Finance
Hong Kong is more entrepreneurial, open and diverse than Singapore: Paul Chan
Addressing competition with Singapore and questions from US firms about expanding in the region, he said: “Hong Kong is a lot more entrepreneurial. When it comes to the entrepreneurial spirit and innovation, I think you’ll find it more interesting … Hong Kong is [also] more open and diverse. On lifestyle, Hong Kong is a lot more interesting too.
“Come talk to us. Depending on the scale of the investment, the size of operation, the stage of the technology that you’re bringing, we can tailor-make specific packages for you.”
He said the city was an ideal destination for businesses planning to expand into North Asia and the mainland, citing the connectivity that allowed travellers to reach more than half of the world’s population within five hours’ flight time.
Chan also highlighted the strengths of Hong Kong’s stock market, touting its advantages over Singapore’s, which he described as being “no comparison in terms of depth and breadth”.
The market capitalisation of companies listed on Hong Kong’s stock exchange stood at HK$32.1 trillion, compared with HK$7.4 trillion on Singapore’s bourse. But the city state has a larger economy that is considered more diversified.
The lunch event was co-organised by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in San Francisco and the Bay Area Council, a California-based business association with more than 300 member companies. It was held in the dining hall of a luxury hotel in downtown San Francisco.
Attendees included about 100 representatives from California-based businesses, start-ups and trade associations, but no US officials were present.
In his speech, titled “Hong Kong’s New Chapter: Empowering Growth through Innovation and Sustainability”, Chan said Hong Kong remained attractive as “a springboard” for accessing the mainland and Asian markets.
“Coming to Hong Kong, on one hand you will have convenience and sometimes priority access to the mainland,” he said. “At the same time, from there, your international character and your international facets will be preserved. Talent, goods and data are movable.”
The memorandum of understanding signed between InvestHK and the Bay Area Council covered joint promotion investment with a focus on green finance and sustainable development.
San Francisco and Berkeley were the final destinations of the first-ever joint delegation composed of senior officials from Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong province to promote business opportunities in the Greater Bay Area, a plan by Beijing to turn Hong Kong, Macau and nine Guangdong cities into a hi-tech economic powerhouse by 2025.
The joint delegation, which concluded a four-day visit in Paris before heading to the US, will stay in California until Friday to attend the US-China High-Level Event on Subnational Climate Action. It is also expected to take part in the Bay to Bay Dialogue event with Californian businesses.
The visit is Chan’s second to San Francisco in six months, after he attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November last year on behalf of city leader John Lee Ka-chiu.
Lee, who is sanctioned by the US, had cited a pre-scheduled agenda clash and turned down the invitation.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met his US counterpart, Joe Biden, during the summit, with both sides agreeing to work together to cooperate on risks posed by artificial intelligence.
Before their meeting, California Governor Gavin Newsom visited the mainland and made a brief stop in Hong Kong as part of a week-long trip last October, partly to “advance climate action”, according to his office.
The San Francisco Bay Area has reigned as a global hub for technological innovation, notable for the vast number of tech giants headquartered there, including Apple, Google and Facebook.
The Hong Kong delegation’s lobbying efforts come as the mainland also seeks foreign investment to revitalise its sluggish economy, which has been hampered by weak business confidence, partly due to a property market downturn.
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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