Uzbekistan’s Competition Development and Consumer Protection Committee has granted preliminary approval for Tapuz Limited to acquire a 100% stake in OLX Classifieds LLC, the operator of one of the country’s most widely used online marketplace platforms. The approval is subject to a set of regulatory conditions designed to preserve market competition across Uzbekistan’s rapidly expanding digital economy.   

Tapuz Limited is principally owned by TBC Bank Group PLC, the London-listed financial group that also indirectly controls TBC Bank Uzbekistan and Payme two of the most prominent digital financial platforms operating in the country. The OLX acquisition, once fully completed, would bring together a dominant classifieds platform with an established digital banking and payments ecosystem under a single corporate structure.   

Regulatory Approval and Its Conditions   

The Competition Committee’s approval is not unconditional. The regulator has imposed a series of requirements on Tapuz Limited that are designed to prevent the combined entity from using its market position to restrict competition or disadvantage users. Both Payme and OLX are listed on Uzbekistan’s national register of companies holding dominant positions in the digital platforms market a designation that brings specific obligations under competition law.   

Among the conditions imposed, the buyer is prohibited from leveraging other digital services to improperly influence the terms under which OLX operates. It is also restricted from using OLX user data to benefit TBC Bank Uzbekistan or Payme in ways that would limit competition. The regulator has explicitly stated that OLX users cannot be required to use only Payme or TBC Bank services when making payments on the platform a condition that ensures the marketplace remains open to competing payment providers.   

The requirements also address the handling of commercial information. Tapuz Limited is prohibited from disclosing personal or commercial data about the customers of competing businesses a provision that reflects the regulator’s focus on preventing the kind of data asymmetry that can entrench market dominance in digital platform economies. Compliance with national competition legislation is specified as an ongoing obligation throughout the transaction.   

What the Acquisition Means for Uzbekistan’s Digital Market   

The strategic logic behind the OLX acquisition is straightforward. OLX Uzbekistan is one of the country’s most visited online platforms, used by millions of consumers and small businesses for buying, selling, and trading goods and services. Integrating this marketplace reach with TBC Bank Group’s financial services infrastructure creates a platform with compelling potential for embedded financial services credit at the point of sale, payment processing for marketplace transactions, and financial products tailored to the needs of small merchants operating through classifieds.   

The combination also reflects a broader trend in emerging market fintech, where the most successful platforms are those that embed financial services within the contexts where consumers and businesses already spend their time. Marketplaces are particularly valuable in this regard because they generate high-frequency, high-intent interactions precisely the kind of engagement that financial services providers seek when developing embedded product strategies.   

For TBC Bank Uzbekistan, which already serves over 6 million monthly active users and holds a leading position in consumer credit and payments, the OLX acquisition represents an extension of its ecosystem rather than a departure from its core strategy. The company has consistently expanded its product range to cover a wider share of the financial and commercial activity of its users from daily banking and lending to insurance, travel, and subscription services.   

Savings, Deposits, and the Maturing of Uzbekistan’s Financial Market   

The regulatory approval of this acquisition takes place within a financial market that is maturing rapidly on multiple dimensions simultaneously. Consumer awareness of financial products savings instruments, investment options, and structured deposit offerings has grown considerably as digital banking platforms have made these products more visible and accessible. The growing interest in terms such as “депозиты в узбекистане” and “omonat turlari” reflects a population that is moving beyond basic transactional banking toward a more considered engagement with savings and wealth preservation. This shift is significant for the long-term development of Uzbekistan’s financial sector. 

As consumer confidence in digital financial platforms increases, and as the range of products available through those platforms expands, the conditions for deeper financial inclusion become more favourable. The combination of accessible savings products, embedded lending at points of commerce, and reliable payment infrastructure creates a financial ecosystem that can serve users across a much broader range of their economic needs than was possible through traditional banking channels alone.   

Competition, Compliance, and the Road Ahead   

The conditions attached to the OLX acquisition approval reflect a regulatory approach that is increasingly common in markets where digital platform concentration is emerging as a structural concern. By imposing specific restrictions on data use, payment exclusivity, and competitive conduct at the outset of the transaction, the Competition Committee is attempting to shape the market structure proactively rather than responding to abuses after the fact.   

For TBC Bank Group, navigating these conditions will be an important operational priority as the acquisition moves toward completion. The restrictions are not unusual in the context of platform acquisitions in competitive markets, and the group’s compliance track record across its operations in Georgia and Uzbekistan suggests it is well positioned to meet the requirements. The key challenge will be realising the commercial potential of the combined entity while maintaining the open, competitive environment that the regulator has mandated.   

Uzbekistan’s digital economy has expanded at a pace that has regularly surprised outside observers, and the OLX acquisition is one of the more visible markers of how seriously international and domestic players now view the market’s long-term potential. TBC Bank Group’s willingness to pursue a transaction of this scale — subject to regulatory scrutiny and conditional approval reflects a confidence in the trajectory of Uzbekistan’s digital economy that is grounded in the operational results the group has already achieved. 

New York isn’t just losing residents — it’s losing some of the people who help power its economy.

As New York continues to see residents move to other states, former New York Gov. George Pataki is warning that entrepreneurs, financial leaders and major donors are increasingly heading for the exits.

Pataki joined FOX Business’ Cheryl Casone on “Mornings with Maria” to discuss the state’s outmigration, its business climate and the policies he believes are pushing residents and job creators elsewhere.

“You know, it’s just almost tragic to see the loss of people, not just people, but people who create jobs, who donate to hospitals and museums, the best of New York, the people who have made New York the entrepreneurial and financial center are just leaving,” Pataki said.

The former governor argued that New York risks weakening its position as the nation’s financial center as companies expand their workforces elsewhere, pointing to the growing pull of lower-tax states such as Texas.

“We fought hard to keep it the financial capital of the world. It still is for the moment. But if we continue these tax-and-spend and soft-on-crime policies, it’s just going to get worse,” he said.

NYC-AREA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE CEO BLASTS MAMDANI GROCERY PLAN AS ‘DISASTROUS’ AMID LEGAL FIGHT

Pataki also warned that additional tax increases and rising debt could deepen the state’s challenges and drive more residents away. Still, he said New York has the ability to reverse course.

“We’re going to end up not just with the highest taxes in the country, but with unsustainable debt, with more people leaving,” Pataki said. “We’re not doing great right now, but New York is New York. It’s very resilient. It still has great people. We put in place the right policies and it will come roaring back. So in that sense, I’m an optimist.”

FLORIDA CHAMBER CEO: COMPANIES EYE SUNSHINE STATE ‘FROM ALL OVER THE COUNTRY’ AFTER VIRAL MAMDANI BILLBOARD

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Users of the Microsoft Store began reporting access problems starting at approximately 12:17 p.m. Eastern time Monday, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, marking the third Microsoft service to draw user complaints within roughly 90 minutes on the same day.

Downdetector, an Ookla-owned platform that monitors more than 12,000 online services worldwide, posted on X shortly after the reports began surfacing. “User reports indicate problems with Microsoft Store since 12:17 PM EDT,” the account wrote, encouraging affected users to share how the disruption was impacting them under the hashtag #MicrosoftStoreDown. Separate outage-tracking service Entireweb similarly logged elevated activity for the Microsoft Store, recording 56 user reports over the preceding 24-hour period as of Monday, with six of those reports arriving within the final hour before its status check.

Monday’s Microsoft Store reports followed closely on the heels of two earlier disruptions affecting other Microsoft products the same day. Users had reported problems with Microsoft Outlook beginning around 11:53 a.m. Eastern time, and separate reports tracked by the online forum DesignTAXI Community indicated that broader Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook specifically, began showing elevated outage report volumes as early as 11:33 a.m. Eastern time Monday. The clustering of complaints across multiple Microsoft products within a relatively narrow window raised questions among affected users about whether the issues stemmed from a shared underlying cause, though Microsoft had not issued a public statement definitively linking the incidents as of Monday afternoon.

Microsoft’s broader cloud infrastructure, built primarily on its Azure platform, underpins a wide range of the company’s consumer and enterprise products, meaning that problems originating in shared backend systems can sometimes manifest as simultaneous disruptions across seemingly unrelated services. That dynamic played out dramatically during a major Microsoft outage in 2021, when a Domain Name System, or DNS, networking issue took down Microsoft’s homepage, Xbox and Office services, login pages, and even the company’s own status pages simultaneously, according to a contemporaneous report from TechCrunch. In that incident, Microsoft’s cloud service Azure also went offline, causing cascading outages across other websites and services that depend on Azure’s infrastructure, before the company confirmed the issue had been mitigated roughly seven hours after it began.

As of Monday afternoon, StatusGator’s monitoring of the broader Microsoft 365 apps category showed the service listed as operational, with only four user-submitted reports logged over the preceding 24-hour period as of a status check conducted shortly after 12:30 p.m. Eastern time, a discrepancy that illustrates how quickly outage-reporting metrics can shift and how different monitoring services can produce varying pictures of the same underlying situation depending on their data sources and update frequency.

Downdetector’s outage-tracking methodology relies on a combination of user-submitted complaints and automated web traffic monitoring rather than direct access to a company’s internal systems, meaning reported spikes in activity do not always indicate a complete platform-wide failure. Disruptions can instead reflect issues affecting a specific region, a particular version of an app or service, or a coincidental cluster of unrelated individual account problems. Even so, the near-simultaneous emergence of complaints across three separate Microsoft products in a single morning represents an unusual pattern that has drawn attention from users monitoring the company’s service status throughout the day.

Microsoft’s official Azure status page and its dedicated Microsoft 365 service health dashboard remain the most authoritative sources for confirming whether the company has formally acknowledged any of Monday’s reported issues. As of this report, Microsoft had not issued a public statement addressing the Microsoft Store outage reports specifically, and the company did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding whether Monday’s disruptions across Outlook, Microsoft Store and broader Microsoft 365 services were connected to a common underlying cause.

The National Stock Exchange of India Ltd (NSE) on Monday recorded a turnover of Rs 39,718 crore in the Closing Auction Session (CAS), accounting for 22 per cent of its total cash market turnover, on the first index rebalancing day since the mechanism was introduced earlier this month.

The exchange commanded a 99.9 per cent market share in the CAS, with more than 98,000 unique investors participating in the session, NSE said in a statement.

The turnover in Monday’s session was around 42 times the turnover recorded in the previous trading session.

The session coincided with the implementation of the MSCI August 2026 Index Review, which took effect at the close of trading on Monday. It was the first major index rebalancing after CAS went live in the Indian capital markets.

Index rebalancing days typically witness heavy trading towards the close as index funds, exchange-traded funds and other passive investors realign their portfolios based on changes in benchmark indices.

NSE said the strong turnover in the CAS demonstrated that index funds and passive investors executed their rebalancing trades through the mechanism.
Monday also marked the completion of one month of the closing auction session. During the first month, NSE recorded a cumulative CAS turnover of around Rs 63,000 crore, with a market share of 98.2 per cent.The CAS is a call auction mechanism used to determine the closing price of stocks in the cash segment on which derivative contracts are available.

Under the mechanism, buy and sell interest at the close of the market is aggregated into a single price discovery process, aimed at enhancing transparency, integrity and fairness in determining closing prices.

The mechanism was implemented from August 3 following the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (Sebi) decision to introduce the closing auction session in the Indian capital markets.

NSE said the CAS brings the Indian market closer to global best practices for closing price discovery.

Users of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure began reporting access problems starting at approximately 12:45 p.m. Eastern time Monday, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, marking the fourth Microsoft product to draw user complaints within roughly two hours on the same day.

Downdetector posted on X shortly after the reports began surfacing. “User reports indicate problems with Microsoft Azure since 12:45 PM EDT,” the account wrote, asking affected users to describe how the disruption was impacting them under the hashtag #MicrosoftAzureDown. The Azure reports followed earlier Monday complaints involving Microsoft Outlook, which began drawing attention around 11:53 a.m. Eastern time, and Microsoft Store, which saw a similar spike in user reports beginning at 12:17 p.m., raising the possibility that Monday’s cluster of disruptions across multiple Microsoft products traced back to a shared underlying cause within the company’s infrastructure.

Azure serves as the backbone of much of Microsoft’s broader product ecosystem, hosting the cloud infrastructure that supports services including Microsoft 365, Outlook, Xbox Live and countless third-party applications and websites built on top of Microsoft’s cloud platform. That interconnected architecture means disruptions originating within Azure’s core systems can cascade outward, producing what appear to be simultaneous, seemingly unrelated outages across multiple consumer-facing products at once.

Separate monitoring services offered a mixed picture of Azure’s status heading into Monday afternoon. Outage tracker 503Radar reported that Azure was operating normally as of 11:39 a.m. UTC Monday, before the reported issues began, and noted that the platform’s most recent confirmed outage had occurred Aug. 28, when a multiple-service disruption affecting West U.S. regions took roughly 23 hours to resolve. StatusGator, meanwhile, reported that a related product, Azure DevOps, was experiencing a partial outage as of Monday afternoon, with confirmed issues affecting pipeline services in Canada and artifact services in the United States, even as other Azure DevOps components remained listed as operational. StatusGator separately logged 14 user-submitted outage reports for the core Azure platform over the preceding 24-hour period as of an earlier Monday morning check.

Microsoft’s Azure platform has experienced a series of shorter regional disruptions in recent weeks, according to 503Radar’s incident tracking, including an issue affecting Southeast Asia on Aug. 25 that took nearly 13 hours to resolve, and a separate Azure Portal access problem affecting Australian regions on Aug. 14 that lasted more than 12 hours. Those incidents, along with the more recent Aug. 27-28 disruption in West U.S. regions, suggest Azure has faced a more active-than-usual stretch of regional service issues heading into Monday’s reported problems.

Microsoft maintains an official Azure status page, accessible at azure.status.microsoft, which the company updates in real time to reflect the health of its cloud services and to publish post-incident reviews following major outages with broad customer impact. According to Microsoft’s own documentation on the Azure Service Health system, the company distinguishes between incidents severe enough to prevent customers from accessing the status page directly, in which case Microsoft attempts direct customer communication, and broader service issues affecting undetermined numbers of customers or regions, which the company addresses through public status updates rather than individually targeted outreach.

As of Monday afternoon, Microsoft had not issued a public statement specifically linking the day’s reported issues across Outlook, Microsoft Store and Azure to a single root cause, and the company’s official status channels had not confirmed a major, broad-impact incident matching the scale suggested by the clustered Downdetector reports. Outage-tracking methodologies used by services like Downdetector rely on crowdsourced user complaints and automated web traffic monitoring rather than direct visibility into Microsoft’s internal systems, meaning reported spikes in activity do not necessarily confirm a company-wide failure, even when they cluster closely together in time.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the reported Azure disruption or whether it was connected to the earlier Outlook and Microsoft Store outage reports logged earlier the same day. Affected users have been encouraged to monitor Microsoft’s official Azure status page directly for the most authoritative and up-to-date information regarding the platform’s operational status.

A family battle over a billionaire’s fortune, from boats and a jet to Dallas Cowboys tickets, is rankling the board of a small regional bank in

Texas. 

Texas banking veteran Gerald J. Ford is ensnarled in a legal fight with some of his adult children over a large stake in Hilltop Holdings

HTH

-0.18%

decrease; down pointing triangle, the $2.2 billion financial-services holding company he forged. Four of Ford’s children—including son Jeremy, who took over as chair from Ford in 2025—are suing to wrest away control of their father’s more-than-26% stake in Hilltop, worth some $600 million.