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Tencent Cloud Completes Airstar Bank’s Full Migration to the Cloud to Create a More Agile Digital Bank

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HONG KONG, April 25, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Migrating to the Cloud is quickly becoming an industry standard for the financial industry as it enables institutions to achieve greater performance, digital capabilities, operational efficiencies and cost management. Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, today announced it has helped Hong Kong’s Airstar Bank to successfully migrate its entire operations onto the Cloud, to facilitate more agility for their digital bank services and operations. Airstar Bank has been operating steadily on the cloud for over 100 days, witnessing significant improvements to the greater speed, stability and security that they are able to provide to their digital banking customers.

Airstar Bank is one of the first digital banks to be granted a banking license in Hong Kong and it continues to grow in market presence today. This has placed significant technological demands on Airstar Bank, as it needs to scale up quickly while balancing the high costs and resources that are required to support its growing operations.

In December 2023, Airstar Bank partnered with Tencent Cloud to initiate its cloud business migration plan, which will see all aspects of its business operations housed on the cloud. Tencent Cloud drew from its own extensive experience in cloud migration, formulating detailed technical plans and migration strategies to ensure a safe, smooth, and efficient transition to the cloud, while adhering to strict industry regulations and standards at all times.

Liming Hu, Vice President of Tencent Cloud, said: “Migrating to the cloud is the optimal solution for the digital transformation of the financial industry, and Airstar Bank’s comprehensive cloud migration reflects its forward-looking approach to digitalization. Tencent Cloud is honored to assist Airstar Bank in smoothly and efficiently migrating to the cloud, helping to provide more diverse financial products and services to customers, improve customer satisfaction, and promote a virtuous cycle that enables rapid business development. In the future, Tencent Cloud will continue to focus on fintech and cloud services, offering leading digital banking solutions to financial institutions worldwide and supporting product and business innovation in the financial industry.”

Felix Tao, Chief Technology Officer of Airstar Bank, said: “We are very pleased to partner with Tencent Cloud to successfully and smoothly complete the bank’s cloud migration. We anticipate significant optimization in terms of resource costs and workload as well as the complexity of infrastructure operations and maintenance. As a ‘user-oriented’ digital bank, we remain committed to providing our customers with more diverse products and services. This development not only helps reduce costs and enhance efficiency, accelerating product iteration, but the flexibility and scalability of the new core system will also assist Airstar Bank in dynamically adjusting resources to meet future business expansion and peak customer flow demands. In view of all this, we strive to build a more agile digital bank supported by cloud technology.” 

Airstar Bank adopted a layered architecture design to maintain the highest levels of security, utilizing partition isolation based on its unique business characteristics. Combined with Tencent Cloud’s comprehensive security product capabilities, they built a security protection system at key nodes to safeguard bank data comprehensively. The bank’s business data retrieval is also enhanced by integrating content acceleration and edge security through an edge security acceleration platform.

The financial industry, especially the banking sector, has very high requirements for the stability and security of IT systems. In terms of disaster recovery architecture, Tencent Cloud designed a multi-layer business disaster recovery architecture system for Airstar Bank, covering traffic access, business applications, and data storage. The overall system achieved a cross-AZ dual-active disaster recovery architecture, ensuring second-level rapid switching in the event of extreme failures. Relying on Tencent Cloud’s observability platform, they monitored the operational status of all business nodes in real time.

During the cloud migration process, phased data migration proved to be critical. Each stage of the process needed to be completed quickly within a limited time window to ensure that various bank businesses were not affected. Tencent Cloud provided the tools and expert services to help Airstar Bank adapt and implement the migration effectively with limited disruptions. During the critical database migration phase, an assessment tool helps to first generate a report, which allows the bank to evaluate its business workload. After completing code refactoring, data synchronization is carried out using Tencent Cloud’s DBbridge migration tool, ultimately switching business traffic to the cloud. The success rate of the overall cloud migration reached 100%, with no occurrence of business fallback or data rollback issues.

After completing the full cloud migration, Airstar Bank has seen significant improvements in high-performance data processing capabilities, along with a reduction in resource costs and the workload and complexity of infrastructure maintenance—estimated to lead to annual cost savings worth millions in the future. Additionally, the business systems can now fully leverage the diverse enterprise-grade commercial products available in the cloud to replace self-built open-source product components, significantly enhancing development efficiency and enabling agile application iterations and rapid responses to market changes.

About Tencent Cloud:

Tencent Cloud, one of the world’s leading cloud companies, is committed to creating innovative solutions to resolve real-world issues and enabling digital transformation for smart industries. Through our extensive global infrastructure, Tencent Cloud provides businesses across the globe with stable and secure industry-leading cloud products and services, leveraging technological advancements such as cloud computing, Big Data analytics, AI, IoT, and network security. It is our constant mission to meet the needs of industries across the board, including the fields of gaming, media and entertainment, finance, healthcare, property, retail, travel, and transportation.

About Airstar Bank:

Airstar Bank is a digital bank in Hong Kong with Xiaomi Corporation and Futu Group as its key shareholders. The Bank upholds the virtue of financial inclusion by making cutting edge digital banking services accessible at our customers’ fingertips. Airstar Bank has become a licensed bank under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority since May 9, 2019.

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SOURCE Tencent Cloud

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SiriusXM Declares Quarterly Cash Dividend

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NEW YORK, July 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — SiriusXM (NASDAQ: SIRI) today announced that its Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.27 per share of common stock. This regular quarterly dividend is payable in cash on August 26, 2026, to stockholders of record at the close of business on August 10, 2026.

About Sirius XM Holdings Inc.
SiriusXM is the leading audio entertainment company in North America with a portfolio of audio businesses including its flagship subscription entertainment service SiriusXM; the ad-supported and premium music streaming services of Pandora; an expansive podcast network; and a suite of business and advertising solutions. Together, SiriusXM reaches a combined monthly audience of approximately 255 million listeners. SiriusXM offers a broad range of content for listeners everywhere they tune in with a diverse mix of live, on-demand, and curated programming across music, talk, news, and sports. For more about SiriusXM, please go to: www.siriusxm.com.

Source: SiriusXM

Investor contacts:
Jennifer DiGrazia
investor.relations@siriusxm.com 

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SOURCE Sirius XM Holdings Inc.

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Shutterstock Announces Capital Allocation Update

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NEW YORK, July 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK) (the “Company”), a family of brands delivering scalable creative and GenAI solutions to help customers fuel great work, today announced that at a meeting held on July 20, 2026 its Board of Directors (the “Board”) resolved to suspend the Company’s future quarterly cash dividend.

The Board’s determination reflects its ongoing review of the Company’s capital-allocation priorities and its focus on deploying capital to support long-term value creation for shareholders, including reducing debt, minimizing related interest expense and strengthening financial flexibility.

The Board will continue to evaluate the Company’s capital allocation priorities as part of its regular governance process. Any future declaration and payment of dividends, and the amount thereof, will remain subject to the discretion of the Board and will depend upon the Company’s results of operations, financial condition, capital requirements, contractual restrictions, applicable law, and such other factors as the Board deems relevant.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may discuss intentions and expectations as to future plans, trends, events, results of operations or financial condition, or otherwise. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made and should not be relied upon as predictions of future events, as there can be no assurance that the events or circumstances reflected in these statements will occur. Forward-looking statements can often, but not always, be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology including “believes,” “could,” “expects,” “intends,” “may,” “might,” “ongoing,” “plans,” “seeks,” “should,” “will,”  or the negative of these words and phrases, other variations of these words and phrases or comparable terminology, but not all forward-looking statements include such identifying words. Forward-looking statements are based upon current plans, estimates and expectations that are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may differ materially from those indicated or anticipated by such forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this press release relate to, among other things, the Company’s capital allocation strategy, the suspension of the Company’s quarterly cash dividend, the Company’s plans with respect to debt reduction, interest expense management and financial flexibility, and any future declaration and payment of dividends. For a discussion of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by forward-looking statements, see the sections captioned “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, the Company’s Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, and the Company’s other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While those factors are considered representative, no list of risk factors should be considered a complete statement of all potential risks and uncertainties. Unlisted factors may present significant additional obstacles to the realization of forward-looking statements. The Company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements, and the Company disclaims any such obligation, except as may be required by law.

About Shutterstock
Shutterstock is in the business of turning ideas into impact. Powered by a global network of millions of creators and our cutting-edge technology, we provide businesses, creatives, and brand leaders with the essential, universal ingredients to make their work more effective. Shutterstock offers access to one of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of high-quality licensable assets, specialized training datasets, evaluation tools, and end-to-end strategic partnerships for the full model training lifecycle, as well as advertising and distribution solutions, exclusive editorial content, and full-service studio production—delivering unparalleled resources to fuel great work.

Discover our impact at www.shutterstock.com and connect with us on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook and YouTube.

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SOURCE Shutterstock, Inc.

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ICI Welcomes Bipartisan Sponsors of Bill to Stop States from Seizing Long-Term Investors’ Savings

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WASHINGTON, July 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Investment Company Institute released the following Viewpoints blog. To learn more about why this issue matters and how the SAFER Act would help protect American investors, watch our video on LinkedIn.

Millions of American investors have adopted the advice given by financial advisors to invest for the long term and then leave those savings alone. In some states, however, following this guidance can get your account seized. That was the warning sounded at an event featuring the sponsors of the bipartisan SAFER Act, Representatives Sam Liccardo (D-CA) and Mike Lawler (R-NY), who joined ICI leaders to make the case for a federal solution to the problem of state unclaimed property laws that can treat buy-and-hold investors as though they have disappeared. 

ICI President and CEO Eric Pan opened the event by outlining the nature of this growing threat. More than 128 million Americans invest in regulated funds, many with the intention of holding them for years, following the advice of many financial educators to “stay in the market, invest for the long term.” They put their money away and go about their lives, confident that the savings will be there when they need it. But under some states’ laws, an account that shows no activity can be declared abandoned and taken into state custody through a process called escheatment.

Pan walked through what seizure means in practice. When a state escheats an investment account, it typically liquidates the holdings — so even an investor who eventually recovers the money gets back only what the account was worth at seizure, with no credit for years of market gains. For retirement accounts, the forced liquidation can also trigger unforeseen tax consequences. And recovering the money at all can take years of paperwork and persistence. Meanwhile, some states are moving in the wrong direction, loosening their rules to make it easier to capture assets. 

“This is where the leadership of Congressmen Lawler and Liccardo is so important,” Pan said. “They’ve introduced the SAFER Act, a federal solution to a problem that exists across the United States. This patchwork of different legal standards, and the fact that the legal standards change constantly, creates a lot of confusion and creates this risk and harm that we’re so worried about.” 

In a panel discussion, the two lawmakers described the issue as an obvious place for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground, given Americans’ widespread use of investment accounts for saving.

“We are, for the most part, a group of Americans who sit on our investments, which is more or less the right strategy,” Liccardo said, noting that this is exactly the approach that inactivity standards put at risk. 

Liccardo pointed to the widely reported case of Walter Schramm, an investor who bought Amazon shares in the late 1990s and then did what many long-term investors do: leave the account be. Delaware deemed the account abandoned and liquidated the shares in 2008, when they worth about $8,000. By the time Schramm discovered what happened years later, the position would have been worth roughly $100,000.

The financial incentives driving state behavior are a concern, Liccardo noted. Unclaimed property has become one of Delaware’s largest sources of revenue, bringing in more than half a billion dollars a year — a powerful reason for states to loosen their standards rather than tighten them. 

Lawler contrasted legitimate unclaimed property programs and what some states are doing now. “It’s one thing to get an asset because it’s truly abandoned,” he said. “It’s another to basically target a group of investors who have a long-term strategy of just not touching the asset and being passive.”

The right standard, Lawler argued, is the obvious one: before seizing investment assets, a state should have to prove the owner is actually deceased. He posited that most Americans would be shocked to learn how little protection they have. “You think you have ownership of this asset, but the state, under current law, can just take it.”

The SAFER Act would establish federal guardrails ensuring that inactivity alone cannot be the basis for escheatment and that states confirm the death of an owner and that no estate or beneficiary has claimed the assets before escheating investment accounts. It would also require states to leave unclaimed investments in place, rather than liquidating them, until they can prove abandonment.

Both lawmakers said the path to fixing the problem is through public awareness of the threat some state laws pose to Americans financial security. “Ultimately the American people will rise up,” Liccardo said. “It may take a little while. We just have to get the information to them.”

Contact: media@ici.org 

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SOURCE Investment Company Institute

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