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US$ 15 million dollar loan from United States Government

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4 years ago

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STF Corporate Advisory has successfully managed to source and secure US$ 15 Million dollar loan from Washington based United States International Development Finance Corporation (US DFC)

25th May 2022, Colombo: STF Corporate Advisory has successfully managed to source and secure US$ 15 Million dollar loan from Washington based United States International Development Finance Corporation (US DFC), America’s development finance institution and agency of the United States federal government, for Sri Lanka based Colombo Stock Exchange listed company BPPL Holdings PLC.

BPPL Holdings PLC is one of Sri Lanka’s leading Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) compliant companies. BPPL collects waste plastic bottles, which would otherwise end up polluting the oceans, and convert them to recycled polyester, which are in turn used by international sportswear brands such as Nike and Decathlon. The Sri Lankan company was also recently ranked by prestigious Forbes Asia, as one of the top 200 companies in Asia under US$1 billion revenue in 2021.  

“We saw BPPL as a hidden gem in Sri Lanka, an icon of an ESG Company and a very well-run business silently doing a lot of good for the environment while also bringing in much needed dollars into the Sri Lankan economy by exporting the recycled polyester yarn. We wanted to help grow the business and took on the mandate to source and secure the capital funding required for its growth. We are glad to have helped BPPL finally secure a commitment of US$ 15 Million loan from US DFC despite the very challenging dollar-crunch crisis environment in Sri Lanka.” said Sanjana T. Fernando, Managing Director STF Corporate Advisory.

“STF Corporate Advisory came to us about a year ago with several ideas and strategies on capital raising for the growth of our Company. We were very impressed with their ability to very quickly bring a considerable number of high-profile international investors and lenders to the negotiation table, including sovereign wealth fund backed equity investors and several International Government backed Development Finance Corporations. STF understood the importance of Cost of Capital to the Company and always worked towards the best long-term interest of the Company. They negotiated and executed the transaction in a very professional manner. We are delighted to have had STF advise us on this transaction in these very challenging times, where international experience, execution and completion ability is key for a good debt advisor.” said Dr.  Anush Amarasinghe, BPPL Holdings PLC Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer.

The loan provided by DFC has a 10-year tenure with a three-year grace period and is subject to regulatory approvals.

STF Corporate Advisory, headed by Sanjana T. Fernando, is a Melbourne based Investment Banking Advisory firm with a focus on advising Sri Lankan based listed companies, mainly on M&A and debt and equity capital raising. In the past STF Corporate Advisory has worked with several Sri Lankan listed conglomerates including John Keells Holdings, Hayleys, LOLC Holdings and Browns Investments. Most recently it sourced and advised LOLC Holding’s Browns Investments on raising equity investment of US$ 30 Million from Spanish Hospitality Giant Barcelo Hotel Group.

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Business

Master Power Technologies Unveils R50m State-of-the-Art Customer Experience Centre at New Midrand Premises

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21 minutes ago

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July 20, 2026

By

Master Power Technologies

This milestone marks a significant step in the company’s continued expansion and commitment to advancing Africa’s data centre infrastructure

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, July 20, 2026/APO Group/ –Master Power Technologies (MPT) (https://kva.co.za/), a leading pan-African provider of turnkey data centre and critical power solutions, has unveiled its hi-tech Customer Experience Centre, also home to its new regional headquarters in Midrand.

Master Power Technologies Unveils R50m State-of-the-Art Customer Experience Centre at New Midrand Premises

This milestone marks a significant step in the company’s continued expansion and commitment to advancing Africa’s data centre infrastructure.

Founded in 1999 by electrical engineer Menno Parsons, MPT has grown from its origins as a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) provider into a diversified engineering firm that delivers end-to-end solutions for data centres across Africa and the Middle East. Today, MPT designs, manufactures, and assembles a wide range of products under its flagship brands, SURE and AIVA, tailored to withstand Africa’s demanding operational environments.

The new Midrand facility spans 6 000m2 and will serve as MPT’s African headquarters, housing approximately 200 employees. Strategically located between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the site is positioned close to major data centre hubs, ensuring accessibility for clients and partners.

Hands-on environment

At the heart of the launch is the Customer Experience Centre, a R50 million investment designed to showcase MPT’s engineering capabilities and provide a hands-on environment for customers, partners, and trainees. The centre features advanced test facilities, including a 2 MVA UPS test platform and a 400kW cooling systems test centre, which is the most comprehensive of its kind on the continent.

These facilities enable performance testing to European certification standards, offering clients confidence in the reliability and efficiency of MPT’s solutions, with the company having become the first African business to be officially certified as an Endorser of the European Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres in 2025.

The Experience Centre represents a new chapter for Master Power Technologies

“The Experience Centre represents a new chapter for Master Power Technologies. It’s about creating a space where customers can engage with our technology, see it in action, and understand the depth of our capabilities,” says MD and Founder of MPT Menno Parsons.

“This centre will be the most impressive UPS and cooling training facility in Africa, allowing our clients to touch, feel, and work with real systems in a way that has never been possible before.”

Commitment to local

The Experience Centre also highlights MPT’s commitment to local engineering and manufacturing. MPT assembles and engineers complete modular data centre and energy centre solutions within Africa. This approach reduces logistical risks, supports local industry, and ensures solutions are tailored to regional requirements.

Beyond technical demonstrations, the centre will serve as a hub for training and collaboration, equipping engineers and clients with practical knowledge to optimise data centre performance.

It also integrates MPT’s proprietary Advanced Infrastructure Visual Analytics (AIVA) monitoring platform, which manages and records metrics across more than 200 data centres in Africa, offering advanced analytics and operational insights.

“Our business has always been about more than just selling equipment. We engineer solutions for Africa, by Africa. This Experience Centre is a testament to that philosophy, which strengthens our ability to train, innovate and deliver world-class infrastructure while remaining rooted in local expertise,” says Parsons.

The launch of the Midrand offices and Experience Centre underscores MPT’s role as a trusted partner in Africa’s rapidly growing data centre sector. With demand for resilient, efficient, and scalable infrastructure on the rise, MPT’s investment positions the company to meet the evolving needs of clients across the continent and beyond.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Master Power Technologies.

 

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Events

Embracing an Intelligent Future: UnionPay Showcases AI Innovation at WAIC 2026

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23 minutes ago

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July 20, 2026

By

WAIC

Release of Phased Achievements of the National Pilot Base for AI Application (Financial Sector) Held Alongside the Conference

SHANGHAI, CHINA – Media OutReach Newswire – 20 July 2026 – On 17 July, the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) officially opened in Shanghai. UnionPay unveiled three proprietary AI technologies developed for the financial sector at the Shanghai exhibition area: financial transaction time-series foundation model, the Agentic Payment Open Protocol (APOP) framework, and a privacy-preserving large language model inference solution. As the AI era unfolds, the showcase highlights UnionPay’s continued commitment to accelerating the adoption of digital and intelligent technologies.

On 18 July, UnionPay hosted the Release of Phased Achievements of the National Pilot Base for AI Application (Financial Sector) at the UnionPay Center alongside WAIC 2026. The event brought together more than 100 representatives from commercial banks, Chinese and international partners, leading technology companies, academia, and research institutions. During the event, UnionPay released its “1+6+N” AI achievements framework, announced a series of industry partnerships, and launched a joint initiative calling for greater collaboration on the development and governance of the financial industry. These achievements demonstrate the progress of the National AI Application Pilot Base in building an open innovation platform that accelerates AI adoption across the industry.

Dong Junfeng, Chairman of China UnionPay and UnionPay International, attended the event and delivered a keynote speech. He noted that AI is rapidly reshaping the financial industry. Since the National AI Application Pilot Base was launched in 2025, it has delivered a number of meaningful outcomes through close collaboration across the industry. Mr. Dong elaborated on the vision for the development of the base from through three dimensions: sharing, collaborative governance, and mutual benefits. First, by pooling computing resources, data and models on a centralized public platform, the base helps address industry challenges such as the high cost of computing resources and data silos. This lowers barriers to AI adoption across the financial sector. Second, the base has strengthened AI security by building robust safeguards for large language models and applying AI to enhance transaction risk management and cybersecurity. Such efforts are made to support a safer and more resilient financial ecosystem. Third, the base is accelerating the AI adoption across real-world use cases. It has incubated a range of commercial AI solutions spanning agentic payments, credit risk management, consumption promotion and merchant digital transformation, turning technological innovation into tangible business value. Looking ahead, the future of AI + Finance holds enormous potential. UnionPay looks forward to working with partners across industries to build an open, shared, and well-governed financial AI ecosystem that supports the development of new productive forces through technological innovation.

A highlight of the event was the official launch of UnionPay’s “1+6+N” AI achievements framework.

The “1” represents a unified portal—the National AI Application Pilot Base. Built on a “One Portal, Six Centers” structure, it integrates six specialized centers covering models, datasets, applications, talent development, supply-demand matching, and financial services. Together, the platform currently hosts 11 models, 14 datasets, 59 demonstration applications, and 61 service offerings, bringing together 145 core resources in total.

The “6” refers to six independent and controllable capabilities, including computing resources scheduling through a trusted intelligent computing sharing platform, high-quality financial datasets, finance-specific foundation models, AI-powered financial security services, financial AI standards, and a pilot testing sandbox that supports model training and evaluation. Together, these six capabilities form the base’s shared technology foundation, providing ecosystem partners with the core technical infrastructure.

The “N” represents a portfolio of benchmark use cases, standardized AI solutions, and demonstration applications built on this technology foundation. These applications span five key areas—intelligent payments, inclusive finance, consumption growth, risk management and compliance, and operational excellence—building a multi-tier product portfolio serving consumers, merchants, local governments and financial institutions. This accelerates the application of AI capabilities across diverse use cases.

Together, the “1+6+N” framework of the base connects computing power, data, models, and use cases and forms an end-to-end value chain. By addressing common industry challenges—including limited computing resources, data silos and the high cost of AI deployment—it delivers standardized and widely accessible AI capabilities, providing the financial industry with reusable, highly secure and one-stop AI solutions for intelligent transformation. This also reflects UnionPay’s commitment not only to driving its own business growth, but also to enabling the industry through foundational capabilities and reinforcing financial infrastructure for the AI era.

These achievements have already been made available to industry partners and are beginning to create value. For banks, acquirers and other financial institutions, UnionPay’s shared infrastructure enables rapid access to mature financial AI capabilities without the need to build systems from scratch, significantly reducing both technical barriers and implementation costs. For merchants, UnionPay offers AI-powered marketing, digital analytics and intelligent risk management tools to support smarter operations, improve customer engagement and enhance operational efficiency, enabling even small and medium-sized businesses to benefit from AI innovation. For technology companies and other ecosystem partners, the base enables partners to rapidly adapt AI products for financial applications and complete compliance validation, accelerating the commercialization of technological innovations.

The event also featured six rounds of partnership signing ceremonies, covering areas including AI-themed card, cross-border agentic payment ecosystem development, AI-powered operational empowerment for merchants, joint commercialization of pilot base innovations, and broader ecosystem collaboration across the financial industry chain.

Following the signing ceremonies, UnionPay released the Initiative on the Collaborative Development and Governance of AI Applications in Financial Services, with representatives from participating organizations joining the stage to witness its launch. Building on the “1+6+N” framework, the initiative calls on industry stakeholders to collaborate in four areas: First, advancing trusted AI systems that serve the real economy by establishing governance mechanisms for traceable and explainable algorithms while safeguarding data privacy and security; Second, strengthening collaboration among industry, academia, research institutions and users, leveraging the base to jointly advance core technologies and develop independent and secure financial AI infrastructure; Third, promoting openness and inclusiveness by sharing mature AI models, testing services and implementation solutions to reduce the cost of intelligent transformation, particularly for SMEs; Fourth, improving lifecycle governance through tiered risk management, enhanced compliance standards and coordinated risk prevention. The initiative calls on all industry stakeholders to work together by jointly strengthening the foundation, unlocking greater value through shared capabilities, and reinforcing collaborative governance, with the goal of advancing the sound development of AI in the financial sector and driving digital finance through technological innovation.

 

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Energy

Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), Development Finance Corporation (DFC), Standard Bank and Africa50 Lead Finance Lineup at African Mining Week 2026

Published

3 days ago

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July 17, 2026

By

Standard Bank

Leading development finance institutions, commercial banks and private investment firms will explore financing strategies that can unlock the continent’s estimated $29.5 trillion in mine-site mineral wealth at AMW 2026

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, July 17, 2026/APO Group/ –As Africa moves to unlock an estimated $29.5 trillion in mine-site mineral value, development finance institutions, commercial banks and private investment firms are expanding financial support to help transform the continent into a globally competitive mining hub.

The growing role of financiers in unlocking Africa’s mining value chain will take center stage at African Mining Week (AMW) 2026, taking place October 14–16 in Cape Town. The event will bring together leading financial institutions – including Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa (IDC), Standard Bank, Absa Bank, Trade and Development Bank (TDB), Africa50, Apeiron Investment Group and World Mining Investment – to showcase financing models supporting mining development across the continent.

AMW comes as momentum behind mining finance continues to accelerate. In July 2026, AFC, DFC and the Development Bank of Southern Africa reached financial close on the $753 million Lobito Corridor Railway Project, one of Africa’s most significant infrastructure investments supporting the mining sector. The project will rehabilitate 1,300 km of railway linking Angola’s Port of Lobito with the DRC and Zambia, creating a faster and more cost-effective export corridor for copper, cobalt and other strategic minerals.

At AMW 2026, Vibhuti Jain, Managing Director & Regional Head for Africa at DFC, is expected to discuss the institution’s growing investment portfolio and the U.S. strategy to strengthen critical mineral supply chains through Africa.

The event also comes as South Africa strengthens exploration finance through the IDC-managed Junior Exploration Fund. In June 2026, the IDC reached a new financing milestone, increasing the number of junior mining companies supported through the fund to 13. Earlier in the year, the IDC expanded the fund’s capital allocation to R600 million, advancing the country’s efforts to revive exploration, stimulate greenfield development and strengthen the participation of locally owned mining companies. Thabiso Sekano, IDC’s Head of Mining and Metals, is expected to discuss the fund’s progress alongside broader initiatives supporting the mining industry through investments in industrial infrastructure.

Infrastructure finance will also be a key focus at AMW 2026, with Simbarashe Chikarango, Head of Project and Infrastructure Finance at TDB, and Folaseto Akin-Olugbade of Africa50 expected to highlight investments aimed at addressing the energy, transport and logistics constraints that continue to limit mining productivity.

 

TDB recently partnered with several financial institutions to launch a $176 million energy investment platform that will accelerate private-sector electrification across sub-Saharan Africa. The bank is also providing a $150 million syndicated facility to Mota-Engil Africa to finance transport, mining and infrastructure projects across multiple African markets. Meanwhile, Africa50 is supporting Kenya’s $311 million electricity transmission public-private partnership, strengthening power infrastructure essential for mining and industrial development.

Commercial banks are likewise expanding their mining portfolios. Standard Bank and Absa Bank recently participated in a $130 million financing package for South African mining company Tharisa, supporting the company’s long-term growth strategy. Standard Bank also arranged a $150 million financing facility for Rosh Pinah Zinc Corporation in Namibia to support mine expansion, reinforcing its commitment to financing strategic mining projects across Southern Africa.

Deerosh Maharaj, Executive Head for Energy, Infrastructure and Mining at Standard Bank, and Shirley Webber, Managing Principal and Coverage Head for Resources and Energy at Absa Bank, are expected to discuss opportunities to increase capital flows into African mining projects.

Private investment firms are also stepping up efforts to channel international capital into Africa’s mining sector. Apeiron Investment Group and World Mining Investment are expanding initiatives to connect investors with the continent’s growing pipeline of mining opportunities, as Africa seeks to secure a significant share of the estimated $500 billion in global investment required by 2040 to meet soaring demand for critical minerals, including copper, lithium, graphite, nickel and rare earth elements.

Sebastian Wagner, Head of Natural Resources at Apeiron Investment Group, and Didier Rault, CEO of World Mining Investment, are expected to showcase financing strategies designed to connect global investors with Africa’s next generation of mining projects.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Energy Capital & Power.

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