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A bootstrapped business is one that funds its own growth out of revenue rather than outside investment, and while British venture funding is running at record levels, a growing number of founders are deciding they would rather not take the money.

The term gets used loosely, but the meaning is narrow. A bootstrapped company pays for its growth from the cash it generates, plus whatever the founders put in at the start. There is no venture capital or institutional equity on the cap table, and no investor timetable dictating when the business must be sold or floated. The phrase borrows from the old image of hauling yourself up by your own bootstraps, and in practice it describes a company whose only real backer is its customers.

The definition matters because the alternative has rarely looked more tempting on paper. UK startups raised a record $17bn (£12.7bn) in the first half of 2026, with late-stage deals taking 68 per cent of all capital, up from 42 per cent a year earlier.

Read past the headline and the picture narrows considerably. Data intelligence firm Tracxn put UK technology funding at $15.3bn over the same period, spread across fewer completed rounds than in the second half of 2025. Investors are writing bigger cheques to a smaller number of companies, and a founder looking for £2m to £10m is raising into a market that has become markedly choosier.

Policymakers have noticed the gap. The British Business Bank has more than doubled its direct equity investing in nine months, explicitly to prod domestic institutions into following it. For the owner of a profitable but unfashionable business, though, the calculation has not changed much: capital is available, it is simply expensive in terms of control.

That is what bootstrapping trades. Growth is capped at what customers are willing to pay for today, and hiring waits until payroll can absorb it. There is also no external board to satisfy. What the founder keeps is the whole of the equity and the whole of the decision, which is worth a great deal in a downturn and very little in a land grab.

The precedent is not a fringe one. Mailchimp spent two decades funding itself on subscription revenue from small businesses before Intuit agreed to buy it for roughly $12bn in cash and stock in 2021, one of the largest exits ever recorded by a company that never raised a venture round. The founders owned all of it at the point of sale, a reminder that never raising and never selling are separate decisions.

The most instructive current European example sits in Amsterdam. Browser gaming platform Poki began as a personal collection of web games assembled by co-founder Michiel van Amerongen in the mid-2000s, was incorporated as a company in 2013, and has never taken external investment.

The scale it reached without it makes the case. Poki now counts more than 100 million monthly active players, a figure the company says puts it within range of PlayStation Network’s 119 million. Revenue has grown by around 50 per cent a year since 2020, according to Bloomberg, on a team that went from 50 to 65 staff last year.

The mechanics matter more than the folklore. All of the platform’s revenue comes from advertising, and its games run in the browser rather than through an app, so developers sidestep app-store gatekeeping and install friction, and the company avoids the user-acquisition spending mobile publishers typically fund with investor money. A venture-backed rival buys installs; the largest single share of Poki’s traffic arrives through organic search. Distribution that costs nothing is the structural reason revenue alone was sufficient.

That is the point most retellings of a bootstrapping story miss, and the reason it is a strategy rather than a virtue. Self-funding works where customer acquisition is cheap and cash converts quickly. It is close to unworkable in sectors where the first product costs millions before anyone can buy it, and it offers no protection against a rival who raises £50m to buy the market outright. Founders who choose it are betting that their distribution is defensible.

Concentration is the other cost. Poki’s revenue rests on a single advertising stream, and van Amerongen has said the company is exploring models beyond it. The Dutch Game Awards named the firm Best in Business in December 2025, citing its growth as a bootstrapped company competing globally.

For UK founders reading the funding headlines, the sharper question than whether to raise is whether the business has a distribution advantage its own revenue can compound. Where one exists, outside capital mostly buys speed the company may not need. Where it does not, no amount of ownership will substitute for the cheque.

Major League Soccer has spent the past several years building toward global relevance, fueled by the arrival of Lionel Messi, a booming broadcast deal and the countdown to this summer’s World Cup on home soil. But when it comes to official rankings of the world’s strongest soccer leagues, MLS still has significant ground to cover before it can call itself elite.

According to the latest rankings from the International Federation of Football History and Statistics, released in January 2026, MLS sits 40th among the world’s soccer leagues, well outside the top tier still dominated by Europe’s traditional powers.

Europe Still Rules the Rankings

The English Premier League was named the best football league in the world, accumulating 2,369 points according to the IFFHS, dethroning Italy’s Serie A, which had held the top spot for the previous two years. The Italian championship dropped to fourth place in the rankings, falling behind Spain’s La Liga and Brazil’s Brasileirão.

The full top 10, based on IFFHS points, breaks down as follows: the Premier League leads with 2,359 points, followed by La Liga at 2,073, Brazil’s Brasileirão at 1,999, Serie A at 1,972, Germany’s Bundesliga at 1,880, France’s Ligue 1 at 1,502, Liga Portugal at 1,145, Argentina’s Primera División at 1,089, the Dutch Eredivisie at 1,064, and Colombia’s Categoría Primera A rounding out the top 10 with 1,025.5 points.

The top 20 leagues overall include 12 championships from Europe, five from South America, two from Asia and one from Africa, with the Saudi Pro League and Cyprus’s top flight entering the rankings for the first time. The Saudi League, home to Cristiano Ronaldo, was ranked 13th overall with 868.75 points.

MLS Climbs, But Remains Well Outside the Top Tier

Despite not cracking the top 20, MLS has shown clear signs of progress in the IFFHS methodology. In the 2025 rankings, MLS climbed nine positions compared to the previous year, moving up to 40th overall with 426.75 points, up from 49th the year before. The league, now home to stars including Messi, Son Heung-min and Thomas Müller, benefited from that increased star power in the ranking’s calculations.

That places MLS well behind the Saudi Pro League despite the Gulf competition’s shorter track record on the world stage. The Saudi Pro League sits 13th globally with 868.75 points, placing it 27 positions ahead of MLS, which sits 40th with 426.75 points.

A Different Picture From Other Rankings

Not every ranking system tells the same story, and MLS fares considerably better in some alternative methodologies that weigh factors like squad value, star power and global visibility more heavily than IFFHS’s historical, results-based points system. One prominent 2026 ranking places Brazil’s Série A atop all non-European leagues, with Portugal, the Netherlands, MLS and Mexico’s Liga MX rounding out what that outlet considers a genuinely global top 10.

That same analysis describes MLS as the fastest-rising league in the world rankings, having jumped three places in the 2025-26 cycle, crediting Lionel Messi and Inter Miami’s MLS Cup triumph with putting American soccer on the global map like never before. The league’s combined squad value has also crossed the €1.18 billion mark, with expansion clubs and improved youth academies helping to close the quality gap with Europe.

A separate outlet’s 2026 breakdown similarly placed MLS inside a global top 10, ahead of leagues such as the Saudi Pro League and Eredivisie, though that assessment leaned more heavily on financial power, star quality and global appeal than on the points-based, results-driven system IFFHS uses.

Why the Rankings Diverge

The gap between these assessments highlights a broader debate in global soccer about how to measure a league’s true strength. IFFHS bases its rankings primarily on club performance in continental and international competitions, along with historical results, a methodology that tends to reward leagues with deep, consistent success in tournaments like the Champions League, Copa Libertadores or AFC Champions League. That system has generally been unkind to MLS, whose clubs have historically struggled to make deep runs in CONCACAF Champions Cup play against Liga MX opposition.

By contrast, rankings built around commercial metrics, squad valuations and star power tend to favor leagues like MLS and the Saudi Pro League, both of which have invested heavily in marquee international talent even as their overall on-field competitiveness against Europe’s elite remains unproven.

MLS Growth Continues Ahead of the World Cup

Regardless of where various rankings place the league, MLS enters a pivotal stretch as co-host of this summer’s World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico. The 2026 MLS season features 30 clubs split across Eastern and Western Conferences, with a six-week break built into the regular-season schedule from May 25 to July 16 to accommodate the World Cup, which is being played across the United States, Canada and Mexico.

MLS’s long-term outlook has been buoyed by robust infrastructure investment across the league, a lucrative broadcasting partnership with Apple TV, and the arrival of the 2026 World Cup in North America, all factors that observers say point toward continued growth for the league in the years ahead. By star power alone, MLS could make a strong claim to a higher ranking simply by virtue of housing Messi, widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the sport’s history.

The Bottom Line

For now, where MLS truly stands in the global soccer hierarchy depends heavily on which yardstick is used. By the IFFHS’s traditional, performance-based measure, the league remains a distant 40th in the world, trailing not just Europe’s traditional powers but also leagues in Argentina, Colombia, Turkey, Belgium and Saudi Arabia. By more commercially oriented rankings that emphasize star power, squad value and global reach, MLS increasingly finds itself discussed in the same breath as historic European and South American competitions.

What both camps agree on is the trajectory: MLS is rising, and the World Cup arriving on its home turf this summer offers the clearest opportunity yet for the league to translate that momentum into a genuine seat at soccer’s top table.

Every major real estate project starts as an idea. Before new homes are built or financing is secured, someone has to bring together the legal pieces that make the project possible. That kind of work rarely makes headlines, but it shapes communities every day.

For Gita Sankano, that challenge has defined her career. From growing up in New York City to working on Wall Street, graduating near the top of her law school class, and handling sophisticated real estate finance transactions, she has built a career around solving complicated problems. Along the way, she has remained focused on something bigger than legal documents.

“The definition of success is subjective,” Gita says. “However, for me, it’s giving back to my community and pouring in whatever knowledge I have to the youth.”

How Gita Sankano Built a Career in Real Estate Law

Gita Sankano was born in Harlem and raised in the Bronx. Education became the foundation for everything that followed.

She attended CUNY John Jay College, where she earned both a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a Master of Public Administration. While finishing graduate school, she worked as an auditor at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Headquarters on Wall Street.

The experience gave her an early look at how large organizations operate. It also strengthened the attention to detail that would become one of the defining traits of her legal career.

Her path was not always easy.

“Being the first in my family to attend college was an obstacle,” she says. “However, I was able to find mentors to help me navigate my way.”

Those mentors helped her see opportunities she may not have recognized on her own. Years later, she still believes in paying that guidance forward.

Why Law School Became a Launching Pad

Gita continued her education at the University of Maryland School of Law. She graduated Cum Laude and finished in the top 20 percent of her class.

She also stayed active outside the classroom.

She served as Associate Symposium Editor for the Business & Technology Law Journal and Staff Editor for The Authority National Affordable Housing Law Digest. Her academic work earned her the Dean’s Fellow Scholarship for academic excellence and first place in the Paul Cardish Writing Competition.

These accomplishments reflected more than strong grades. They showed a willingness to study difficult topics and communicate them clearly. Those skills would later become essential in transactional law.

What Kind of Work Does Gita Sankano Do?

After graduating, Gita clerked for the Honorable Michael W. Reed at the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland. The clerkship gave her valuable insight into legal reasoning and judicial decision-making.

She then joined a large law firm, where she spent about five years representing the nation’s largest lenders.

Her work centered on the origination, sale, and servicing of commercial loan transactions sold to secondary market investors, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She represented lenders participating in Fannie Mae’s Delegated Underwriting and Servicing (DUS) program and Freddie Mac’s Capital Markets Execution (CME) program.

She also coordinated financing closings across the country for multifamily housing developments and health care facilities financed through FHA insurance programs.

Many projects involved several moving parts at once. Some combined Low Income Housing Tax Credits, Historic Tax Credits, tax-exempt bonds, bridge loans, state and local financing, Section 8 contracts, Section 202 and Section 236 Use Agreements, and mezzanine financing.

Each transaction required careful planning and close coordination among lenders, developers, government agencies, investors, and legal teams.

How Big Ideas Become Successful Projects

Today, Gita represents the District of Columbia Department of Housing and Community Development in complex affordable housing finance transactions.

Her work includes reviewing and drafting legal documents, advising on housing policies, and helping structure transactions that often involve multiple funding sources, property acquisitions, and dispositions.

While affordable housing is a major part of her practice, her experience also reflects the broader world of commercial real estate and transactional law. She understands how legal strategy, careful planning, and collaboration help move projects from concept to completion.

Her role is often about creating solutions before problems arise.

That ability to organize complex transactions has helped support projects that serve both investors and communities.

The Mindset Behind Gita Sankano’s Career

When asked what has made the biggest difference in her career, Gita points to something simple.

“Believing in yourself and believing that you have control over your destiny.”

That mindset has helped her navigate each stage of her professional journey, from being the first in her family to attend college to handling some of the most detailed financing structures in commercial real estate.

She also credits one person for setting that example early.

“My mother has been my biggest influence,” Gita says. “She is a hard working woman who never gives up and keeps going forward.”

Those lessons continue to shape how she approaches both her work and her life.

Outside the office, Gita enjoys traveling, hiking, painting, Pilates, and exploring art. She has also shared her experiences as a keynote speaker at the Smiling Coast Women Conference, encouraging others to pursue education, seek mentors, and invest in future generations.

Looking back, her career is not defined by a single transaction or accomplishment. Instead, it is built on years of thoughtful work that has helped turn complicated ideas into real projects. Whether working on commercial real estate financing, advising on housing policy, or mentoring others, Gita Sankano continues to show that meaningful progress often comes from careful preparation, steady leadership, and a commitment to creating opportunities that last.

Instagram experienced a widespread outage Monday morning, with users across the platform reporting problems accessing the app beginning around 11:05 a.m. Eastern time, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector.

Downdetector said user reports indicated problems with Instagram since 11:05 a.m. Eastern time, and the company posted about the disruption on X shortly afterward, using the hashtag #InstagramDown. The scope of Monday’s outage and the specific issues users encountered were still becoming clear as reports continued to come in.

A Pattern of Recurring Problems

Monday’s disruption is not an isolated incident. Instagram has experienced multiple outages over the past two weeks alone, part of a broader pattern that has frustrated users and raised questions about the reliability of one of the world’s most widely used social media platforms.

Just five days earlier, on July 22, thousands of users reported problems on Downdetector, with nearly 1,400 reports logged and issues appearing to begin around 7:30 a.m. Eastern time. That outage affected several major U.S. cities, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and Atlanta, and it appeared other Meta-owned services, including Messenger and Facebook, were experiencing problems at the same time.

During the July 22 outage, Downdetector reports spiked to more than 2,000 almost immediately and eventually reached a high of around 4,000, with the disruption lasting roughly two hours starting at 6:30 a.m. Meta did not appear to acknowledge that outage on its official status page, and the problems seemed to center primarily on direct messages, which were not going through for many users.

An Even Broader Outage Earlier in the Month

The July 22 disruption followed an even larger international outage just days before. On Sunday, July 19, some Facebook and Instagram users reported international outages that left them unable to access their feeds, according to two internet watchdogs and a check of the platforms. More than 23,000 users reported problems with Facebook in the United States alone between 3:44 and 5:02 a.m. Eastern time that morning, while at least 18,000 reports flagged problems with Instagram in the U.S. during the same window, according to Downdetector’s data.

Internet monitoring group NetBlocks, which tracks worldwide internet access, noted that the Facebook and Instagram disruptions were international in scope and unrelated to any country-level internet restrictions.

Recent Reports Suggest Ongoing, Smaller-Scale Issues

Beyond the larger, headline-grabbing outages, data from outage trackers suggests Instagram has continued to experience a steady stream of smaller user-reported issues throughout the past week. Status-monitoring service StatusGator logged 7,392 outage reports in the 24 hours leading into Monday, with users describing a range of problems including pages that wouldn’t load, story-posting failures, login errors, and app crashes.

Individual reports came in from locations spanning Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia’s Mecca region, Ireland, India’s Punjab state, Oregon, Maryland, England and Spain, describing issues ranging from posts getting stuck partway through uploading to apps glitching and shutting down unexpectedly.

How Instagram Outages Typically Unfold

Based on the pattern of recent disruptions, Instagram outages have tended to resolve within a relatively short window, though the company has not always been quick to publicly acknowledge problems while they are occurring. Instagram outages are often resolved within 30 minutes, though a more significant outage can affect the entire Meta network for several hours. Looking at a broader window, Instagram experienced five incidents over the trailing 90-day period, with a median duration of roughly one hour and nine minutes.

That track record suggests Monday’s outage, like several before it this summer, could resolve relatively quickly, though the exact timeline and root cause had not been confirmed as of publication.

Meta’s Track Record on Communicating Outages

Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has had an inconsistent record of publicly acknowledging outages in real time. During several recent disruptions this year, the company’s official status page continued to show no known issues even as user reports on third-party trackers spiked into the thousands, a discrepancy that has fueled user frustration and made platforms like Downdetector the primary source of real-time information during outages.

Why These Outages Keep Making Headlines

With more than 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, even brief disruptions to Instagram can generate outsized attention, both because of the platform’s massive scale and because so many businesses, creators and everyday users rely on it for real-time communication, marketing and social interaction. Each outage tends to trigger a familiar cycle: a spike in Downdetector reports, a wave of complaints on X and other platforms, and eventually either an official acknowledgment from Meta or a quiet resolution as service returns to normal.

The repeated nature of these disruptions in July has drawn particular notice, with users online increasingly commenting on what feels like a heightened frequency of outages compared with previous months. Whether Monday’s issue is connected to the same underlying causes as the July 19 and July 22 incidents remains unclear, and Meta has not detailed the technical root cause of any of the month’s outages publicly.

What Users Can Do

In the meantime, users experiencing problems are typically advised to try basic troubleshooting steps, including restarting the app, checking their internet connection, or trying to access Instagram from a different device or network. If problems persist across multiple devices and networks, that is generally a stronger indicator of a broader, platform-wide issue rather than a local connectivity problem.

For now, the scale and duration of Monday’s outage remain in the process of being assessed, with real-time reports on Downdetector offering the clearest available window into how widely the disruption is being felt as the situation continues to develop.

This article was written by

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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

This article is intended to provide informational content and should not be viewed as an exhaustive analysis of the featured company. It should not be interpreted as personalized investment advice with regard to “Buy/Sell/Hold/Short/Long” recommendations. Financial models presented here, including DCF, rNPV, and scenario analyses, are illustrative tools based on the author’s assumptions and are highly sensitive to inputs; small changes can materially alter outputs. The predictions and opinions presented reflect a probabilistic approach, not absolute certainty. Efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but inadvertent errors may occur. Readers are advised to independently verify information and conduct their own research. Investing in stocks involves inherent volatility and risk. Before making any investment decisions, it is crucial for readers to conduct thorough research and assess their financial circumstances. The author is not liable for any financial losses incurred as a result of using or relying on the content of this article.

Seeking Alpha’s Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

Facebook experienced a widespread outage Monday morning, with user reports surging just minutes after a similar disruption hit sister platform Instagram, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector.

Downdetector reported that user complaints about Facebook began around 11:08 a.m. Eastern time, prompting the company to post about the disruption on X using the hashtag #FacebookDown. The timing closely mirrored a separate wave of Instagram outage reports that began just minutes earlier, suggesting the two Meta-owned platforms may have been affected by the same underlying issue.

Two Platforms, One Company, Same Morning

Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Meta Platforms, and the two services have a well-documented history of experiencing simultaneous outages, given that they often share underlying technical infrastructure. Monday’s near-simultaneous disruption reports fit a pattern that has played out repeatedly in recent Meta outages, where problems on one platform frequently coincide with issues on the other.

As of the most recent check by outage-monitoring service StatusGator, however, official indicators painted a more muted picture than the real-time user reports suggested. StatusGator’s last check of Meta’s status found the service operational as of 11:05 a.m. UTC on July 27, with 25 user-submitted outage reports logged over the preceding 24 hours. That relatively modest 24-hour figure stood in contrast to the concentrated spike in complaints reported by Downdetector around the same time Monday morning, a discrepancy that has been common during past Meta disruptions, when user-facing problems have periodically outpaced what appears on official status trackers.

A History of Recurring Disruptions

Monday’s reports add to what has become a familiar pattern for Meta’s family of apps. The company has experienced several high-profile service disruptions in recent years, some lasting only minutes and others stretching for hours and affecting hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.

Meta experienced a nearly six-hour global outage in October 2021 that affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger simultaneously, an incident the company attributed at the time to a faulty configuration change to its network infrastructure that unintentionally cut off communication between its data centers. More recently, in March 2024, Facebook and Instagram, along with Threads and WhatsApp to a lesser extent, suffered a widespread outage that left hundreds of thousands of users unable to access their accounts for more than two hours, with many users unexpectedly logged out and unable to sign back in while Instagram feeds failed to refresh.

How Past Outages of This Type Have Unfolded

Previous joint Facebook-Instagram outages offer a rough template for how Monday’s disruption might play out. During a comparable outage in 2024, Facebook, Messenger, Threads and Instagram reported tens of thousands of complaints beginning around 10 a.m., with Facebook’s outage reports reaching 183,731 at their peak, according to Downdetector. In that incident, 75% of affected Facebook users reported issues with logging in, 17% reported problems with the app, and 8% reported issues with the website, while Facebook’s own login status page marked the disruption a “major disruption” before later declaring it resolved that afternoon.

During that same episode, Instagram’s outage reports peaked at 89,330, with 62% of affected users reporting app-related issues, 27% reporting problems with their feed, and 10% reporting login troubles. That outage was eventually resolved within a few hours, with Meta’s communications team confirming the fix publicly once service was restored.

Meta’s Communication Pattern During Outages

Meta has generally acknowledged major outages through its communications team once problems become widespread, though the company has often been slow to do so and has typically declined to offer detailed technical explanations. During a prior large-scale outage, Meta’s communications director posted on X that the company was aware people were having trouble accessing its services and was working on the issue, later confirming the problem had been resolved and describing it only as “technical” in nature, consistent with the company’s longstanding practice of offering limited detail about the underlying causes of most of its outages.

Meta does not operate public-facing status pages for its consumer products the way many technology companies do, instead relying on its business products status page, which tracks services like advertising tools rather than the consumer apps themselves. That approach has often left outage-tracking services like Downdetector as the most immediate public source of information during disruptions, since Meta’s own status indicators frequently continue showing normal operations even as user complaints mount elsewhere.

What to Watch For

Based on the pattern of previous incidents, resolution timelines for Meta outages have varied considerably, ranging from disruptions lasting under an hour to episodes stretching across an entire afternoon. Users experiencing problems Monday were left to rely largely on Downdetector’s real-time reporting and social media chatter for updates, as is typically the case during the early stages of a Meta service disruption before the company issues any official acknowledgment.

Given that both Facebook and Instagram reported issues within minutes of each other Monday morning, the disruption appeared consistent with past incidents in which a single underlying technical issue affected multiple Meta platforms simultaneously, though the company had not yet confirmed the cause or scope of Monday’s problems.

A Frustrating Pattern for Users

For many users, Monday’s outage is likely to feel like part of an increasingly familiar rhythm. Meta’s platforms have faced a string of disruptions throughout the summer, with outages affecting Instagram alone reported on multiple occasions in recent weeks. The recurrence of these incidents has fueled ongoing frustration among users who rely on Facebook and Instagram for everything from personal communication to business operations, even as the platforms have historically restored full service within hours in the vast majority of cases.

As of Monday late morning, the full scope and cause of the outage remained unclear, with users encouraged to check official channels and outage trackers for updates as the situation continued to develop.

The state-owned lender targets to raise $1.5 billion from FCNR-B alone by September, managing director Brajesh Kumar Singh said.

“We have already raised $750 million in FCNR-B deposits and expect the count to cross $1 billion this month,” Singh said after announcing a slim 2.2% year-on-year rise in first quarter net profit at Rs 4856 crore against Rs 4752 crore in the year-ago period.

He said that the bank would target to raise around $1 billion in the third quarter through a combination of external commercial borrowing and overseas foreign currency borrowing.

He also said that the mobilisation of FCNR-B deposits would help the bank shed about Rs 10000 crore of bulk deposits, which constitutes over a fifth of the bank’s total deposit base, keeping cost of deposits near 5.3% even after a 40 basis point moderation year-on-year.

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The bank’s operating profit rose 0.96% year-on-year at Rs 8636 crore while total income was lower at Rs 39696 crore for the quarter against Rs 41442 crore in the year ago period.

Mobilisation to help shed ₹10K-cr of bulk deposits, bank says after posting slim growth in Q1 net

A 13.4% year-on-year rise in net interest income at Rs 10215 crore was offset by a 60% drop in earnings from sale of investment at Rs 654 crore against Rs 1617 crore earlier.
It maintained net interest margin for the quarter at 2.52% against 2.55% a year prior. Gross non-performing assets ratio improved to 1.57% as at June 2026 reduced from 1.84% as at March 2026 and 2.69% as at June 2025. Net NPA ratio improved to 0.36% from 0.43% and 0.63% over the same period.

The bank’s gross advances expanded by 18% year-on-year to Rs 12.93 lakh crore while deposits increased by 11.6% to Rs 16.12 lakh crore at the end of June.

Every business owner has a version of the same routine. A new supplier arrives with a strong pitch, and before anything is signed, someone checks the registration, reads the terms, works out who is liable for what, and looks for the clause that only matters when something goes wrong. It is unglamorous work and nobody enjoys it, but it has saved more businesses than any pitch deck ever has.

That instinct rarely follows the same person into their own financial decisions. Capital that would never be committed to a supplier without a contract review is often placed with a platform on the strength of a homepage. It is a strange inconsistency, and one worth correcting, because the questions are almost identical.

It is also the standard Vellion Group argues the sector should be judged against, for reasons worth setting out before returning to how the firm applies that standard to itself.

The habit transfers more easily than people expect

Due diligence is simply the care a reasonable business takes before entering an agreement. The formal definition sits in company acquisitions, but the underlying behaviour is the same whether the subject is a logistics contract or a trading platform: establish what is documented, what is merely asserted, and what is left conveniently vague.

Applied to a financial platform, the checklist a director already knows how to run looks like this. Where is the company registered, and where does it say so? What happens to money once it is transferred in?

Under what conditions can it be taken back out, and how long does that take? Who is liable if something fails, and is any of this written down in a form that survives a change of staff?

What published documentation actually signals

A platform that answers those questions in writing has told you something before you read a single word of the substance. Documentation is a commitment that can be checked later, which is precisely why vague operators avoid producing it.

This is not a new insight. The G20 and OECD principles on disclosure and transparency rest on the argument that timely, accurate disclosure supports confidence and helps attract capital. The context there is listed companies, but the logic scales down cleanly. Written standards create accountability. Unwritten ones create deniability.

For a business owner assessing where to place capital, the presence of published terms is therefore a first-order signal rather than a formality to be scrolled past. It also gives you something durable to return to. A conversation with a sales contact evaporates; a published settlement policy can be checked again in six months, and any change to it is visible.

Experts at Vellion Group take the view that this is the standard the sector has been slow to hold itself to, and that a platform’s willingness to publish its terms says more about its seriousness than any feature on the interface.

Vellion Group’s own answer to that checklist

Vellion Group publishes the material this kind of assessment depends on. Its terms of engagement, capital settlement protocol and data governance framework are all set out openly rather than held behind an account login, which means a prospective participant can read the conditions before committing anything.

The substance is specific rather than decorative. Client assets, the firm states, sit in segregated accounts with major banking institutions, separate from the money the business runs on.

Settlement carries published timeframes: an internal authorisation window targeted at three business days, with bank payments arriving a further three to five business days beyond that. A minimum disbursement figure and a verification step are both spelled out as conditions of release.

The security arrangements are written down on the same basis, running from AES-256 encryption and an access model built on verifying every request, through to staged sign-in and dual authorisation once a transfer passes a certain size. Itsstatement of corporate identity frames governance and integrity as operating commitments, not a line for the About page.

Governance as a working habit

None of this is glamorous, which is rather the point. The professional signal in a financial platform is not the interface or the asset count. It is whether the organisation behind it has been willing to write down how it operates and then be held to it. Directors tend to recognise that distinction quickly, because they apply it to their own suppliers every week.

Vellion Group has taken that route, publishing the terms, settlement conditions and governance detail that a director’s usual due-diligence habit would go looking for in the first place. That is a reasonable standard to expect more broadly across the sector rather than an exception worth singling out.

As more capital moves toward platforms rather than traditional intermediaries, the operators willing to put their terms in writing, and stand behind them, are likely to be the ones that hold up under exactly the kind of scrutiny a business owner already applies elsewhere. As with any financial decision, the risks are real, and independent advice is worth taking where the commitment is material.

Financial instruments carry substantial risk. Capital is at risk and losses can exceed the sum originally deposited. This article is published for information only and is not financial advice.

Traffic at Cracker Barrel locations is yet to fully recover from the backlash against its failed rebrand last year despite signs of improvement, company executives said on the restaurant chain’s most recent earnings call.

The company has been looking to put itself on a more solid financial footing after sales slumped in response to the unsuccessful rebrand that included the removal of the “old timer” from the company’s logo and changes to the restaurant chain’s interior layout, which has long featured a general store.

Cracker Barrel announced on Monday that CEO Julie Masino will step down from the role this summer, with David Deno set to take the helm of the company on Aug. 10. The move follows a slow recovery from the attempted rebrand.

CRACKER BARREL CEO JULIE MASINO TO STEP DOWN

Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino is stepping down, effective Aug. 10. (Jeenah Moon/Reuters)

The company noted in its third-quarter earnings last month that while traffic was improving relative to the recent trend, it remained lower than it was in the prior year.

Masino said, “Q3 results exceeded our expectations, driven by our operating and cost actions, while guest-facing metrics continue to improve, and position us for further traffic recovery.”

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“Comparable store restaurant sales decreased 2.6%, which included a traffic decline of 6.7%,” said Cracker Barrel CFO Craig Pommells. “Although traffic remained negative, we are encouraged by the gradual improvement in the underlying trend.”

Pommells said that “controlling for the variability between last year’s third and fourth quarters and the resulting comparison in the current year, the underlying traffic trend continues to show gradual improvement.”

The company noted in its third-quarter earnings last month that while traffic was improving relative to the recent trend, it remained lower than it was in the prior year. (Gregory Walton/AFP via Getty Images)

Cracker Barrel’s stock is down about 18% from a year ago, remaining well below its pre-rebrand levels.

However, it has made significant progress in getting back to those levels this year; the company’s stock is up 105% since the start of 2026.

The company has taken steps recently that aim to improve its financial performance.

CRACKER BARREL SALES, TRAFFIC CONTINUE TO SLUMP MONTHS AFTER FAILED REBRAND

Last week, Cracker Barrel announced that it will sell some of its restaurant properties as well as exiting its Maple Street Business Company business. It sold the Maple Street brand and 35 of its locations to Biscuit Belly LLC, with Cracker Barrel closing the remaining 16 Maple Street restaurants.

Cracker Barrel announced last week that it will exit its Maple Street Business Company business. (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The company also completed a sale-leaseback deal involving 26 company-owned locations, which generated about $77 million in net proceeds that it planned to use to pay down debt, while continuing to operate the restaurants by leasing the properties from the new owner.

“A brand isn’t what management wants it to be,” said brand expert Bruce Turkel. “It’s what customers believe it is.”

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FOX Business’ Sophia Compton contributed to this report.