Taco Bell is set to return to the UAE after a 14-year absence, with Dubai expected to host the first restaurants as part of a wider Gulf expansion led by Americana Restaurants, marking the latest addition to the region’s increasingly competitive quick-service restaurant (QSR) market.

According to media reports, Americana Restaurants announced it has signed an exclusive development agreement with Taco Bell UK and Europe Ltd, a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, to relaunch the Mexican-inspired fast-food chain in the UAE before rolling it out across other GCC markets in phases. The companies have not disclosed opening dates or specific locations, although Dubai is expected to be the first city to welcome the brand back.

The move marks Taco Bell’s second attempt in the UAE. The brand previously operated several outlets, including restaurants at Dubai Mall, Deira City Centre and Mirdif City Centre, before exiting the market in 2012. Since then, consumer demand for international and Mexican-inspired dining concepts has grown significantly, with new entrants helping to broaden the category.

For Americana, the agreement strengthens its long-standing partnership with Yum! Brands, whose portfolio already includes KFC and Pizza Hut across the Middle East and North Africa. The addition of Taco Bell also diversifies Americana’s offering by entering the Mexican-inspired QSR segment, complementing its portfolio of global restaurant brands

Ripple has partnered with digital asset platform provider SettleMint to launch an integrated solution aimed at helping regulated financial institutions custody, issue and manage tokenised assets through a single platform.

The collaboration combines Ripple Custody’s institutional-grade digital asset custody infrastructure with SettleMint’s Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP), allowing banks, financial market infrastructure providers and sovereign entities to manage tokenised real-world assets across their entire lifecycle.

The partnership comes as financial institutions increasingly explore tokenisation as blockchain technology gains traction across traditional finance, with banks seeking integrated platforms that combine custody, issuance, compliance and servicing rather than relying on multiple vendors.

Unified platform for digital assets

Under the partnership, institutions will be able to securely custody digital assets while managing issuance, compliance, settlement and servicing from a single platform.

Ripple said its custody platform has expanded significantly over the past year through partnerships with Securosys and Figment, integration with Chainalysis and the acquisition of Palisade, broadening its institutional custody capabilities.

SettleMint’s DALP, meanwhile, is already being deployed across production and pilot programmes in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. The platform enables regulated institutions to issue and manage tokenised real-world assets while maintaining governance and compliance controls.

Unlike standalone tokenisation tools, DALP manages the full lifecycle of digital assets after issuance, providing a unified operating platform for regulated financial institutions.

Asia rollout first

The two companies have begun offering the integrated solution in Asia and plan to expand into additional markets as institutional demand grows.

Fiona Murray, managing director for Asia-Pacific at Ripple, said financial institutions were increasingly looking for integrated digital asset infrastructure.

“Financial institutions across Asia Pacific are putting digital assets to work. They are asking how to do more without stitching together separate solutions for custody, issuance and governance. This partnership gives them the foundation to roll out digital assets and future-proof them from there: Ripple Custody to hold and govern the asset, and SettleMint to manage its entire lifecycle.”

Adam Popat, CEO of SettleMint, said the move reflects a broader shift towards blockchain-based capital markets.

“Global capital markets are moving fully on-chain, and that shift only works when digital asset custody and lifecycle management operate as one system rather than two. Combining Ripple Custody and DALP gives institutions that single foundation, and this partnership lets us bring it to regulated markets globally.”

Tokenisation market gathers pace

The partnership comes as tokenisation continues to gain momentum across global financial markets.

According to Boston Consulting Group’s The Future of Digital Assets report published in May 2026, tokenised real-world assets could reach $88tr by 2035 as financial institutions increasingly digitise traditional assets.

The report also warned that banks which fail to adapt to digital assets could see profits decline by as much as 30 per cent by 2035, while identifying tokenised funds, digital custody and automated collateral management as key future revenue opportunities for the sector.

Nepal’s rescue teams, helped by Chinese and Indian experts, stepped up efforts on Monday to reach hundreds of people believed to be stuck inside blocked hydropower project tunnels in the aftermath of last week’s Himalayan flood.

The unprecedented deluge of ice, rock, mud and debris carved a trail of destruction in the country’s valley towns and villages, as well as across the border in China, on Wednesday, killing more than 900 people, with nearly 5,000 still missing.

A glacier collapse is thought to have triggered the disaster.

Hundreds of bodies, many unidentified, have been buried in shallow graves as they began decomposing in the humid weather in the plains of the Himalayan country after being swept down the mountains by the torrent.

Nepali officials said that the focus was on reaching the 933 workers believed to be trapped at 11 hydropower projects, including many who were working in about half a dozen tunnels, in the two hard-hit districts of Rasuwa and Nuwakot.

Pictures and videos shared by rescue teams showed earth-moving equipment digging and shovelling mud and rocks under lights in the dark of the night as workers watched. Soldiers used torchlight in a big pit they had created to look for space to get into one tunnel.

The Nepali army said search-and-rescue teams were using controlled blasts, excavators and searchlights to clear water and mud and reach trapped people. Teams recovered three bodies after entering two tunnels, while other sections remained buried in mud and were still being searched, it said.

“A large amount of debris has been deposited and that is posing us a big challenge to open the tunnels,” Nepali army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet said. “Our main focus is on opening the tunnels.”

On Monday, Nepali authorities said 903 people were confirmed dead, with 4,247 missing, including the 933 at hydropower projects. On the Chinese side, authorities said 16 people were killed in Gyirong County and 546 were missing.

The Nepali foreign ministry said that about 590 foreign nationals from 39 countries were still missing. More than 10,000 people had been rescued from the flood-hit region, including 323 foreign nationals, it added.

The Red Cross has estimated that more than 90,000 people were likely to have been affected by the disaster, which China has linked to the effects of climate change.

There has been a boom in hydropower projects in Nepal since the turn of the century as the mountainous country sought to take advantage of its Himalayan water resources to address chronic domestic power shortages and exploit prospects for selling electricity to southern neighbour India.

Hydropower projects in Nepal’s mountains need tunnels to carry water through the steep terrain, allowing developers to exploit the sharp elevation drop between Himalayan rivers and powerhouses to generate electricity.

Prime Minister Balendra Shah said the flood was an “unprecedented and devastating natural disaster” and it remained challenging to compile a complete assessment of the damage.

Beijing has said 261 foreign nationals from 23 countries were unaccounted for in Tibet, near a key border crossing with Nepal.

On Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said that nearly 100 Chinese citizens have not been contactable on the Nepalese side.

A meeting of the Chinese cabinet urged all-out effort to search for the missing, the release of authoritative information, addressing risks and hidden dangers and further improvement of emergency management capabilities, state television CCTV said.

Although Nepal has said that it does not need foreign help in general rescue and search, it has leaned on giant neighbours India and China for their expertise in tunnel rescue.

Rescue operations have been suspended several times because of bad weather and concerns that a lake formed across the Nepal-China border by the disaster could trigger fresh flooding after it began overflowing into Nepal’s rivers.

On Monday, CCTV said that glaciers around an impact crater carved out near the site of last week’s glacier collapse on the Nepalese side remained at risk of collapse. Drone footage showed multiple landslide deposits along both riverbanks, posing a risk of further collapses and the formation of new lakes, it said.

Last week’s flood was “caused by glacier instability under the long-term effects of global warming”, the state broadcaster reported.

Two Nepali officials told Reuters that China had not shared much information on glacier risks and water levels following a meeting to strengthen cooperation earlier this year, and they feared that a lack of data-sharing could hamper future disaster preparedness.

The Chinese foreign ministry said that Beijing had continuously provided Nepal with meteorological and hydrological data and would continue to “strongly support” Nepal’s disaster relief efforts and safeguard the two countries’ common interests.

Lionel Messi has announced his retirement from international football, bringing the curtain down on a remarkable 21-year career with Argentina.

The 39-year-old leaves as Argentina’s all-time leading scorer and most-capped player, with 125 goals in 207 appearances.

He captained his country to the 2022 FIFA World Cup, won the Copa América in 2021 and 2024, and reached three World Cup finals, in 2014, 2022 and 2026.

He has been awarded the Ballon d’Or eight times.

His final appearance came in Argentina’s 1-0 extra-time defeat to Spain in the 2026 World Cup final on July 19.

According to a Reuters report, Messi announced his decision on Instagram. He wrote: “Time is running short, chapters come to a close, and this is one that hurts me deeply. I love, have loved, and will always love being part of the national team. I’ve given everything I had; I have nothing left to give.”

Messi revealed that he had written his farewell on July 21, two days after the World Cup final, but published it on August 31.

From years of painful near-misses to lifting the World Cup in Qatar in 2022, Messi leaves international football as one of Argentina’s defining sporting figures.

Abu Dhabi-based eVoost AI is stepping up its international expansion after signing a three-year agreement with Spanish real estate asset manager Aliseda covering an initial commercialisation volume of close to $1.4bn.

Founded in May 2024, eVoost is seeking to tackle one of the property industry’s longstanding challenges: turning buyer interest into completed transactions. The company has developed an AI-native platform spanning demand analysis and pricing through to buyer qualification and multilingual sales agents operating across WhatsApp and voice. It says the technology is now live in six markets and supports more than $3.5bn in signed developer project volume.

The Aliseda agreement represents a potentially important shift in that growth model, giving eVoost access to a broader portfolio through a single institutional platform rather than expanding developer by developer. The company is also extending its partnership with Hercesa into Romania, adding to operations across the UAE, Spain, Portugal, Georgia and the US.

Here, CEO Cristian Garcia Pastrana talks about the economics behind eVoost’s technology, its international ambitions and why he believes Abu Dhabi provides the right base from which to build a global technology business.

What gap in the real estate market led you to establish eVoost AI, and how has the company’s original proposition evolved since its launch?

Three failures brought us here.

In my experience as a real estate developer and broker in the past, real estate leads convert below 2 per cent. Ninety-eight out of a hundred people who raise their hand for a home never buy one, from anyone. In any other capital-intensive industry that would be a crisis; here it’s been normalised. It is the largest unmonetised demand pool in any asset class.

The developer doesn’t own the knowledge of their own buyer. Not because anyone withholds it, but because the process is analogue. Preferences live in a WhatsApp thread, objections in someone’s head, intent dies in a spreadsheet. So the industry designs against the competitor instead of against demand: you build what the tower next door built and price against their list. A technology gap, not a talent gap, and it means the most capital-intensive decision in the business is made without its most valuable input.

And often, buying a home is a bad experience. Not difficult, just bad. No speed, no transparency, no continuity, nobody available who “speaks your language” when you need it most. The largest purchase of a person’s life, with an experience that is worse than ordering food. Human teams can’t be everywhere, communicating well in every native language, at every hour the customer is available. Today’s technology can fix this.

Same failure three times: the industry decides what to build without the buyer, sells without really knowing them, serves without a system.

We founded eVoost AI in May 2024 to fix this sequence. We started with intelligence: predict demand, price to elasticity, design to real buyers. Developers validated it in weeks, then asked the question that changed the company: who executes it? All the hard-won knowledge a human had to compile then gets crushed into a static report.

So we built an AI-native solution. An operating system that defines the product’s optimum go-to-market, then sells it: AI agents running the buyer journey 24/7, multilingually, on WhatsApp and voice, fully white-labelled under the developer’s brand to maintain trust, similar to what Shopify did for commerce. The commercial teams aren’t replaced; they get help from agents that do much of the analogue work for them: every conversation becomes structured data, and every buyer arrives already understood. And the knowledge accumulates on the developer’s side of the table instead of evaporating.

That’s the part we didn’t initially design for. Because eVoost now sits across both the development decision and the buyer transaction, every interaction, not just every sale, feeds a shared intelligence layer we call the Brain. Every buyer interaction and new project makes the next one sharper.

Today, eVoost is live in six markets and supporting more than $3.5bn in signed developer project volume.

How does eVoost use AI to improve property sales, and what measurable impact has it had on lead qualification, conversion rates and sales timelines?

The AI doesn’t help sell. It does the selling, and it learns while it does. These are the three layers, in sequence:

1. Before the launch, the system defines what to build and how to price it against live demand, not solely based on the competitor’s list. Product-market fit is decided before capital is committed, not discovered after the launch underperforms.
2. At the moment of contact. AI agents respond to potential buyers in seconds, 24/7, in the buyer’s native language, over WhatsApp and voice, with real conversations, not chat widgets. Every lead is qualified from the first interaction: budget, motivation, timeline, objections. No lead waits until Monday morning or sits in a queue; thousands of leads are activated in minutes instead of weeks. Time is the single biggest source of leakage in the industry.
3. Across the journey. Each buyer moves through an emotional journey adapted to their profile. An investor and a family looking at the same building see different arguments for it. The developer sees this entire funnel live: which units are popular or underperforming, where price is wrong, which leads are closest to signing.

About the numbers: in live projects we’re seeing roughly a 4x conversion efficiency per lead, 300 per cent higher buyer engagement, and go-to-market cycles compressed by up to 6x, largely because pre-launch demand is already validated and the sales layer is running at machine speed from day one. Full-funnel visibility, which most developers have never had before, and around 25 per cent higher marketing ROI from cuts to spending on demand that was never going to convert.

But the metric I care most about isn’t any of those. It’s how quickly the Brain learns and improves. Every interaction allows teams to have a truly intelligent system embedded in their internal workflows.

What does the three-year agreement with Aliseda cover, and how significant is it commercially for eVoost’s next stage of growth?

Aliseda is Spain’s largest real estate asset manager. The agreement runs three years and covers their new-build portfolio, starting with a commercialisation volume of close to $1.4bn.

Structurally, it’s simple: Aliseda brings the assets, the developer relationships and the market depth. eVoost brings the AI-native layer that runs the commercial cycle end to end: demand analysis before launch, pricing, buyer qualification, and the 24/7 multilingual agents that carry each buyer through to contract signature. The first deployments are already live: IQONIQ Torre de Cristal in Vigo, and Origo Mare and Residencial Las Arenas in Fuerteventura.

Why this matters more than its size suggests: it changes how we scale.

Until now we have grown developer by developer: one contract, one portfolio, one integration. Aliseda creates a different growth model. We embed once within a platform that aggregates hundreds of developments and dozens of developers, with a continuous supply of assets and buyers. That is real distribution leverage, which is what separates a good software company from an infrastructure company.

It also accelerates learning. Our system improves with every buyer interaction, and a portfolio of this density concentrates more interactions in one place than any single developer can generate. The intelligence we build on Spanish residential demand doesn’t stay in Spain; it feeds the same Brain that operates in the UAE, the US, Portugal, Georgia and Romania. And it validates the model where validation is hardest.

Aliseda is an institutional asset manager with proven fiduciary discipline. Passing that filter is the reference that opens the next tier for eVoost: institutional portfolios, servicers and sovereign-scale asset owners. That’s where the next phase of growth sits for us.

Why did eVoost choose Abu Dhabi as its base, and which parts of Hub71’s ecosystem have directly supported its international expansion?

We chose Abu Dhabi because we wanted to build globally from here.

For what we do, this market is the most demanding in the world. Abu Dhabi and Dubai run at a velocity no European market matches: launches can sell out in days, buyers come from dozens of nationalities, and off-plan homes are often sold before construction begins.

If a system can hold up here, multilingual, 24/7, at that absorption speed, it holds up anywhere. We deliberately put our hardest test at the centre of the company rather than at the edge of it. Everything we build is stress-tested against this market first, then deployed to Spain, Portugal, Romania, Georgia and the US.

Real estate here is a national strategy, not just an asset class. Land, urban planning and residential supply are instruments of economic diversification. That means the decision-maker isn’t only thinking as a developer in the short term but in decades. That’s the client we’re built for.

Furthermore, the UAE decided to be an AI country before most of the world took the question seriously. Regulatory clarity, sovereign commitment to compute, capital that funds infrastructure rather than features. For an AI-native company, that alignment is worth more than any single incentive.

Regarding Hub71 and ADGM specifically: ADGM gave us a common-law holding structure that institutional investors and international clients recognise without explanation. That alone removed months of friction. Hub71 gave us three things: legitimacy in a market where trust is earned relationally and a name behind you fast-tracks every first meeting; proximity to capital and to the region’s largest developers in the same building; and a technical environment where AI infrastructure is a shared standard rather than a procurement negotiation.

The result is a company headquartered in Abu Dhabi, operating in six markets, profitable in its first year, with more than $3.5bn in signed developer project volume. International founding team, Emirati base, global reach. We’re exporting technology from the UAE.

What does the Hercesa Romania partnership involve, and how will eVoost manage differences in property markets, consumer behaviour, data regulation and AI rules as it expands further?

Hercesa is a 50-year-old family developer with 30,000 homes delivered. They already use eVoost in Spain and Portugal; Romania is the extension of that relationship into a third country, and our sixth market.

Concretely: Hercesa Romania has delivered over 1,200 apartments in Bucharest and has more than 600 units under development across Stellaris Residencias, Vivenda Prime and the final phase of Vivenda Residencias. eVoost runs the commercial layer for that portfolio: demand analysis, buyer qualification, and 24/7 multilingual agents inside Hercesa’s own digital estate, under Hercesa’s brand. Our economics are tied to their sales: onboarding plus performance. We win when they sell.

Romania matters because it’s an early market. Strong fundamentals, rising urban demand, and almost no AI penetration in residential sales. Early-adopting markets often set the standard for how the category develops, and we’d rather be the company defining that standard than arriving after someone else does.

With respect to data and AI regulation, our position is deliberately counterintuitive: we treat the strictest regime as our design baseline. In our category, I see it as a protection. Real estate is a high-value, deeply personal and highly regulated transaction.

Institutional asset owners and governments need systems they can understand, audit and trust. By building for that standard from the outset, we have created a platform that is ready to operate across markets, quickly, responsibly and durably.