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Alona Shevtsova, CEO of Sends, will lead an industry discussion at The Blockchain Show Riyadh, bringing together experts from cybersecurity, banking, blockchain infrastructure, and digital asset innovation to explore how artificial intelligence, risk management frameworks, and distributed ledger technologies are shaping the future of digital banking.

The panel, titled “AI, Risk & Blockchain: Building the Next Generation of Digital Banking,” will examine the opportunities and challenges facing financial institutions as emerging technologies become increasingly integrated into global financial infrastructure.

The discussion will focus on four key themes: the foundations of secure and resilient digital banking; the role of blockchain in financial infrastructure and digital trust; responsible AI governance and innovation; and the future of digital finance across the Middle East and global markets.

As moderator, Alona Shevtsova will guide the conversation around one of the most pressing questions facing the financial sector today: how financial institutions can continue to innovate while maintaining trust, security, transparency, and regulatory compliance in an increasingly digital environment.

Commenting ahead of the event, Alona Shevtsova, CEO of Sends, said: “The future of banking will be defined by the ability to balance innovation with trust. AI, blockchain and digital infrastructure are creating new opportunities for financial institutions, but long-term success will depend on building secure, transparent and resilient systems that inspire confidence among customers, businesses and regulators alike.”

The panel is also expected to explore the growing role of blockchain technology in institutional finance, the evolution of digital assets and decentralised financial systems, and the opportunities emerging from the convergence of AI, digital identity, and automated decision-making.

Particular attention will be given to developments across the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia’s growing position as a regional hub for digital innovation, financial technology, and blockchain adoption.

The Blockchain Show Riyadh brings together industry leaders, innovators, regulators, and technology experts to discuss the trends and technologies shaping the future of digital finance and blockchain adoption worldwide.

Earlier this month, Alona Shevtsova was shortlisted for the 2026 Great British Entrepreneur Awards in the Established Business of the Year category. Her team is also preparing for the Fintech Connect conference in London later this year. Sends will be a leading sponsor of this event.

In July 2025, Alona Shevtsova announced the first stage of the project in collaboration with Sends Messenger. Teams plan to integrate payment functionality directly into the messaging app. The initiative, developed in partnership with Sends Messenger, aims to redefine how users across the UK, Europe, Ukraine, and beyond interact with digital payments in everyday conversations.

During the Q1 2026, Sends introduced customisable digital cards for personal accounts available in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet. Giving customers more flexibility and available control over their experience with Sends is one of teams priority.

In June 2026, Sends announced the launch of Samsung Pay as a supported payment method, giving merchants access to millions of Samsung users.

With over 15 years of experience in payments and financial and technology Alona Shevtsova drives Sends’ growth into the scalable, secure, and globally, accessible financial platform.

*Sends is a trade name of SMARTFLOW PAYMENTS LIMITED, registered in England and Wales (Company No.11070048). For more information, visit sends.co .

A recent article in The Shift placed renewed scrutiny on International Hotel Investments (IHI), owner of the Corinthia Hotels brand, after it revealed the scale of debt now carried by one of Malta’s best-known hospitality groups.

The Maltese investigative outlet reported on 11 June that IHI had returned to the bond market while holding almost €790 million in debt. That’s a significant debt burden for any company, but for a hotel group that has spent a decade struggling to turn expansion into consistent profits, it is a clear warning sign.

These figures contradict Corinthia Group’s expansion story. Despite the company’s best efforts to maintain the appearance of continued international growth and present positive numbers in its annual financial reports, recent figures point to severe financial difficulties that cast doubt on the company’s financial health.

 Corinthia’s financial annual reports: a closer examination

A closer reading of Corinthia’s public accounts suggests that the nearly €800 million debt reported on the Shift is just the tip of the iceberg. The company has reported net losses every year since at least 2014. By 2024, accumulated losses had reached €46 million. Persistent losses weaken a company’s ability to fund growth from its own operations and make it increasingly reliant on lenders, investors, and refinancing.

Corinthia’s own actions suggest those pressures were understood internally. Dividends have not been paid since 2019, an apparent recognition of the company’s financial struggles. Then in 2022, Corinthia underwent bruising cuts to staffing when the Board instructed a deliberate reduction to staffing targeted at keeping headcount at least 15% below 2019 levels.

In spite of the apparent financial reality, Corinthia’s expansion continued. New Corinthia-branded projects have been promoted all the way from Rome in Europe, through Asia, and most notably entered the market in the Middle East’s tourism capital – Dubai. Corinthia’s international expansion story is difficult to reconcile with its clear financial difficulties, raising serious questions over the financial prudence of the company’s expansion strategy.

In fact, Corinthia’s latest financial annual report shows that net debt was more than 11 times EBITDA, a level widely regarded as high by international lending standards. Put simply, the company’s borrowings appear far larger than the earnings available to support them.

Borrowing can be sensible when it funds growth that later pays for itself. But when a company is already facing consistent financial losses, every new refinancing begins to look less like confidence and more like survival. As of 2024, interest costs consumed much of the operating profit needed to service the debt, leaving Corinthia with less room for error and even fewer ways to absorb another shock.

 Auditing Corinthia’s finances: cause for concern?

EU Reporter

has previously reported that PwC’s auditors’ report does not appear to flag the near ~€800 million debt or the latest bond market return as a specific audit concern, leaving open whether investors were alerted to the scale of the risk.

The picture is therefore not simply of an ambitious hotel group temporarily carrying high debt. It is of a company that has spent years losing money, cutting dividends and staff, borrowing to keep expanding, and relying on asset revaluations to help its financial reports stay afloat. With more bonds due in 2026 and debt forecast to approach €880 million, the question is no longer whether Corinthia is expanding. It is how much longer can its financial model withstand the weight of deception

Cyber attacks used to feel distant. They were something that happened to big banks or government agencies. Not anymore. Ransomware hits hospitals. Phishing emails slip into small business inboxes. Even home networks are vulnerable.

Behind the scenes, a handful of companies spend their days (and nights) trying to stay one step ahead. Here are ten cybersecurity firms that are shaping how we defend ourselves against modern threats.

1. Check Point Software Technologies

Check Point has been a leader in security for many years. That experience shows. Its firewalls and threat prevention tools sit quietly in the background of many large networks, just doing the work.

What makes Check Point different is its focus on deep, layered protection. It brings together network security, cloud security, and endpoint tools under a single management roof. That helps security teams see patterns they would otherwise miss. If you had to pick one cyber security company that understands long‑term, policy‑driven defense, Check Point would be high on the list.

2. Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto is the name you keep hearing in serious security discussions. They helped push the idea that firewalls should understand applications and users, not just ports and IP addresses.

Today, their reach goes far beyond the data center. Cloud security, secure access for remote workers, automated response—it’s all there. Many teams like Palo Alto because its tools don’t just alert. They try to reduce noise and highlight what really matters in a messy environment.

3. CrowdStrike

If you talk to incident responders, CrowdStrike comes up quickly. Its Falcon platform lives on endpoints, laptops, servers, and cloud workloads and watches for signs of attack in real time.

CrowdStrike’s strength lies in speed. It’s built to see suspicious behavior early and shut it down fast. The company also invests heavily in threat intelligence. That research often shapes how the rest of the industry talks about new attack groups and campaigns.

4. Fortinet

Fortinet is known for blending strong security features with serious performance. Its FortiGate firewalls use custom hardware to push a lot of traffic, even when deep inspection and SSL decryption are switched on.

But Fortinet does more than perimeter firewalls. The “security fabric” idea ties together switches, access points, endpoints, and more. For organizations that want one vendor to cover a big chunk of their stack, Fortinet is a regular contender.

5. Cisco Secure

Cisco may be famous for routers and switches, but its security arm is big in its own right. Firewalls, email security, DNS protection, zero trust access—these all contribute.

The real win for Cisco customers is integration. If your network is already Cisco, the security tools can plug into the same identity and policy sources. That can make complex things like segmentation and access control a bit less painful. Not easy. Just less painful.

6. Microsoft (Defender and beyond)

For a long time, people laughed at the idea of Microsoft as a security leader. That’s changed. Completely.

Microsoft has quietly turned Windows Defender into a serious endpoint platform. It pairs that with identity protection in Entra, cloud security in Defender for Cloud, and a huge amount of telemetry from Office, Azure, and more. Because attackers often exploit Microsoft services, having the vendor itself monitoring for patterns at that scale is significant.

7. SentinelOne

SentinelOne is one of the newer endpoint security players. It focuses on using behavior and automation rather than just signatures and static rules.

The charm here is autonomy. The agent is built to make quick decisions on the device itself, even if it’s offline. It can roll back changes, isolate systems, and block processes in seconds. For understaffed teams, that kind of automation can be the difference between a small incident and a disastrous week.

8. Zscaler

Zscaler came at security from a different angle. Instead of defending a central office, it assumes people work from anywhere. Rather than pushing all traffic back to a head office, Zscaler runs a huge cloud service that sits between users and the internet.

In practice, that means secure web gateways, zero trust access to internal apps, and strong inspection without the old “VPN hairpin” headaches. As more companies go hybrid or fully remote, this model looks less like an experiment and more like the default.

9. Okta

Okta doesn’t scan packets or endpoints. Its job is identity. Who are you, and what should you be allowed to touch?

In a world full of SaaS apps, cloud consoles, and remote sign‑ins, identity has become the new perimeter. Okta’s single sign‑on and multi‑factor authentication tools help companies tighten that perimeter without tormenting users too much. When attackers steal passwords or try to move laterally inside a network, a strong identity layer makes life harder for them.

10. Cloudflare

Most people know Cloudflare for speeding up websites. It also plays a major role in security.

Cloudflare runs one of the largest global networks on the planet. It uses that to absorb DDoS attacks, filter malicious traffic, and provide secure access to internal apps without clunky VPNs. It also offers DNS filtering and email security. Because so much web traffic already flows through Cloudflare, it has a broad view of emerging attacks in the wild.

Final Words

Modern threats don’t stay still. Ransomware groups rebrand. Phishing lures get sharper. Attackers learn from each other. The companies above are in a constant race to keep up and sometimes to get ahead.

No single vendor can solve every problem. But the right mix of tools, backed by knowledgeable people, can improve your chances. In the end, that’s what matters: making it just hard enough and expensive enough that attackers decide to move on to an easier target.

Britain’s largest trade union has thrown its weight behind Ed Miliband to become the next chancellor, a move that sharpens an increasingly bitter contest for control of the Treasury under a prospective Andy Burnham government.

Andrea Egan, general secretary of Unison, has backed the energy secretary as one of two frontrunners to replace Rachel Reeves in No 11. Her endorsement matters: Unison is the largest union in the country, with more than 1.3 million members concentrated in the public sector. Yet the support is far from unanimous across the movement, with two other big unions, GMB and Unite, lining up against him.

The jockeying between supporters of Miliband and his most likely rival, Wes Streeting, comes as Burnham prepares to deliver his first major policy speech since being elected as the MP for Makerfield. The former Greater Manchester mayor will set out his thinking on devolution and the economy in Manchester on Monday, but he is under mounting pressure to name his chancellor, a choice that investors, MPs, unions and business groups all regard as the single most consequential decision he will make in office. For business owners watching from the sidelines, the identity of the next occupant of No 11 will shape everything from the autumn Budget to the future ownership of Britain’s utilities. We have set out the runners and riders for the Treasury here.

Egan did not mince her words. “Andy Burnham has a historic opportunity to rebuild our country in the interests of workers and communities, but that chance will be squandered if his government is made up of politicians determined to continue the same failed approach,” she said.

“We need a chancellor who will rewire the economy and properly invest to improve the lives of the majority. Of those reported to be in the running, only Ed Miliband could enact the kinds of policies trade unions and our members urgently need.”

Burnham is assembling his inner circle of advisers and ministers, having entered the Commons only a week ago. Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement on Monday that he intends to resign as prime minister, swiftly followed by Streeting’s endorsement of Burnham, has made it overwhelmingly likely that the outgoing Manchester mayor will walk into No 10 as soon as next month.

Labour’s ruling national executive committee confirmed on Thursday that a new leader would be named on 17 July if only one candidate comes forward. Should a rival secure the backing of 81 Labour MPs and force a contest, the party will hold a full leadership election and declare the result on 29 August.

The new prime minister’s first appointment is already drawing fire. Burnham has chosen his former cabinet colleague and long-standing friend James Purnell as chief of staff, a decision that has irritated parts of the Labour left, who are wary of Purnell’s Blairite pedigree.

Attention has now turned squarely to who will run the Treasury, a brief that extends well beyond setting tax policy in this autumn’s Budget. The next chancellor will be charged with reigniting growth and overseeing the de-privatisation of some of Britain’s largest utilities, an agenda with direct consequences for investors and the wider business community.

The two leading contenders, Streeting and Miliband, hail from different wings of the party and would almost certainly pursue different priorities. Streeting, like Purnell, is a Blairite who, as health secretary, welcomed private sector involvement in the NHS. He is regarded as the more business-friendly option and the candidate most likely to reassure international investors, though some on the left worry he would be lukewarm on returning water and energy companies to public ownership.

Miliband, by contrast, is seen as more ideologically aligned with Burnham’s programme. But he has drawn anger from sections of both the unions and the business community over his approach to net zero. Some investors believe he would prove anti-business, pointing back to his time as Labour leader, when he drew a sharp line between companies he cast as “producers” and those he branded “predators”.

Unions with a strong presence in the North Sea oil industry have been exasperated by Miliband’s refusal to soften his pledge not to issue new exploration licences. They also fear he will decline to approve the Jackdaw and Rosebank megafields, even though waving them through would not technically breach that promise, since both already hold licences. The two projects, analysed in detail by the Institute for Government, have become a lightning rod in the wider argument over energy security and the pace of the transition.

One senior union official told the Financial Times on Thursday: “There are ongoing discussions to try to stop Ed Miliband. There is a GMB-Unite axis on this.”

Unison’s endorsement will strengthen Miliband’s standing within the labour movement, and he is not without other backers. Smaller unions, including the TSSA, are expected to issue similar messages of support in the coming days, while the National Education Union came out for him earlier on Thursday.

Even so, Miliband and Streeting are not the only names in the frame. Other possible candidates include Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, John Healey, the former defence secretary, and Jonathan Reynolds, the chief whip.

Allies of Reeves insist she would like to stay put, arguing she is best placed to keep markets calm while giving Burnham’s platform her full support. Her own appetite for the job has not gone unnoticed in the City, and her position has fed into a broader debate about fiscal devolution as Burnham eyes No 10.

Asked by the BBC on Wednesday about her chances of remaining in cabinet, Reeves said: “I’m not going to pre-empt the decisions that the new prime minister will make. I’m backing Andy and I think he’d be a great prime minister, but those are his decisions, not mine to make.”

She later told the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference: “I hope that whoever is chancellor in the future, whenever that future may be, sticks to what I’m doing. Because it is beginning to bear fruit, and we are seeing that investment return to the economy, that growth return to the economy, and crucially, that stability, so that businesses can plan and invest in the future.”

Allies of Burnham, however, are adamant that he will not keep her in place. For Britain’s businesses, the only certainty is that the answer is coming, and soon.

Paul Jones

Harvard alumni and former New York Times journalist. Editor of Business Matters for over 15 years, the UKs largest business magazine. I am also head of Capital Business Media’s automotive division working for clients such as Red Bull Racing, Honda, Aston Martin and Infiniti.