The investment was led by Abu Dhabi-based Further Ventures, along with participation by US-based Liberty City Ventures.
CEO believes the Middle East is the perfect home to establish a digital assets infrastructure business.
Abu Dhabi-headquartered Fuze has raised a $14 million Seed round, the largest investment in a digital assets startup in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).
Fuze enables any bank, fintech or traditional enterprise to easily offer regulated digital assets products to their customers through their native apps.
The investment was led by Abu Dhabi-based Further Ventures, along with participation by US-based Liberty City Ventures.
Fuze will benefit from the strategic capital and network of these investors, acting as a catalyst for the business as it builds the digital asset infrastructure that will drive the future of finance.
Mideast: A perfect home
With a regional digital asset market worth $566 billion, and growing at 48 per cent year on year, Mohammed Ali Yusuf, Fuze co-founder and CEO, believes the Middle East is the perfect home to establish a digital assets infrastructure business.
“We are excited to build the future of regulated financial infrastructure and digital assets out of the UAE. Regulations have played a pivotal role in propelling the UAE into a central position within the global Digital Assets industry.”
Fuze was founded in December 2022 and selected earlier this year to join Hub71, Abu Dhabi’s global tech ecosystem through its Company Building Program.
“We are building a suite of products that addresses the growing demand for regulated digital asset capabilities through trusted channels. Our technology first approach is a game-changer for the region and offers our customers a reliable bridge to the new era of investments and to the future of finance,” Yusuf said.
S&T clusters in certain emerging economies grew at a particularly fast pace, including Brazil, India, Turkey and, beyond the top 100, in Argentina, Egypt, Thailand and others.
East Asia houses the world’s five biggest science and technology (S&T) clusters in the world, according to an early release from the 2023 edition of WIPO’s Global Innovation Index (GII).
Tokyo-Yokohama (Japan) leads as the largest global S&T cluster, followed by Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou (China and Hong Kong, China), Seoul (Republic of Korea), followed by China’s Beijing and Shanghai-Suzhou clusters.
All five top clusters are in East Asia, with the San Jose-San Francisco cluster in the US at number six.
“Science and technology clusters are among the most-critical components for the innovation performance of any economy. By bringing science, businesses and entrepreneurs together, these cities or regions are able to build an ecosystem that translates scientific ideas into on-the-ground impact,” Daren Tang, Director General of WIPO, said in a statement.
Moreover, he said that it is also heartening to see that these S&T clusters are growing at a particularly fast pace in emerging economies.
The Cambridge cluster in the United Kingdom and San Jose-San Francisco, CA in the United States are found to be intensive S&T activity, in proportion to population density, followed by Oxford (UK), Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Boston–Cambridge (US).
This year, the GII identifies 24 S&T clusters in China, up from the 21 last year, as the country boasting the greatest number of clusters, with Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou, Beijing Shanghai–Suzhou, and Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou and Nanjing leading.
The US has 21 among the top 100, Germany 9, and Japan, Canada, India and the Republic of Korea each have 4, with San Jose–San Francisco leading for the US, Munich for Germany, Tokyo-Yokohama for Japan, Toronto for Canada, Bengaluru for India, and Seoul for the Republic of Korea.
S&T clusters located in other middle-income economies besides China also saw strong S&T output growth, notably in India which has four top S&T clusters, with Chennai and Bengaluru experiencing the biggest increases in density of inventors and scientific authors.
S&T clusters in certain emerging economies grew at a particularly fast pace, including Brazil, India, Turkey and, beyond the top 100, in Argentina, Egypt, Thailand and others.
Skogstad’s advice to other auto industry leaders is to iterate fast and don’t be afraid to fail.
The potential for gen AI across many different sectors is clear, with an expected annual impact of around $6 trillion to $8 trillion.
Mercedes CEO says that the data stays within Mercedes, with you and your car and none of it is shared back with OpenAI or ChatGPT.
Gen AI has been front and centre since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, although the technology already existed for many years.
Gen AI burst into our lives earlier this year with ChatGPT. Whether you played with a toast or a roast or planned your vacation using this powerful technology, it had been around for the past six or seven years.
It started in December 2017 with a transformer model, the “T” in GPT, coming from Google, and has evolved since then.
Over the last few months, there’s been a lot of debate about how gen AI will impact different industries, our way of working, and our way of life.
Mercedes-Benz is the first automotive manufacturer to integrate ChatGPT in their vehicles, which is currently being beta-tested with 900,000 users.
How did the idea come?
Philipp Skogstad, CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D North America, said in a podcast to McKinsey & Company that “we’ve always been a leader, and we continue to carry that tradition forward.”
Philipp Skogstad, CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D North America.
“ChatGPT’s latest version came out at the end of last year, and it was already installed in my car just after the New Year, in time to demonstrate it at CES [the Consumer Electronics Show] in January, where it met the approval of the chief technology officer for all of Mercedes.”
In February, they showed it to influencers, analysts, and media from around the world, and the feedback was very, very positive.
“That encouraged us to bring this technology to our customers. And we wouldn’t be Mercedes if we didn’t do it quickly but also responsibly. We’re very glad our culture enabled us to be the first by iterating early on, installing it in my car, and then rolling it out in a beta program,” Skogstad said.
US customers opted in eithervia their Mercedes app or from their car, where they can just say, “Hey Mercedes, I wanted to join the ChatGPT beta program.”
At that point, Hey Mercedes voice assistant will continue to deliver all your navigation and vehicle control functions you’re used to but draw on a broader domain via ChatGPT technology.
Customer in mind
“We have united but divergent pieces of software and hardware and need to make sure the two always connect, which is a key part of my responsibility. And in this case, it was a bootstrapped effort involving many teams,” Skogstad said.
However, he said that enabling the beta program required changes in the app, as well as bringing in legal and data security colleagues.
As this effort evolved, Mercedes kept iterating and keeping the customer in mind.
“There was always this very clear focus, and I thought, we have a great feature. We’ve seen it work in my car. Let’s have as many customers as possible benefit from this as quickly as possible.” We launched in the US, but we’re not going to stop here,” Skogstad said.
“I sometimes need to remind the team that even though we have something really good, we should keep iterating to make it better. For those of us familiar with software, especially cloud software, that’s the culture of having a fixed release cycle and a need to get something out there very quickly.”
But what’s important with all this, he said is to ensure that customers’ safety first and foremost—their physical safety as well as their digital safety.
Moreover, he said that handling customer data responsibly is key to ensuring the privacy of the customers throughout the entire process.
Transformational impact
Skogstad said that it will have an transformational impact on all parts of the work, personal lives, and “how we interact with each other and our cars. Right now, we’ve implemented ChatGPT through voice. We’re seeing more and more intelligent assistants all around us in our lives, and we want the car to be part of that.”
According to McKinsey, the potential for gen AI across many different sectors is clear, with an expected annual impact of around $6 trillion to $8 trillion.
But McKinsey mentioned in a recent article that 75 per cent of the value of gen AI in specific use cases falls under four major areas: customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering and R&D.
Ben Ellencweig, senior partner and global leader of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, said that the industry is moving at a laser-speed pace and it’s just going faster and faster but “we have to remember this is early days of the first innings.”
“We’re all going to have virtual assistants writing memos and preparing us for meetings. They’re also going to be composing music, whether it’s a new song by the Beatles or anything else.”
But what’s interesting, he said is to look at the holistic ecosystem beyond the consumer and think about the technician that services your car when you bring it to the dealer.
Gen AI can guide the technician, to identify the problem and quickly pinpoint how to solve that problem, he said.
Driving change
“I think humans will always need to stay in the loop, and human intelligence will always be a key,” Skogstad said.
AIis a key enabler, he said and added that there is a transformation underway, and all of us like to drive change.
“People want to drive change, but they don’t want to be changed. So the key here is to let people drive this transformation and to give them access to generative AI so they can play with it themselves.”
Mercedes has been enabling developers to use sandbox environments so their data stays within the company.
“We want them to try out the technology in a safe way and iterate their way forward like we did when we introduced ChatGPT to our cars. I think then we’ll be able to automate a lot of the tedious tasks currently preventing us from doing more value-added activities,” he said.
Regarding safety, he said that safety is absolutely a key for Mercedes and a cornerstone of their reputation.
“Whether you are talking about physical or digital safety, both need to be treated with the utmost importance. So if you look at how we use ChatGPT, the data stays within Mercedes, with you and your car. It’s in our Microsoft cloud, which your other vehicle data isn’t. But everything is exactly disclosed in terms of what goes where in our permissions.”
None of it is shared back with OpenAI or ChatGPT, so it cannot be used to train it for future answers, he said to avoid data leakage.
“The same holds for our internal projects. We’re using the same rules for our data as we do for our customer data to make sure it doesn’t escape.”
Gen AI needs proper training
Ellencweig said that this is a new technology and a whole new paradigm.
“We’re still learning it as a society, as enterprises, and in the automotive ecosystem. We like to talk about responsible AI, but generative AI is not perfect. You’ve probably all heard of gen AI hallucinations, which is when ChatGPT completely fabricates information. The models are so sophisticated and the answers are presented in such a profound way that you take it as a solid fact or a truth.
But many times, he said the large language model, on which gen AI chatbots like ChatGPT are based, is just wrong.
Maybe it wasn’t trained properly, or you’re asking something relatively new the model is still learning, he said but there’s also a question of how you train the model, and “we’ve seen issues with biases based on the training material used for the model.”
In terms of ethical use, he said let’s not forget that at the end of the day, underlying the models is a whole host of structured and unstructured data that you need to think about how to manage.
And obviously, “we’re connecting our system to other organisations in the outside world, which also poses a risk. We’re seeing two approaches, with some organisations blocking access to gen AI completely, while others are enabling it out in the open.”
In terms of responsible use of AI, “I would make two points. One, establish clear guidelines for your customers and employees, and be responsible, especially when it comes to what we like to call explainability.
“Point number two is providing clear disclaimers, explaining that this is all based solely on public knowledge plus some private, enterprise knowledge, which has a huge impact on the level of accuracy or confidence in a given answer.”
Rapid iteration
Responsible use of AI includes legal and ethical implications, and “we must realise we’re still learning how to use this phenomenal technology that will disrupt every aspect of life. And sometimes, humans are not exactly fully accurate either, so it’s a journey,” Ellencweig said.
Mercedes’long-term vision is to make the car part of a person’s digital and physical life.
“Mercedes stands for luxury and technology, and I think what that means will continue to evolve. Installing ChatGPT in the car is one step, very iteratively done, and will continue to evolve from there over many, many increments.”
Skogstad’s advice to other auto industry leaders is to iterate fast and don’t be afraid to fail.
“You’re going to learn a whole lot more from failing than succeeding. And that’s the beauty of fast iteration since every failure is only a small failure, not a big one. That’s why I’m so fond of rapid iteration but be responsible. In each case, think through the worst-case scenario, and treat your customer data and safety responsibly.”
Moreover, Mercedes’s slogan is “the best or nothing.”
Samsung is expected to lead the pack this year with 68%, followed by Huawei with 14%, Oppo with 5% and Xiaomi with 4%.
If more Chinese brands pivot and ramp up their global sales game, they might just turbocharge the foldable market’s growth trajectory.
Shipments of foldable smartphones could skyrocket 43 per cent year on year to an 18.3 million units this year, but it only captures a slim 1.6 per cent of the year’s total smartphone market.
Research firm TrendForce said that the shipments are expected to surge by 38 per cent in 2024 to 25.2 million units and by five per cent in 2027 to reach 70 million units.
Even though Samsung, Huawei, Motorola, Google, Vivo, Xiaomi and Oppo have launched foldable phones, other big Chinese brands haven’t joined the bandwagon yet.
When other big Chinese players join the bandwagon, the costs come down – especially panel and hinge expenses—and then the foldable phone prices is likely to potentially slide below the $1,000 threshold.
This year, Samsung once again led the pack, with projections pointing toward a robust 12.5 million unit shipment. But there’s a twist. Its stronghold, a staggering 82 per cent market share in 2022, may slip to 68 per cent this year.
The leaders
It’s because of the surging tidal wave of foldables from Chinese contenders. Huawei clinched the runner-up spot, estimated to have dispatched around 2.5 million foldables for a respectable 14 per cent of the market share.
Hot on their heels were Oppo and Xiaomi, with market shares of five per cent and four per cent, respectively. Other brands have each snagged less than per cent.
TrendForce sheds light on the fact that Chinese foldable brands, impacted by recent global events, have mostly kept their eyes on home turf, eschewing aggressive overseas expansion.
However, if these brands pivot and ramp up their global sales game, they might just turbocharge the foldable market’s growth trajectory.
And then, there’s Apple—the enigmatic juggernaut. To date, Apple’s foray into foldables has been tepid, to say the least. This restraint has undoubtedly doused consumer fervor for foldable.
Yet, true to form, Apple’s unwavering obsession with user experience could be the culprit. Persistent challenges with foldable tech—think panel evenness and hinge design—might be holding them back.
But here’s the kicker: Achieving perfection with larger foldable panels is somewhat simpler than their smaller counterparts. Could this mean Apple might leapfrog right into medium-sized foldable products—like laptops or tablets? Only time will tell.
IDC says that iOS is set to reach its highest share of the worldwide smartphone market this year at 20 per cent while Android will decline six per cent year on year in 2023.
The success of Apple’s Pro/ProMax models has helped Apple gain a share in the premium segment.
Which country is the cheapest place to buy Apple’s iPhone 15 that are set to hit the shelves on September 22 this year?
Apple unveiled the iPhone’s 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max devices with different colours and the pre-orders start on September 15th.
The highlight was the Pro model, which is made of titanium frame, the lightest material that Apple has ever built.
The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus models are powered by last year’s A16 Bionic ship while the Pro models are powered by an A17 chip.
The cheapest place to buy the devices is in the US (see table), followed by China and Canada. The price comparison is for the base models and without taxes.
The iPhone 15 series is available at different prices depending on the market.
However, the US devices only support eSIM. So, buying devices from the US may not work in certain countries due to the eSIM option and some features also may not work due to telecom regulations in those countries.
Ardit Ballhysa, Technology Analyst at GlobalData, said that eSIM, while largely underutilised worldwide despite Apple claiming that over 190 carriers support it globally (as of July 2023), was made the default and only option for US consumers with the release of the iPhone 14 series. The same is the case for the iPhone 15 series.
“Perhaps an eSIM only iPhone fairs unfavourably via the perspective of consumers outside the US, or maybe carriers globally are just not ready for eSIM smartphones just yet. Maybe next year we’ll learn more.”
For the first time in over 10 years, he said that iPhone will get an updated charging port, replacing the lighting port with the universally used USB-C.
But, if not for the EU’s landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA), he said that Apple would have opted to continue using the lighting port for the foreseeable future.
“The USB-C on the iPhone highlights how influential the DMA ruling is, where not even the most valuable and arguably one of the most influential companies in the world is immune from it.
“Another key change pertains to the Pro model’s composition is that iPhones will feature a titanium enclosure, marking a move away from stainless steel first introduced on the iPhone X in 2017. While it is true that no other smartphone available on the market offers a titanium enclosure, making Apple the only smartphone OEM to do so, it is not true that it is the first to do so.”
Both the Essential Phone and Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha, he said offered titanium in their enclosures, but both were also discontinued, hence Apple being the only smartphone OEM to currently offer smartphones with titanium enclosures.
How will be the sales performance?
According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), the premium segment of the global smartphone market has grown 10pts since 2019 to 20 per cent share in the first half of 2023.
Within it, Apple holds a dominant 71 per cent share, significantly up from 63 per cent in 2019.
The success of Apple’s Pro/ProMax models has helped Apple gain share in premium, while Samsung is trying hard to regain lost premium share with a focus on its foldable and other flagship devices.
“With the expected hike in the price of iPhone 15 and new premium devices from Huawei, push of the foldables by Samsung, Apple’s premium growth in share will be challenged more now than ever,” Nabila Popal, research director for consumer devices at IDC, said.
TrendForce predicts a production figure of approximately 80 million units for the iPhone 15 series, which constitutes over 60 per cent of Apple’s new device production.
This represents a six per cent year-on-year growth, bouncing back from last year’s Foxconn-related production hiccups.
Popal said that iOS is set to reach its highest share of the worldwide smartphone market this year at 20 per cent.
Android will decline six per cent year on year in 2023 while iOS will grow by one per cent, all the more impressive as the overall market is forecast to decline 4.7 per cent year on year in 2023.
Popal said that it clearly demonstrates how Apple has been more resilient and Android has borne the brunt of the market decline in the last few years.
The worldwide sales of smartphones are forecast to decline 4.7 per cent year over year in 2023 to 1.15 billion units, the lowest volume in a decade.
Despite the lower forecast for 2023, IDC expects the market to recover in 2024 with 4.5 per cent year-over-year growth followed by growth in the low single digits through the remainder of the forecast, resulting in a five-year compound annual growth rate of 1.7 per cent.
While obstacles like data protection and regulatory adherence remain, they’re not poised to stall the swift advance of this technology in financial services.
Forging strategic alliances can be a pathway to harness the transformative potential of genAI, GlobalData says.
Generative AI (genAI) is quickly becoming a game-changer in the financial services sector in generating customised content and solutions are redefining how financial institutions interact with their customers and optimising their internal operations.
With the growing demand for personalised financial solutions, Kiran Raj, Practice Head of Disruptive Tech at GlobalData, said that genAI has a pivotal role in curating bespoke customer experiences.
“It is not about generic financial products anymore but crafting individualised strategies that align with each customer’s financial goals.”
Traditional banks such as JPMorgan and HSBC have already developed genAI-based tools that offer personalised financial advice to their customers.
Create predictive models
On the other hand, emerging fintechs such as Stripe and Cowbell are enhancing their end-user experience with genAI-powered tools.
“Harnessing the power of genAI to analyse intricate patterns in transaction histories and financial behaviours can create predictive models that not only anticipate customer needs but also craft targeted financial products and advisories. This has the potential to elevate customer service, optimise costs, and enhance overall user satisfaction.” Saurabh Daga, Associate Project Manager of Disruptive Tech at GlobalData, said.
Synthetic data is being used by financial service providers such as Provinzial Insurance and Wells Fargo to create predictive models to detect fraud as well as develop personalised offerings.
Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs are experimenting with genAI to automate some of their backend processes including banking software development and management of financial documents.
Daga said that implementing genAI in the sensitive landscape of financial services comes with its set of challenges.
“Issues surrounding data accuracy, ethical considerations, and privacy are paramount. However, with judicious governance, these hurdles can be surpassed. Forging strategic alliances can be a pathway to harness the transformative potential of genAI, ensuring they are equipped with the right technology, infrastructure, and talent to capitalise on this wave of innovation.”
