Finance
The rise of Israel's finance minister Bezalel Smotrich
A look at the rise Israel’s finance minister who has become perhaps the most influential man in the country, alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Israel’s finance minister has become arguably the most influential man in the country, alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s an ultranationalist and a West Bank settler who has repeatedly called for Israel to resettle the Gaza Strip. He has threatened to collapse Netanyahu’s government if the war in Gaza ends. And this week, the war resumed after a 42-day ceasefire ended with Israeli strikes that killed more than 400 Palestinians. NPR’s Hadeel Al-Shalchi looks into his rise to power in Israel.
HADEEL AL-SHALCHI, BYLINE: Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was once a wanted man by Israel’s version of the FBI. In 2005, Israel was rocked by mass protests. Israeli settlers were demonstrating against the removal of Jewish settlements from Gaza. At the time, Dvir Kariv was an agent with Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet.
DVIR KARIV: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: Kariv says late on July 11, 2005, they raided a home in central Israel.
KARIV: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: He says, in the basement, we found several jerry cans filled with a lot of oil and fuel.
KARIV: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: They arrested five people there. One of them was a student called Bezalel Smotrich. Kariv says the men were interrogated for 3 1/2 weeks.
KARIV: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: “From the Shin Bet’s perspective, we successfully thwarted what Bezalel Smotrich and his group had planned,” Kariv says. While he says he can’t divulge what that was, Israeli media has reported that Smotrich and his group were planning to blow up a major Israeli highway. Smotrich remained completely silent during his interrogations and was released without charge. He did not give away his secrets, but later, as a politician, he spoke a lot about what drives his political motivations.
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BEZALEL SMOTRICH: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: “My long-term desire is for the state of Israel to be governed according to the Torah or Jewish holy scripture,” he once told Israeli radio.
Smotrich is an ultranationalist religious Zionist, a type of Judaism that branched out from the secular Zionist movement that founded Israel. While many ultrareligious Jews historically rejected the Zionist movement, a minority accepted it. Many of them embraced the settlement movement after Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the war of 1967. Tomer Persico is a scholar of Jewish extremism.
TOMER PERSICO: The more Jews settle the lands that the state of Israel has conquered, the more redemption is coming close. So it’s a Messianic movement – very motivated, pious and devoted religion.
AL-SHALCHI: Persico says Smotrich is on the far right of the spectrum of religious Zionism, also known as ultra-Orthodox nationalists, who follow Jewish law and reject values like feminism, liberalism and LGBTQ rights. Smotrich and his followers believe that the Israeli-occupied West Bank is the Jewish people’s ancestral home featured in the Bible, a God-given land they must make a permanent part of Israel.
Smotrich, a lawyer, was first elected to parliament in 2015. Two years later, he wrote a manifesto called “Israel’s Decisive Plan.” In it, he writes how to tackle the main obstacle to settling the West Bank – the Palestinians.
PERSICO: Smotrich gives the Palestinians basically three options – emigrate, surrender and live as, let’s say, subjects without the right to vote, or fight and die.
AL-SHALCHI: Only a few years later, Smotrich became the leader of the Religious Zionist Party. Ohad Tal is a lawmaker in Smotrich’s party.
OHAD TAL: I think that he’s a very clever and smart person who understands the reality. He’s presented as somebody radical because people find it hard to accept the truth.
AL-SHALCHI: Smotrich was perfectly poised for what happened in the most recent Israeli national election. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won and looked for allies to form a coalition, but he’s facing trial on corruption charges. Persico says Netanyahu was desperate.
PERSICO: He didn’t have anyone else. Because of his ongoing trial, people said they would not sit in parliament with him.
AL-SHALCHI: The only parties that would agree to form a government with Netanyahu were the ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionists, including Smotrich’s party. Netanyahu formed a coalition with them, giving them more power than they had ever had before. The prime minister appointed Smotrich as finance minister and to the Ministry of Defense. Jewish extremism scholar Persico.
PERSICO: And in that position, he has basically taken over the civil management of settlers in the occupied territories, meaning he is on the verge of official annexation.
AL-SHALCHI: After the October 2023 attacks on Israel, Netanyahu called on Smotrich to be part of his war cabinet. The finance minister reached for his faith.
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SMOTRICH: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: “I struggled with this decision and gathered my rabbis to consult with them. After all, I want to influence the war,” he told a group of religious students last year in a video posted online.
Smotrich is reported to regularly consult with a group of rabbis known as the Five. Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira is one of them. He has opposed a hostage deal.
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YEHOSHUA SHAPIRA: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: “There is joy that hostages will return, but despite that joy, this is a very bad deal for Israel,” Shapira said in an online lecture.
Persico says Smotrich’s faithful devotion is evident every time he threatens to collapse Netanyahu’s coalition if the war doesn’t continue in Gaza, where he ultimately wants to see Jewish settlements rebuilt.
PERSICO: He is the primal force that is withholding the end of the war.
AL-SHALCHI: Smotrich has leveraged this power to further settler ambitions in the West Bank. Just days after Israel paused the war in January and agreed to a deal with Hamas for the release of hostages, Netanyahu ordered the escalation of incursions in the West Bank, causing massive destruction in urban refugee camps and displacing thousands of Palestinians. Israel says it’s to weed out Palestinian militants.
PERSICO: It’s very feasible to say this is just a card Netanyahu gave Smotrich in order to appease him when going into the hostage deal.
AL-SHALCHI: Smotrich was sidelined under President Biden’s administration for his anti-Palestinian rhetoric, and in Israel, polls show that he would not survive another election. Only 11% of the Israeli population voted for Smotrich’s party in the last elections in 2022. This month, Smotrich was invited to Washington, D.C., to meet with his counterpart in President Trump’s administration.
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SMOTRICH: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: Smotrich rarely gives interviews to U.S. Western media. This month, he gave his first press conference since his trip to the U.S., and I posed a question to him.
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AL-SHALCHI: I have two questions. Do you know anything about…
I ask him about plans for the annexation of the West Bank. Smotrich objects to the word annexation.
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SMOTRICH: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: “Annexation implies taking something that isn’t yours,” the minister says. “Judea and Samaria” – the biblical name for the West Bank – “belongs to us.”
Trump told reporters his administration would announce its position on West Bank annexation by early March. That date has passed.
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SMOTRICH: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: Smotrich says, “Israel and the U.S. are in dialogue about it, and I prefer not to go into details.” I reply…
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AL-SHALCHI: Is Trump the man who will make it happen for you? Will he support you to make it happen?
SMOTRICH: (Non-English language spoken).
AL-SHALCHI: “We believe this is the right thing to do,” he says. “We’re engaged in discussions and dialogue.”
So while Smotrich firmly believes he has God’s mandate to take over the West Bank, the question is whether he also has Trump’s blessing.
Hadeel Al-Shalchi, NPR News, Jerusalem.
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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.
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