drastic reduction” in regulations and “mass head-count reductions” last week in the Wall Street Journal.
The men said they would rely on two recent US supreme court rulings that limited the authority of federal regulatory agencies to “liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress”.
They said Doge would target more than $500bn “authorised by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended”, including $535m in funding for public broadcasting, $1.5bn in grants to international organisations and nearly $300m given to progressive groups including Planned Parenthood.
DOoge would also carry out audits of government contracts to “yield significant savings” and “identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions”.
“Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink,” they wrote, referring to the healthcare programs covering more than 150 million Americans.
How far Ramaswamy and Musk will be able to influence cuts to federal programs and spending before running into legislative opposition is yet to be determined. Many have warned them that cutting bureaucracy is difficult and time-consuming.
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On Wednesday, Musk asked in a poll on X what should happen to the budget for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the agency responsible for collecting federal taxes. The most popular result was to have its budget “deleted”. He later replied positively to a post that called for the IRS itself to be audited by Doge.
But dismantling the CFPB would be a signal of broader plans for disruption. The agency was formed after the financial crash of 2008, which was caused by insecure or predatory lending to “subprime” mortgage borrowers.
Safeguards to prevent a repeat of the disaster included regulatory financial reforms and the formation of CFPB. The agency reports that its work has resulted in over $20.7bn in compensation, cancelled debt and other forms of monetary relief for consumers and has requested responses from companies involved in more than 5.6m consumer complaints.
It has also drawn the attention of the conservative policy blueprint known as Project 2025, which called for CFPB to be abolished.
“The CFPB is a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency. It is unconstitutional,” the document said. “The next conservative President should order the immediate dissolution of the agency”.
Musk last week also posted on social media naming several specific people and jobs that he aims to eliminate, targeting relatively obscure posts and otherwise unknown government employees.
“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees, told CNN. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.”
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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