The challenger bank is said to have seen interest from a number of potential suitors

Digital bank Atom has failed to attract a desired £600m bid amid a sale process led by its investors, a report suggests.

The Newcastle-based lender is said to been offered below asking price by London-based investor Pollen Street Capital, according to the Financial Times. Atom’s key backers – including BBVA and Toscafund – are reported to be considering halting the sale process as a result.

Yorkshire Building Society and Leeds Building Society are also said to have considered bids for Atom, which last year moved into new headquarters in Newcastle’s Stephenson Quarter. The sale process comes after many years of a mooted flotation for the challenger bank which last year reported it had more than 270,000 customers and mortgage balances of £4.2bn.

Atom was founded in 2013, secured a banking licence in 2015 and after nine years of losses struck a first pre-tax profit of £7m in 2023. The branch-less bank, which now employs more than 500 people, was valued at about £362m when it raised £100m in new equity capital in 2023.

A deal with Pollen Street Capital could have preceded a merger with Tandem, another digital-based lender which Pollen owns. The private equity firm is also linked to Newcastle-registered LSL Property Services via its Pivotal Growth joint venture which aims to grow a tech-led UK mortgage broker.

Atom has been a pioneer of the four-day week, and has talked positively of remote working. Last year, it made a multimillion-pound move from Durham to Tyneside, taking up residence in the historic Pattern Shop building. At the time, the bank said the shift of headquarters was “an important investment in the future of the franchise and one that will help us to drive delivery of the business plan and the realisation of our strategic vision”.

The sales process behind Atom comes after a period of big deals in the UK banking market, including Nationwide Building Society’s £2.9bn takeover of Newcastle-based Virgin Money and Coventry’s acquisition of Co-op Bank. In the bank’s 2025 report, Atom chairman Lee Rochford said valuations in the sector has progressed strongly and that the deals “further entrenched the dominance of high street brands”, raising questions about competitiveness in the market.

Nationwide earned a £2.3bn windfall from its acquisition of Virgin, where it has pledged to keep all branches open until at least 2030 – even where the two brands have locations close to each other.

Atom Bank did not comment on the reports.

Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, is one of the most private and secretive businesses in the UK – its reclusive owner Humphrey Smith rarely spoke to the media and ran a unique brewing empire rooted in 1950s pub tradition

The half-mast Union flag atop The Old Brewery provided the sole indication at the notoriously tight-lipped Samuel Smith organisation that its reclusive proprietor had passed away.

It was flying beside the 140ft (43m) chimney, which dominates the centre of Tadcaster, situated just a couple of hundred metres from its marginally taller counterpart at the competing John Smith’s brewery.

While Heineken-owned John Smith’s has long been absorbed into the global corporate brewing industry, Eton-educated Humphrey Smith devoted the past 60 years to ensuring Sam Smith’s became synonymous with family-run traditional beer-making anchored in a vision of pub culture from the 1950s.

The company’s website declares: “Our pubs are havens from the digital world – there are no TVs or background music. The use of mobile phones, laptops and other tech is not allowed in our pubs. Friendly pub conversation is encouraged (no swearing! ) together with the responsible enjoyment of our beers.”

Numerous accounts exist of Smith arriving in person to reprimand both customers and landlords, including an episode at a pub in Sheffield in 2020 when a couple claimed they were dismissed after they couldn’t serve his preferred pudding. In 2011, campaigners organised a “kiss-in” when a Sam Smith’s pub in Soho, central London, purportedly ejected two men for a public display of affection.

Mr Smith himself never granted interviews to the press and his company maintained the same approach. His appetite for confidentiality – particularly surrounding his wealth and commercial affairs – meant that Samuel Smith’s is amongst a tiny minority of British enterprises not to submit public financial accounts.

Mr Smith transformed the firm into a private unlimited company in 1982, rendering it exempt from filing accounts or disclosing its assets, though this structure also means all owners bear personal liability for its debts.

The company’s website proudly boasts that its pubs exclusively stock Sam Smith’s beer and cider, with all other produce sourced locally. A post on a real ale enthusiasts’ page described Smith as “an absolute titan of the British brewing world”.

It read: “Love him or hate him for his strict rules banning smartphones, tablets, music, and even swearing, he ran his pubs entirely his own way to preserve the classic, tech-free British pubs experience. Whether you cherished the peace or found the rules baffling, there is no denying his massive impact on our pub heritage.”

York Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) chairman Christopher Tregellis commented: “It is difficult to differentiate between him as a man and the business itself. The two seem to have been closely aligned.

“The business had a reputation as being very traditional and sometimes arbitrary. They seemed prepared to keep large parts of their pub estate empty and unused and would often close pubs at very short notice, depriving local customers of community assets without them knowing why.

“Their pubs are known as purveyors of fairly priced beer and they have a commitment to cask ale which is obviously valued by Camra. The passing of Mr Smith presents the brewery with an opportunity to modernise its approach whilst preserving its good aspects, and we hope to see this happen.”

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Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh on Wednesday said he will firmly go by the U.S. central bank’s 2% inflation target and will “disappoint” anyone who expects monetary policy easing despite President Donald Trump’s repeated demands for rate cuts.

“If people thought this central bank was going to be comfortable with an inflation objective above 2%, they would be disappointed,” Warsh told a European Central Bank panel in Sintra, Portugal, adding, “We have been an independent central ⁠bank for ⁠a long time. We are going to be an independent central bank at this moment and you will see no changes on that.”

He further restated that he would give little hints on monetary policy projections.

Warsh also promised to bring in real-time economic data that will help the US central bank make better policies, replacing what he termed problematic government reports.

“My aspiration is that nine to 12 months from now we’re going to be using new technologies to understand what’s happening in the real economy ‌in a contemporaneous, real-time ⁠way that ⁠positions us as central bankers to make better decisions, that we’re no longer going to have to rely solely on data that we get from government agencies with mismeasurement problems that have surveys that are no longer relevant,” Warsh told a monetary policy forum in Portugal. “My favorite data is upon us, and if we do our jobs, we’ll be here a year from now, and we’ll say we’ve discovered data that helps us make better decisions.”

The Federal Reserve relies on a broad mix of government, private-sector and internal data — both public and non-public — to assess economic conditions and guide interest rate decisions aimed at supporting employment and keeping inflation under control.
Warsh has argued that the Fed places excessive reliance on official data, which he believes often lags or fails to accurately reflect current economic conditions. He contends that flawed data has contributed to poor policymaking, allowing inflation to remain above the central bank’s target for more than five years.Fed officials, however, say they guard against the risk of relying on data that may later be revised or fail to capture current conditions by focusing on longer-term trends — an approach Warsh himself appeared to endorse on Wednesday when he avoided drawing monetary policy conclusions from recent economic data.

They also argue that regular consultations with business leaders and organisations across the country, summarised in the Fed’s Beige Book, provide timely insights into economic developments that may not yet be reflected in official data.

Task Force members to be named soon
Warsh also said he would start naming members of his five new task forces from next week, one of which focuses on finding new data-gathering sources ‌and methods.

Warsh says his task force may have ideas about how to improve official data but also about how to generate more up-to-date information about the economy.

After 12 years in the planning, the north’s flagship rail scheme still has no detailed design and a £45 billion budget that the public accounts committee says was set before anyone knew what it would build.

The plan to transform train services across the north of England is at risk of sliding into the same fiasco that has engulfed HS2, according to parliament’s spending watchdog, which says the scheme still lacks a proper design and a realistic budget after more than a decade of planning.

In a withering report, the Commons public accounts committee (PAC) said Northern Powerhouse Rail had no detailed design to speak of after 12 years on the drawing board, and warned that its £45 billion budget had become “decoupled from reality”. As it stands, the committee said, the project is likely to fail to deliver the improvements promised and risks becoming yet another government infrastructure albatross.

Originally conceived as a high-speed line linking Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, the scheme has since been pared back to a series of local upgrades intended to deliver faster and more frequent services. The government revived the programme in January with a phased £45 billion vision for the north, but the PAC is unconvinced the numbers stack up.

The committee said it was “not confident that the Department for Transport (DfT) has learnt all the lessons from its past failures in its management of other rail projects”, pointing above all to the truncated HS2 north-south link. HS2 has busted its budget and could cost well in excess of £100 billion despite now running only as far as Birmingham, and is expected to be at least five years late.

On the money, the PAC was blunt. There was “no convincing plan” to deliver Northern Powerhouse Rail’s aims within the £45 billion cap, it said, and no explanation of how the Treasury had arrived at the figure in the first place, with no formal design, scope or costing yet published.

Clive Betts, the PAC’s deputy chair, said there was no doubt that railways in the north needed transforming to deliver jobs, mobility and productivity. But having taken evidence from interested parties, he warned: “Our committee has heard troubling echoes of the same mistakes in loose governance that HS2 made early on.

“Much of the project remains almost impressionistic. Both the Treasury and DfT have questions to answer about the project’s £45 billion funding cap. We need to know how this figure was arrived at and how DfT will keep to it. Capping a project’s funding before it was even designed or costed feels like putting a roof on a house before the foundations are laid.”

Betts reserved particular scorn for the decision to let HS2 Ltd, the agency set up to deliver HS2, advise on Northern Powerhouse Rail, calling it laughable that a body with such a record of failure should be shaping the north’s next big scheme.

The report lands as northern leaders press for a firmer commitment to the region. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, a vocal champion of devolution who has warned the north faces “Armageddon” without proper rail links, has continued to push for better transport connections and a shift of power away from Westminster.

The committee wants clarity, and quickly. It called on the DfT, already stretched by HS2 and the creation of Great British Railways, the new publicly controlled operator, to front up: “Within six months, the department should write to us to confirm whether Northern Powerhouse Rail is a mega-project or not.”

That question matters because the answer determines how the scheme is governed, scrutinised and funded, and the committee’s frustration is that, 12 years in, it still cannot be answered. Ministers have also faced pressure over cheaper alternatives elsewhere on the network, including a cut-price “HS2-light” line beyond Birmingham being weighed up by officials.

The Department for Transport pushed back firmly. “Northern Powerhouse Rail will deliver the biggest investment in rail connectivity in a generation, giving the north the transport links it deserves and driving growth, jobs and investment across the region,” a spokesperson said.

“NPR will not repeat the mistakes of HS2, which is why we accepted all the recommendations of the James Stewart review and are taking a disciplined, phased approach, completing detailed technical work with all stakeholders before fixing precise choices for major infrastructure.

“Since announcing NPR in January, we have worked closely with mayors to take the project forward. New joint partnership forums are already overseeing the next stage of development and Network Rail has begun developing engineering designs.”

The full findings are set out in the PAC’s report on Northern Powerhouse Rail, which draws on National Audit Office analysis showing the DfT will have spent some £410 million on the programme by March 2026. For a scheme meant to rebalance the economy, the watchdog’s message is uncomfortable: design first, cost second, and cap the budget only once you know what you are building, rather than the other way round.

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Actor Danny Glover publicly disclosed his Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis Wednesday in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that aired on the “Today” show, saying he has been living with the progressive brain disease for several years and that it has already begun to affect his speech, movement and memory.

Glover, 79, sat down with Holt at his home for the conversation, which he said he chose to have publicly in part to promote awareness of a condition that affects nearly 7 million Americans age 65 and older. The actor, best known for his role as homicide detective Roger Murtaugh in the “Lethal Weapon” franchise alongside Mel Gibson, said he received his diagnosis in 2023 and has been processing it with the help of family and close friends since then.

“I could live with it, in a sense,” Glover told Holt during the “Today” interview, but acknowledged the path ahead, adding that as the disease progresses, “things are going to be different and changing.”

The announcement came just weeks before Glover’s 80th birthday on July 22.

In a separate conversation with People magazine, Glover described coming to terms with the diagnosis and offered a philosophical reflection on what living with Alzheimer’s has meant for his sense of self.

“I still have my daughter, I have friends,” Glover told People. “I want to just say, your life continues.”

He also acknowledged the uneven nature of memory as the disease progresses.

“I’m still not accepting in my mind all parts of it,” Glover said. “There are the moments that you keep remembering that validate the fact that you can remember stuff. And there are moments I’ll never forget.”

Despite the gravity of the diagnosis, Glover made clear he does not view his condition as a reason to surrender.

“There’s work to do,” he said, adding that the disease does not feel like “the end of my life.”

Glover’s daughter, Mandisa, also spoke with People about her experience as a caregiver, describing the emotional complexity of watching a parent navigate the condition’s progression.

“He is aware sometimes and then sometimes not,” Mandisa said. She described the diagnosis as “a change in the core of who you think you are or don’t think you are.”

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia and is classified as a progressive brain disorder that typically begins with mild memory loss before advancing to affect an individual’s ability to carry on conversations, complete daily activities or respond to their surroundings, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There is currently no cure for the disease, though treatments are available that can help manage symptoms and slow some aspects of its progression for certain patients.

The scale of Alzheimer’s in the United States is significant. According to data from the Mayo Clinic, nearly 7 million Americans age 65 and older are currently living with the disease, and that number is expected to grow as the population ages over the coming decades. The Alzheimer’s Association has estimated that by 2050, as many as 13 million Americans could be living with the disease if no major medical breakthrough occurs in the interim.

Glover has spent decades as one of Hollywood’s most recognizable and broadly respected figures, with a career spanning more than 50 years across film, television and stage. His role as Roger Murtaugh, the long-suffering Los Angeles police detective partnered with Mel Gibson’s volatile Martin Riggs across four “Lethal Weapon” films between 1987 and 1998, cemented his status as a mainstream cinema fixture. Among his other notable film credits are “The Color Purple,” directed by Steven Spielberg in 1985, in which Glover played the emotionally complex Mister; “Places in the Heart,” in which he starred alongside Sally Field; and “Predator 2.” His work in television earned him five Emmy Award nominations, including one for his portrayal of Nelson Mandela in a biographical television film of the same name.

Beyond his film and television career, Glover built a parallel reputation as one of the entertainment industry’s most committed and outspoken social activists, a role that earned him Hollywood’s highest humanitarian recognition. In 2022, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an honorary Oscar presented to individuals whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the film industry by promoting human welfare and contributing to addressing systemic inequities.

At the ceremony marking that award, actress Alfre Woodard paid tribute to Glover’s decades of activism, which included his role as a student organizer during his years at San Francisco State University, where he was a driving force behind a campus walkout that helped lead to the creation of the Department of Black Studies, one of the first such academic departments in the United States.

“Danny Glover always does the right thing first, without testing the prevailing winds of public opinion,” Woodard said in her tribute. “The places in his heart where he has put his time and his resources outnumber his years.”

Glover’s decision to speak openly about his Alzheimer’s diagnosis follows a pattern of public figures choosing to disclose the condition in order to reduce the stigma associated with cognitive decline in older adults and to encourage others facing similar circumstances to seek help and remain engaged with their communities. Several prominent figures across politics, entertainment and other fields have shared similar disclosures in recent years, each raising awareness of a disease that researchers have characterized as a growing public health concern for which current treatment options remain limited relative to the scale of need.

For Glover, the decision to share the news publicly also appears grounded in the same sense of purpose and engagement that has defined his personal and professional life for more than five decades, the conviction that there is always something meaningful to offer, regardless of circumstances.

“There’s work to do,” he said simply.

Shares of NICE Ltd. climbed Wednesday morning, recovering modestly from a 52-week low hit just two weeks ago as a broader rally in beaten-down enterprise software stocks lifted the Israeli AI contact center technology company alongside peers that have been battered by investor fears over generative AI disruption to their core business models.

Shares of the Ra’anana, Israel-based company were trading at $95.37 as of 10:34 a.m. EDT, up $4.52, or 4.98%, on the day. The advance offers some relief after a prolonged and painful selloff that has carried NICE shares from a 52-week high of $175, reached in late July 2025, down to a 52-week low of $83.10 hit on June 18, a decline of more than 52% that has made the company one of the hardest-hit names in the enterprise software sector during 2026.

Wednesday’s bounce comes on a day when the broader software category has stabilized following weeks of broad-based selling attributed to fears, sometimes described by analysts as the “SaaSpocalypse,” that generative AI tools from companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google could fundamentally disrupt traditional enterprise software subscription business models. That dynamic has weighed heavily on NICE in particular because the company’s flagship CXone Mpower platform competes directly in the AI-powered contact center space, a category that some investors fear could be hollowed out by AI tools capable of performing customer service interactions autonomously without requiring a dedicated third-party software platform.

NICE has pushed back forcefully against that narrative through its annual NiCE World 2026 customer conference, held June 8 through 10 at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where the company rolled out a series of product announcements designed to position itself not as a victim of the agentic AI wave but as one of its primary beneficiaries. The company announced that agentic AI is now natively embedded at the core of its CXone Mpower platform, framing the shift as a fundamental transformation of customer experience from human-driven support to an integrated model combining AI agents, human workers and enterprise data in a single operating environment.

NiCE said it introduced the Workforce Empowerment Suite, giving enterprises one operating model to manage, govern and empower both human employees and AI agents at scale. The company also launched NiCE Labs, a dedicated AI innovation lab established to conduct advanced research, rigorous benchmarking and rapid prototyping at the leading edge of agentic customer experience technology.

The financial results presented at the same investor and analyst day showed revenue of $768.62 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2026, up 8% year-over-year and modestly above analyst estimates of $760.92 million. Adjusted earnings per share of $2.64 also beat consensus expectations of $2.52, representing a year-over-year increase of roughly 39% in net income. Despite those beats, the stock fell sharply following the event, with multiple analysts cutting their price targets in response to concerns about the pace of longer-term revenue growth in an increasingly competitive AI-native contact center market.

Wedbush lowered its price target on NICE to $100 from $120 and maintained a Neutral rating on the shares following the investor day. Morgan Stanley maintained an Overweight rating but lowered its price target to $130 from $148. Citi reduced its target to $100 from $119, and RBC Capital lowered its target to $130 from $150.

The broadly negative analyst price target revisions reflected a common concern: while NICE’s near-term financial performance has held up reasonably well, investors are increasingly questioning whether the company’s competitive position in the contact center software market is durable over a multi-year horizon given the pace of development of AI-native alternatives. NICE has traditionally relied on its CXone platform’s breadth of capabilities, including workforce optimization, quality management, compliance recording, analytics and interaction management, as a defensible moat against competitors. That argument is now being stress-tested in real time as both established cloud software companies and smaller AI-native startups attempt to replicate those capabilities using foundation models.

A separate challenge has emerged from NICE’s European presence. Reports have circulated that France’s domestic intelligence agency was transitioning off Palantir’s tools in favor of domestic alternatives, and more broadly, a wider shift in European government and enterprise procurement sentiment toward prioritizing domestically developed or European-domiciled software vendors has created uncertainty around renewal rates for NICE’s international public-sector customer base, even if the company has not publicly quantified the impact.

Despite those headwinds, NICE has continued executing on its commercial expansion strategy. NICE Actimize, the company’s financial crime and compliance division, signed a major contract with DNB Bank ASA, Norway’s largest financial services group, to deploy the NICE Actimize X-Sight Enterprise platform, consolidating DNB’s fraud detection and anti-money laundering systems onto a single cloud-native intelligence-driven platform. The win illustrates that NICE’s financial crime compliance business, which serves banks and financial institutions rather than consumer-facing contact centers, has continued to grow independently of the contact center narrative that has dominated the stock’s recent performance.

According to 16 analysts, approximately 93.75% maintain a Buy rating on NICE shares, with an average 12-month price target of $131.43, implying roughly 30% upside from recent trading levels. That disconnect between the overwhelmingly bullish analyst consensus and the stock’s 52% decline from its 52-week high reflects a broader investor skepticism about the durability of enterprise software business models in an AI-saturated environment that has not yet been resolved by any individual earnings report or product announcement.

NICE’s next earnings report is expected in early August, a date that will give investors their next opportunity to assess whether the company’s pivot toward agentic AI as a platform-level strategy is beginning to translate into new bookings, expanded customer commitments and improved revenue visibility, or whether the competitive pressures bearing down on the contact center software market are more structurally challenging than the company’s current financial results reflect. For now, Wednesday’s advance represents a stabilization trade rather than a conviction reversal, with the stock still far below where it traded just a year ago even after this morning’s nearly 5% bounce.

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