Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

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Rapid geopolitical shifts are exposing multinational corporations (MNCs) to well-documented risks, but they are also opening vital arenas for growth. This presents CEOs with a dual mandate: to seize opportunities in new markets and trade corridors while managing their organizations’ geopolitical exposure and associated risks. Companies that move quickly can use the forces reshaping the global order—from regional realignments to industrial-policy measures—to expand in growing economies such as India and Vietnam, access billions of dollars in industrial subsidies and investment incentives, and gain market share from slower-moving competitors. Conversely, MNCs that don’t respond to geopolitically driven shifts may see their enterprise value eroded by tariff costs, supply chain and operational disruptions, and other challenges.

Two steps can help CEOs gain an edge on competitors, the authors’ research suggests: first, quantify the value at stake linked to geopolitical developments to guide growth strategies and manage risk; and second, develop the organizational agility needed to respond quickly to new opportunities and risks as they arise.

Geopolitical developments can significantly affect MNCs’ enterprise value—both positively and negatively. On the upside, shifts can open new markets or boost demand, rewarding companies that can adjust production volumes and prices quickly.  However, the same geopolitical forces that fuel growth can also erode value.  Despite the magnitude of the value at stake, few MNCs rigorously measure it.

Estimating the enterprise value linked to geopolitical shifts requires first understanding the company’s geopolitical profile. Various tools can serve this purpose, but in this article, the authors rely on the geopolitical distance index, a measure of geopolitical alignment developed by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) based on countries’ voting records in the UN General Assembly.  MGI’s research shows that the average geopolitical distance between countries engaged in trade and foreign direct investment has fallen.   Additional analysis indicates that more than 90 percent of MNCs are exposed to countries whose political and diplomatic positions diverge significantly from those of their home governments.

Quantifying geopolitical value at stake combines geopolitical distance and financial-exposure metrics. The process involves assessing the revenue from each market, applying a probability weight based on the market’s geopolitical distance from the company’s home market (a proxy for divergence), and adjusting the result by a severity factor that reflects the impact of stabilizing mechanisms such as free trade agreements, tariff preferences, or more permissive export control environments. The outcome helps inform CEOs’ strategies by providing a directional, order-of-magnitude view of where businesses can protect and unlock value through a proactive geopolitical response.

In practice, exposure to geopolitically distant geographies without stabilizing mechanisms such as trade agreements can translate into materially higher value at stake than when such “shock absorbers” are in place.  

Participating in geopolitically distant markets requires leaders to assess not only the demand and operating costs in those markets but also the durability of relations between the economies.

To assess potential value swings associated with geopolitically distant markets, leaders need to evaluate the impact of shocks on demand, costs, and capital. This means sizing not only demand and operating costs but also the durability of relations across borders and the likelihood of sudden shifts in data localization rules or investment screening policies, for example. What’s more, they should do so not only at the enterprise level but also by function.

Having quantified the value at stake for each function, leaders can set thresholds for the geopolitical exposure they can tolerate. This is typically a three-step process:  Establish baseline concentration guidance.  Quantify how (and where) geopolitical exposure creates opportunities and risks.  And consider actions to lower exposure.

Agility is central to the CEO’s dual mandate—it boosts a company’s ability to capture growth opportunities while reducing risk from exposure to geopolitically distant markets.  Four steps can help CEOs improve their companies’ agility—gathering geopolitical insights and creating dashboards, developing regional intelligence-gathering capabilities, determining preplanned offensive and defensive actions, and ensuring rapid decision-making to respond to opportunities and shocks.

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Banking and crypto safeguards are supposed to confirm that an account belongs to a real person, and that the user’s face matches the identity documents that were provided to open the account. But scammers are bypassing them in order to open mule accounts and launder money. Rather than using a live phone camera feed for a liveness check, the hacks typically deploy a tool known as a virtual camera. Users can replace the video stream with other videos or photos—depicting a real or deepfake person or even an object.

Thanks to one of a growing range of illicit hacking services, readily available for purchase on Telegram, that are designed to break “Know Your Customer” (KYC) facial scans.

As financial institutions enact enhanced security measures aimed at stopping cyberscammers, these workarounds are the latest round in the cat-and-mouse game between criminal operators and the financial services industry.

Over the course of a two-month investigation earlier this year, MIT Technology Review identified 22 The rise in KYC bypasses has occurred alongside an expansion of a global industry in “pig-butchering” cyberscams.Chinese-, Vietnamese-, and English-language public Telegram channels and groups advertising bypass kits and stolen biometric data. The software kits use a variety of methods to compromise phone operating systems and banking applications, claiming to enable users to get around the compliance checks imposed by financial institutions ranging from major crypto exchanges such as Binance to name-brand banks like Spain’s BBVA.

Telegram says that after reviewing the accounts, it removed them for violating its terms of service. But such online marketplaces proliferate easily, and multiple channels and groups advertising similar tools remain active.

 Crypto platforms and banks around the world are facing increasing scrutiny over the flow of illegally obtained money, including profits from such scams, through their platforms. This has prompted tightened banking regulations in countries such as Vietnam and Thailand, where governments have increased customer verification and fraud monitoring requirements and are pushing for stronger anti-money-laundering safeguards in the crypto industry.

Chainalysis, a US blockchain analysis firm, estimates that around $17 billion was stolen in 2025 in crypto scams and fraud, up from $13 billion in 2024. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, meanwhile, warned in a recent report that the expansion of Asian scam syndicates in Africa and the Pacific has helped the industry “dramatically scale up profits.”  Regulators around the world are trying to catch up.

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What do the best teams do differently? To find out the authors surveyed more than 6,000 knowledge workers across a wide range of industries—from finance and law to healthcare and technology—and collected detailed data on how their teams set priorities, make decisions, and collaborate.  

Among those superteams, the formula for high performance looked remarkably similar. Superteams share three key strengths: (1) They get more done by managing time, energy, and attention more efficiently; (2) their members actively make one another better; and (3) they’re constantly building new skills and improving over time.

How to Drive Continuous Improvement?  At the center of every learning culture is a leader who makes growth a daily priority. The authors’ research uncovered seven practices that top leaders use to foster continuous improvement. The same principles that built a championship team can help any leader create a team that keeps getting better.  Run more experiments.  Make curiosity contagious.  Ask the one question most leaders avoid – What are you stuck on?  Roll up your sleeves, even when you don’t have to.  Make feedback feel like support.  Encourage growth, even when it doesn’t benefit you.  And lead with meaning, not just metrics.

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On a muggy February afternoon, the Kopi Kenangan café at the Alam Sutera mall in suburban Jakarta is buzzing with customers. The bestseller on its menu is Kopi Kenangan Mantan, a blend of Indonesian robusta and arabica beans—, milk, creamer and gula aren, the local palm sugar. Queuing up to place his order, 23-year-old marketing management student Elson Rochilie says he appreciates the range of premium coffees on offer at pocket-friendly prices.

Rochilie fits the customer profile the chain’s cofounder and CEO, Edward Tirtanata, was going after when he opened the first Kopi Kenangan grab-and-go store in the Indonesian capital in 2017: young people looking for an alternative to cheap instant coffee sold by street vendors but who didn’t want to pay more than double the price charged by international chains such as Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Positioning itself in that sweet spot has paid off for Kopi Kenangan, which became a unicorn in 2021 after raising $96 million in a series C funding round and overtook the local unit of Starbucks in retail reach two years later. Today, it claims to be Indonesia’s biggest coffee chain with a third of the market and 1,136 outlets, as well as 188 overseas, as of December. Eyeing what he reckons is a burgeoning customer base for quality Indonesian coffee, 37-year-old Tirtanata is brewing a plan to invest $200 million to more than triple the store count to 4,000 by 2030. “We’d like to be the single company or brand that is the most dominant in Southeast Asia, not just by store count but by revenue and profitability,” he declares. The entrepreneur’s ambitions dovetail with a regional retail coffee business undergoing rapid change, according to Roshan Behera, a Singapore-based partner at India-headquartered Redseer Strategy Consultants. Consumers “are moving away from unorganized, low-quality channels,” Behera says in an email, in favor of “a guaranteed, elevated experience.” At the same time, premium coffee drinkers are seeking alternatives “that offer high-end quality without the expensive price tag,” he says.

In an April 2025 report, Redseer estimates that Indonesia’s coffee market—including coffee sold in cafes, restaurants and hotels as well as retail outlets–will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11% to $12.6 billion by 2030 from $6.7 billion in 2024. With a rising middle class and higher disposable incomes, it predicts out-of-home consumption of coffee will increase over that period to between 65% and 70% of the total from around half in 2024.

To catch that wave, Kopi Kenangan has been on a tear, opening 347 stores last year, or nearly one a day. The CEO discloses that the chain, after running up losses for five consecutive years following the Covid-19 pandemic, returned to profitability in 2025 with net profit of $17 million on a 45% jump in revenue to $184 million. Keeping up the momentum, sales surged 70% to $57 million in the first quarter from a year ago, says Tirtanata, adding that he’s targeting revenue of $650 million by 2030.

So far, Kopi Kenangan has garnered a total of $234 million over at least five funding rounds, the most recent being its Series C, from a star-studded galaxy of investors, including American rapper Jay-Z’s VC firm Arrive and American tennis player Serena Williams’s Serena Ventures.

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Everyone remembers their first meaningful job. It might have been scooping ice cream in high school or cleaning golf carts at the local club. Or it could have been the first stretch in a real office after college. In this month’s CEO Diet (a monthly series in Bloomberg Businessweek), it’s the hard-won lessons that continue to underpin success today.

For David Solomon who has been the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. since 2018 and an employee there since 1999, “You learn a lot about serving people when you work in customer-facing retail, and I carried some of those foundational lessons throughout my career.” A major takeaway: “The value of focus and paying attention. When the line was long, I needed to get the flavor and toppings right.”

Now he’s the president and chief operating officer of Uber Technologies Inc., but when he was growing up, Andrew Macdonald focused on a different mode of transportation: golf carts.  The job taught him that setting goals makes even routine work feel meaningful. It also taught him discipline.

“My first job was at Lehman Brothers, the largest bank failure in history,” says Katerina Schneider, CEO of the wellness and supplements brand Ritual.  She also taught herself how to work hard and not get burned out. “If you are specific about doing work that aligns with what you find interesting and gratifying, you can work much harder for much longer without burning out.”

As CEO of Legal & General Group Plc, António Simões oversees the UK’s largest asset management company, with about £1.2 trillion ($1.6 trillion) in total assets.  He spent the summer working in the back office at an accountancy firm, filing financial reports in alphabetical order.” He says he still remembers it fondly. “It taught me early on about the importance of work ethic, how to work as a team and the joy of earning my own money.

“The Walt Disney Co. taught me two lessons,” says Bing Chen. He’s now CEO of the Asian Pacific community nonprofit Gold House; before that he was YouTube’s first global head of creators and built much of what’s become a multibillion-dollar business.  If you can’t do the ‘small’ things, why would we entrust you with the big ones?” Chen also shares a lesson from Rich Ross, the former chairman of Disney Studios, whom he calls his longest-term professional mentor: “Your job is not to be impressive; if you’re in the room, you’ve impressed. Your job is to be memorable.’”

Long before Gregg Lemkau was co-CEO of BDT & MSD Partners LLC — the merchant bank that merges Michael Dell and Byron Trott funds — and a board director of BlackRock Inc.  From his work in childhood in the construction, “I learned the power of disposable income as I blew my summer earnings seeing Van Halen in concert four nights in a row.”

Since 2023, Billy Hult has been the CEO of New York-based Tradeweb Markets Inc., which operates electronic trading platforms and has an approximately $26 billion market cap; prior to that he was the company’s president. But back in the day he had a very different job. “I was a betting clerk at an OTB [off-track betting] in the South Bronx.  The job taught him how to process information and think quickly.

“My first real job was on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, which is not exactly a traditional on-ramp to a career,” says David Karandish, founder and CEO of the AI-powered support platform Capacity. Reflecting on that singular experience, he says I learned early that business rewards tenacity and stamina.”

Since 2017, Julie Cartwright has been the president of Pvolve, the workout brand that counts Jennifer Aniston as a partner, investor and brand ambassador. One of Cartwright’s early, memorable jobs was working in a retail store, stocking CDs.  It taught her how to show up professionally and take pride in her work.”

“My first job was at IBM in their Paris headquarters as an intern, teaching executives how to use what were then some of the new Microsoft tools,” recalls Robin Vince. Since 2022 he’s been the CEO of BNY, the oldest US bank.  “Saying yes to things that might have intimidated me at the time. It’s a principle I’ve most recently applied to AI. I had to invest in my own learning before we could bring the company along.”

Ariela Safira, founder and CEO of mental health platform Zeera Healthcare Ltd, might just win the prize for most memorable first job. She was a kids’ karate teacher.  She learned from her teacher to simply love people.

Kenneth Himmel is president of Related Ross LLC, the South Florida-based real estate company with $10 billion in development in Palm Beach. He’s been crucial to curating dining rooms in Related projects.  I learned the value in creating an experience: both from a business perspective but also to appreciate it as a guest.”

“I started on Wall Street during the height of the [’90s] tech boom,” recalls Veronica Miele Beard, co-founder of the popular Veronica Beard fashion brand.  Her learning from her first job is “Relationships are everything — connecting on a human level is what drives trust, loyalty and long-term success.”

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In negotiations, first offers become psychological reference points, and people often fail to adjust far enough away from them, even though they are free to counter any amount they want.

Although the anchoring effect is well documented, what makes this bias so frustrating is that it persists even among skilled and experienced negotiators. It shows up in procurement, strategic deals, and executive compensation conversations — any situation in which one party gets a number on the table early and the other party must respond under time pressure.

If you’re preparing for an important negotiation, the standard advice is familiar: Do your homework, know your target, and don’t reveal too much too soon. Those suggestions are useful, but none of them changes the fact that when the first offer lands, your mind starts thinking of counteroffers close to that number. The authors’ recent research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, identified a simple way to reduce the anchoring effect when you don’t control the first offer: Adopt a choice mindset right when you see the first offer.

The Power of Choice Reminders.  A choice mindset is a state of mind in which people perceive the availability of more choices than they are presented with. When in this mindset, people are more likely to recognize the options available to them, including nonobvious options (such as delaying a decision or changing the structure of a deal), particularly in situations in which they feel constrained (such as difficult negotiations).

In everyday life, a choice mindset is the difference between thinking “I have no choice; I have to take what I can get” and thinking “I have choices and can even consider options that have not been presented to me.” The key insight is that feeling constrained is not the same as being constrained, and the subjective perception of choice can be nudged.

This mechanism points to a simple practice you can use in negotiations. When the other side makes a first offer, you should aim to create a brief choice pause. This moment is not about theatrics; it’s about preventing the first number from becoming your default starting point. During this pause, try to think of multiple counteroffers that are within the bounds of reason, including a few that might appear aggressive but can still be defended based on relevant reference points. The goal is not to counter with the most aggressive number possible but to generate credible options that are not influenced by the first offer. If you have come to the negotiation table with your own first offer prepared, but your counterparty makes the first offer, rather than using their offer as a baseline for negotiations, counter with your preplanned first offer (and the accompanying rationale) even if it appears quite far from theirs.

This practice is even more effective when integrated into your preparation. Rather than just setting a single target and a walk-away point, prepare a set of counters that spans a meaningful range. This broader map protects you against the pull of a surprising anchor. By shifting the focus from a single point to a prebuilt range of possibilities, you change the tone of the internal deliberations before you ever respond externally.

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According to the author when he was speaking about AI and marketing last year at an event, he asked a room of marketing professionals a simple question: “Who here is using AI?”  Nearly every hand went up.  Then he asked a second question: “Who has fundamentally redesigned your marketing workflows around AI?”  Only a few hands stayed raised.  That gap defines the moment we are in. AI usage is widespread. AI readiness is not.

Using ChatGPT to draft, copy, or summarize data is helpful. But the future of marketing will be shaped by something much larger: AI automation, agentic systems, and organizations that understand how to integrate AI into strategy, operations, and governance.  The challenge for marketing leaders is no longer adoption, but much deeper.

For marketers: From output to orchestration.  Execution-level marketers are closest to daily production. They feel the immediate productivity gains from AI. Content gets created faster. Campaign variations multiply. Research accelerates.  But productivity alone does not create advantage. Systems do.  

Marketers who separate themselves will be the ones who invest in structured engineering, learning how to guide AI toward outputs that align with brand positioning, audience intent, and conversion strategy.  Marketing leaders will also invest in AI automation. Instead of AI being used in isolation, they will connect it to CRM platforms, paid media dashboards, analytics systems, and marketing automation tools. The goal becomes building feedback loops where data informs creative, creative informs testing, and testing informs budget allocation.  The marketer’s path forward is clear. Move beyond content generation and design intelligent workflows.

For marketing leaders: From adoption to architecture.  Marketing leaders face a different, but equally urgent, responsibility. Their challenge is not better prompts. It is organizational alignment.  AI readiness at the leadership level means evaluating whether your data infrastructure supports intelligent systems. It means understanding how machine learning models function and where they fail. It also means assessing vendors carefully and aligning AI investments with a long-term strategy.  AI ethics must also be central to leadership discussions. AI-driven personalization, automated messaging, and predictive modeling introduce risks around bias, misinformation, and data privacy. Marketing leaders are stewards of brand trust. Guardrails must be established before scale is achieved.  Leaders must learn how to manage change. Roles will evolve. Skill gaps will emerge. Teams will need structured education to ensure AI augments capability rather than destabilizes morale.

We are entering a phase where AI automation and agentic systems will coordinate campaigns, personalize journeys at scale, optimize budgets in real time, and generate strategic insights continuously.  Marketers must know how to operate these systems. Marketing leaders must know how to build and govern them.  AI savviness is more about capability at the execution and leadership levels.  The organizations that invest in structured AI education now will not simply adapt to change. They will define it.

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Many people think technology is only for young people. They imagine teenagers on TikTok or college students coding in libraries. This is actually a big mistake. The world is getting older. People are living much longer lives now. In the United States, 10,000 people turn 65 every single day, according to AARP International.  This group has more money than any other age group. They basically control most of the wealth. Entrepreneurs often ignore them and focus on Gen Z instead, but this creates a huge opening for you.

We call this movement the Silver Tech Revolution. It is not about making “old person” gadgets. It is about using modern tools to help people age well. These customers want to stay active. They want to stay in their homes. Most importantly, they have the cash to pay for solutions. If you want to build a big business, you should look at these four ideas.

1. Smart home integration for “aging in place”.  Most older adults do not want to move into assisted living. They really want to stay in their own houses. This concept is called “aging in place.” However, houses can become dangerous as people get older. A fall is a serious event. Lighting is often too dim. Stairs become a problem.  You can start a business that turns standard homes into smart homes. This is not just about voice-controlled speakers. It is about safety. You can install sensors that track movement. These sensors can tell if someone has stayed in the bathroom for too long.
2. Personalized health monitoring and longevity tech.  Healthcare is the biggest expense for people over 65. They visit doctors often and take various medications. They also care deeply about staying fit. Most health apps are made for marathon runners. And not for someone managing blood pressure.  There is a big gap here. You can build a platform that connects wearable devices to a simple dashboard. This dashboard would track heart rate, sleep and oxygen levels. It would then send this data to their doctor or family. This is basically “remote patient monitoring.”  You can also focus on longevity. This means helping people live better for longer. You could create an app that gives daily advice on nutrition and mobility exercises.
3. Financial tech (fintech) for the silver era.  Older people are the primary targets for financial scams. Scammers use phones and the internet to steal billions of dollars every year. This group is also worried about outliving their savings. They have complex needs like estate planning and long-term care insurance.  Most banking apps are actually quite hard for them to navigate. You could build a “Silver Fintech” app. This app would have extra security features. It could use AI to detect unusual spending patterns. If a large wire transfer starts, the app could alert a trusted family member.  Moreover, you can help with “decumulation.” This is just a fancy word for spending money in retirement. People need to know how much they can spend without running out. Your app could provide simple visualizations of their wealth.
4. Tech-enabled reskilling and leisure.  Retirement does not mean sitting on a porch anymore. People are “retiring” at 65 and living until 95. That is 30 years of free time. Many of these people want to start a second career. Others want to learn a new skill like painting or coding.  You can create an education platform specifically for the 60+ demographic. Most online courses move too fast.  Your platform would offer “slow-paced” learning. It would focus on community and peer-to-peer interaction.  Many people do not stop working at 65. They start “encore careers.” They might start a small business or a consulting firm. They have the experience but might need help with modern business tools. You can create a suite of tools for these older founders. They also often pick businesses like local shops or services.  Also, consider the travel industry. Older people travel a lot. However, they have different needs. They need to know about medical facilities nearby or sometimes about the “walkability” of a city. You could build a travel tech company that uses data to plan “senior-friendly” trips.