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Fair Finance Asia Calls on Banks to End Coal Financing in ASEAN and Strengthen Social Safeguards

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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, Aug. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Fair Finance Asia (FFA) and Influencing Just Energy Transition in the ASEAN (I-JET) call on banks and investors to stop financing coal expansion and strengthen social safeguards.

In a new report, Phasing out Coal, Phasing in Justice: Roadmap for Financing a Responsible Regional Coal Phase-out in Asia, FFA and I-JET assess the transition landscape in Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines, and Thailand, and in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), more broadly.

While ASEAN member states have introduced coal moratoriums, updated Nationally Determined Contributions, early-retirement plans for coal-fired power plants, green taxonomies, and carbon pricing, the report finds that these still fall short of a Paris-aligned 1.5°C pathway.

International coal finance restrictions have expanded, yet funding persists through corporate lending and upstream mining. Meanwhile, liquefied natural gas (LNG) is being positioned as a bridge fuel despite high costs, price volatility, stranded assets, and fossil fuel lock-in.

To achieve a credible, just phase-out, the report recommends:

No new coal development, including for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital demand.Time-bound, enforceable phase-out plans with zero unabated coal.Permanent retirement or conversion of all units, with site remediation.An end to coal financing, including for false solutions.Binding just transition commitments.

The report also calls for strong social safeguards:

Income support, reskilling, and decent green jobs for affected workers.Meaningful participation, free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), and secure land rights for Indigenous Peoples.Gender-responsive policies.Protection of civic space and environmental and human rights defenders.

Bernadette Victorio, Program Lead, Fair Finance Asia, said: “The test is not only whether coal-fired power plants close, but whether the energy transition reduces inequality by protecting the rights and amplifying the voices of workers, communities, women and Indigenous Peoples.”

Shubert Ciencia, Energy Justice and ASEAN Influencing Program Manager, Oxfam in Asia, said: “The ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation (APAEC) 2026-2030 signals ASEAN’s intent to accelerate decarbonization while maintaining energy security. Member states must now restrict investment in existing coal projects and prohibit new ones.”

Victoria Fanggidae, Executive Director, The PRAKARSA, said: “Climate commitments are meaningless if financial flows continue to support coal. Indonesian financial institutions must stop enabling coal expansion, redirect capital to renewable energy, and embed human rights and just transition principles in financing decisions.”

Genalyn Arcayera-Aquino, Economic Rights Program Manager, Initiatives for Dialogue and Empowerment through Alternative Legal Services (IDEALS), said: “Fossil fuel incentives without a clear phase-out plan create a chicken-and-egg problem: reliance on imported fuels keeps electricity costs high and delays a domestic renewable energy industry.”

Yuki Tanabe, Program Director, Japan Center for a Sustainable Environment and Society (JACSES), said: “Governments should drive early retirement of coal-fired power plants with stricter environmental regulations and higher taxes on coal generation.”

Read the report: bit.ly/4wsaWt7

Media contacts:

Kyle Cruz

Influencing and Campaigning Manager

Fair Finance Asia

kylejuliene.cruz@oxfam.org

Shubert Ciencia

Energy Justice and ASEAN Influencing Program Manager

Oxfam in Asia

shubert.ciencia@oxfam.org

About Fair Finance Asia

FFA is a regional network of Asian civil society organizations working to ensure that financial institutions’ funding decisions respect the social and environmental well-being of the communities where they operate. Learn more: fairfinanceasia.org

About Influencing Just Energy Transition in ASEAN

I-JET is a multi-country initiative advancing a gender-just and socially inclusive energy transition. Learn more: https://x.com/ijet_project

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SOURCE Fair Finance Asia

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Customer-Centric “Huawei + Partners” Collaboration System Launched to Scale AI Across Industries

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SHANGHAI, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Leo Chen, Huawei’s Senior Vice President and President of Enterprise Sales, announced the new SCALE partner support system during his “Scaling All Intelligence for Industry Success” keynote address. Huawei intends to use this new system to equip partners with the capabilities they need to help customers move intelligent transformation from individual pilots to large-scale adoption. Chen also shared new insights and practices Huawei has developed on intelligent industry benchmarks.

Chen stated, “The intelligent era is approaching fast. Huawei works with partners to provide products and solutions that solve real business problems. We want to share our own capabilities with partners. By empowering partners, they can bring their unique strengths to bear, and help customers move from compute construction to intelligent application. Huawei is fully committed to helping our customer-centric ‘Huawei + Partners’ collaboration system thrive. We want to help partners solve customer issues more efficiently and help customers achieve large-scale AI adoption.”

Partners face five challenges when scaling intelligent industry projects: solution development, integration verification, solution delivery, O&M, and system collaboration. To help partners overcome these challenges, the SCALE partner support system offers five types of support: Scenario-based Solutions, Co-innovation, Aligned Marketing, Local Services, Consistent Quality, and Efficient Collaboration. These enhanced support offerings provide partners with systematic support from solution development, verification, launch, delivery, and operations, helping them move from benchmark intelligent projects to large-scale AI adoption.

Scenario-based Solutions: Huawei provides open, easy-to-integrate AI foundation products that partners can use to rapidly develop new solutions. These products cover compute, storage, networks, security, and data protection, and include the new SMECE and the DCS AI Solution that help partners more efficiently convert their industry know-how into feasible intelligent solutions. Huawei’s partners have used these products to develop more than 100 scenario-based solutions for eight industries that accelerate AI adoption.

Co-innovation: To help partners replicate benchmark experience and validate solution integration more efficiently, Huawei has opened up its reference architectures and verification environments. This includes the reference architectures for 48 high-value scenarios that partners can refer when designing solutions, setting up test environments, developing applications, and performing debugging and verification. Besides, Huawei provides unified interfaces and development and verification tools through its cloud-based OpenLab to make solution more efficient.

Aligned Marketing: Huawei is committed to helping its partners identify customer needs, launch new solutions, and make standout solutions more visible, verifiable, and replicable so customers can quickly find the solutions they want. Huawei has opened up its Market-to-Lead (MTL) process capabilities to partners and worked together to effectively bring customer-facing solutions to market. Huawei has launched solutions alongside partners, showcased standout solutions at Huawei’s booths and exhibition halls, and built industry showcases with customers. These efforts have enabled customers to better understand the value of solutions and actual validation results. Huawei has worked with partners to build more than 130 showcases with customers globally.

Local Service, Consistent Quality: Huawei is expanding and localizing its partner services, so that partners can offer customers the same high-quality service as Huawei. Partners can access the knowledge, tools, expertise, and service experience through Huawei’s O3 Partner Service Enablement Platform. Huawei offers talent development and certification programs for various service roles, which have been used to cultivate more than 50,000 AI professionals over the past 3 years.

Efficient Collaboration: Huawei provides two one-stop intelligent platforms for partners that simplify the way they work with Huawei. These platforms (HUAWEI eFly and HUAWEI ePartner) serve as unified portals that help partners navigate Huawei’s processes, and provide partners with the data they need to carry out one-stop marketing, transaction, and service operations. Partners gain access to the documentation, tools, IT interfaces, and AI-assisted configuration and intelligent Q&A tools, that help make serving customers more efficiently.

Chen said, “In the era of true intelligence, scaling proven practices across industries will allow more companies to thrive. Industrial intelligence is creating unprecedented opportunities, and Huawei wants to work with our customers and partners to deploy successful benchmarks at scale, and bring the benefits of AI to more industries, organizations, and people.”

SOURCE HUAWEI

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Soach Global Set for Nearly 25x Gains in Partial Exit from National Stock Exchange

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Fund to sell 20% of its decade-old stake in NSE’s IPO; remaining 80% to be held as a long-term investment

MUMBAI, India, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Soach Global Strategic Holdings Limited, Mauritius, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Soach Global Opportunities Fund (together, “Soach Global”), is part exiting from its decade-long investment in the National Stock Exchange of India Limited (“NSE”). The Fund is selling through the offer for sale in NSE’s initial public offering, which opened today.

The Fund acquired 1,50,000 NSE equity shares from Industrial Finance Corporation of India Limited (IFCI) in January 2016 at ₹3,950 per share, aggregating ₹59.25 crore. Over the following decade, the holding multiplied to 82,50,000 shares through corporate actions, without any additional investment. Adjusted for these corporate actions, the Fund’s average acquisition cost is ₹71.8 per share.

The Fund is now selling 16,50,000 equity shares, which is 20% of its holding, at the IPO price band of ₹1,700 to ₹1,785 per share, valuing the sale at approximately ₹280 to ₹295 crore. This realises nearly five times the Fund’s entire original investment, a return of roughly 25x. The Fund will continue to hold 66,00,000 shares, 80% of its position, valued at approximately ₹1,120 to ₹1,180 crore at the price band.

“Bharat is a fast-growing economy with a large number of growth-aspiring youngsters who are quickly learning the risks and rewards of participating in capital markets. We are participating in the offer for sale and selling a partial stake of what we own because we would like to see a large number of the mass retail population hold some stake of NSE. As these retail investors buy small stakes in NSE, directly or indirectly through mutual funds, they will also benefit from the growth of NSE, the same way we have by buying our stake over ten years ago. Of India’s 1.4 billion people, only about 130 million are registered investors on NSE, and that is the opportunity,” said Anubhav Dayal, Founder & Director, Soach Global Opportunities Fund.

“In our country, we have a culture of buying gold at a festival or for a ceremony. Gold, once purchased by a family, is held for a long time, even generations. It is sold only when in desperate need of money. Retail buyers can compare shares of NSE with buying gold. As a multi-asset-class trading platform, NSE will book growth in revenue while operating at a fixed cost, most of it already incurred. It is a high-technology platform settling trades in nanoseconds, and a multi-asset-class exchange: equity, commodities, electricity futures, bond index futures and coal. As India develops, the list of tradable products will only increase, adding to revenues on a largely fixed cost base. This will reflect in its price per share post-listing. This is a one-way partial exit and we have no plans of re-entering,” he added.

About Anubhav Dayal

Anubhav has over 20 years of experience in banking and investment advisory. He started his career with HSBC Group in India, gaining experience across multiple areas of banking, before moving to Hong Kong to manage HSBC’s Non-Resident Indian business for Asia-Pacific. After over nine years with the HSBC Group, he joined Societe Generale Bank and Trust, Hong Kong, as Director, Marketing, a position he held for over five years.

Beyond his work with Soach Global, Anubhav is engaged with India’s capital market innovation ecosystem. He participated in Manthan Ideathon, organised by SEBI in association with NSE, BSE, NSDL, CDSL, NCDEX, MCX, Link Intime and other fintech companies, where his concept, the Virtual Food Grain Asset (VFGA), was a winning entry. He now plans to set up a VFGA exchange platform at Gujarat International Finance Tec-City Company (GIFT City), enabling teams of farmers to sell tokenised food grain assets to overseas buyers, with transparent global price discovery and foreign currency proceeds that add to India’s FX reserves.

Anubhav holds a Master of Laws (LL.M.) in Corporate and Financial Law from The University of Hong Kong, a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) from the University of Delhi, a Professional Certificate in FinTech from The University of Hong Kong, a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from Amity Business School, NOIDA, and a B.Sc. (Statistics Honours) from Hindu College, University of Delhi.

About Soach Global Opportunities Fund

Soach Global Opportunities Fund, Mauritius, is the parent of Soach Global Strategic Holdings Limited, Mauritius, its 100% investment-holding subsidiary, which holds the Fund’s 82,50,000 equity shares in NSE.

About Soach Global

Soach Global Corporation Limited is a Hong Kong based group with interests in fund management and advisory. The group focuses on businesses that enhance trade, commerce and long-term investment both in India and globally, and has ambitious plans to diversify into other fields of business that can thrive on Hong Kong’s position as a major international business and financial centre.

 

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EASE Automations Helps Modernize 300+ Collocations in $60 Million Annual Cost-Reduction Initiative

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EASE Automations supported a multi-year TDM modernization initiative designed to eliminate approximately $60 million in annual recurring leased transport costs.

CHICAGO, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — EASE Automations, a strategic telecommunications workforce, network transformation, and managed-services partner, announced the successful completion of a multi-year TDM Emulation initiative supporting a leading wholesale voice and Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider.

The program was designed to remove approximately $5 million per month in leased TDM transport expense, representing approximately $60 million in recurring annual cost once the targeted transport was retired.

The initiative began in 2023 and gained significant momentum in 2024 as EASE Automations expanded its role and team. From 2023 through 2025, EASE deployed a specialized team that grew to approximately 35–40 telecommunications professionals, taking on ownership across network provisioning, circuit design, implementation, carrier coordination, validation, and legacy transport retirement.

Across more than 300 collocation environments, EASE-supported professionals designed and provisioned the IP and TDM connectivity required to bring interconnections closer to the carrier edge, backhaul traffic over IP, and ultimately retire costly leased TDM transport.

The financial opportunity was significant. The program was designed to remove approximately $5 million per month in leased TDM transport expense, representing approximately $60 million in recurring annual cost once the targeted transport was retired.

“Modernizing a carrier network is not simply about installing new technology,” said Stan Scott, Managing Director of EASE Automations. “The real work is making every interconnection, carrier order, provisioning dependency, activation, and cutover line up without disrupting the business. EASE Automations built and sustained a team that could operate in that complexity at scale.”

Throughout the engagement, EASE professionals worked across carrier organizations, internal engineering teams, vendor systems, and network operations to move locations from design through activation. The team brought expertise in carrier-scale network provisioning, circuit design and order management, TDM-to-IP enablement, implementation coordination, network validation, and legacy transport retirement.

Just as important was continuity. As EASE’s role expanded, its professionals developed significant institutional knowledge of the client’s network, provisioning processes, carrier relationships, and operational dependencies. Maintaining that expertise helped sustain execution as the transformation progressed.

The initiative demonstrates EASE Automations’ ability to provide more than individual technical resources. By assembling and sustaining specialized telecommunications teams, EASE helps clients execute complex network transformation initiatives while maintaining the knowledge, coordination, and operational control required to move projects forward.

About EASE Automations

EASE Automations is a strategic telecommunications workforce, network transformation, and managed-services partner. EASE combines specialized carrier-domain knowledge with sustained execution to help organizations modernize complex networks while maintaining operational control.

For more information, visit easeautomations.com.

Media Contact

Stan Scott, EASE Automations, 1 (312) 803-4808, sscott@easeautomations.com, https://easeautomations.com/

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SOURCE EASE Automations

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