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Islamic fintech startup Wahed has opened its first physical branch on Baker Street in London. The glossy retail location is designed to look like an Apple store.

Wahed

An investing platform backed by the likes of oil giant Saudi Aramco and French soccer player Paul Pogba is launching a novel proposition in the U.K.: a physical branch and bank accounts backed by gold.

New York-based Wahed, which describes itself as a “halal investing platform,” has opened a branch in the U.K. in a bid to target the country’s 3.9 million Muslims with a sharia-compliant investment management and advice service.

The glossy retail location has a similar design to an Apple store, with digital displays inside and a bright sign displaying its logo outside. It is located on Baker Street in central London, just opposite a branch of U.K. banking giant HSBC.

Khabib Nurmagomedov, the Russian former professional mixed martial artist, is a promoter of the firm and will be among those attending the branch opening Tuesday.

Wahed is also debuting a debit card that lets users deposit funds with an exchange-traded commodity that tracks the price of gold, meaning they can effectively pay for everyday goods via gold.

Investors will be able to redeem the gold in their accounts for physical bars. Junaid Wahedna, CEO and Co-founder of Wahed, said it’s a way for Muslim — as well as non-Muslim — consumers to beat currency fluctuations and the rising cost of living.

“[Muslims are] an underserved community as a whole,” Wahedna said in an interview with CNBC, referring to the market opportunity for digital Islamic finance. “It’s a minority community, there’s a lack of financial literacy.”

Banking startups such as Monzo and Revolut have flourished in the U.K. without physical bank branches, offering smartphone apps that help users manage all their finances. But Wahedna cautioned that this risks leaving behind Muslim consumers.

“In the United Kingdom, [the Muslim community is] actually one of the lowest socio-economic segments of the country,” Wahed’s boss said, with “low incomes or financial literacy.”

“They have trust issues,” he added. “And so they want to see a physical presence before they trust you with money.”

Wahed’s service aims to help clients adhere to the Islamic faith’s strict doctrines on financial services: sharia law forbids its followers from charging or earning interest on loans, or investing in firms that make most of their money from the sale of things such as alcohol and gambling.

Wahed prohibits investments in companies that make money from lending, gambling, alcohol and tobacco. An account with Wahed also doesn’t offer interest on savings, nor does it tout wild returns on risky crypto tokens. Instead, the value of users’ deposits tracks the value of gold, with the precious metal fluctuating in price depending on supply and demand.

“I think it really fits with the Muslim community and what their needs are,” Wahedna said. “Because otherwise, what happens is the Muslim community, because they’re underserved, they keep their money in cash under their mattress, or in something that’s very unsafe, and they lose their money every few years because there’s a scam in the community or someone takes advantage of them. And that poverty cycle just continues.”

CEO slams lending-focused fintechs

Junaid slammed the state of modern fintech companies, suggesting that the industry is too focused on consumer lending with the rise of Klarna and other hyped “buy now, pay later” services.

“All of their business plans are built around lending revenue, right? Even digital banks, it’s like, okay, I’ll start off being a new bank, but then eventually, I’m gonna get a banking license,” said Wahedna.

Wahed is debuting a debit card linked to a gold-backed spending account. The startup is backed by French soccer star Paul Pogba.

Wahed

He said Wahed is focused on making money by charging wealth management fees, which charge users a percentage of their overall asset holdings. The startup, which was founded in 2017, remains lossmaking, but has hit operating breakeven in Malaysia and the U.S., he added. 

“I feel that fintech, like most of the finance industry, is very heavily geared towards lending,” Wahedna said. “In fact, I would say, it’s making the cost of living crisis, a debt crisis, worse with a lot of the products.”

“If you look at the buy, now pay later companies, people are struggling — that’s the worst type of innovation, you’re making it easier to get people into debt,” he added.

Wahedna stressed that the company is not only for Muslims and aims to serve followers of other Abrahamic faiths as well, including Judaism and Christianity.

Staff at its London branch will help customers open accounts, make investments and give guidance on wills and estate planning.

The firm is targeting high-net-worth individuals as well as less well-off consumers, Wahedna said.

Wahed has raised $75 million of total funding to date from investors including Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Capital, the venture capital arm of Saudi state-backed oil firm Saudi Aramco, as well as French footballer Paul Pogba, who is a practicing Muslim.

Islamic finance has achieved significant growth over the past decade and is expected to reach $4.9 trillion in value by 2025, according to Refinitiv’s Islamic Finance Development Indicator. A number of other fintech players are seeking to tap into the halal money space, including Zoya and Niyah.

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Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

WATCH: Former OpenAI exec says tariffs ‘present AI’s moment to shine’

Former OpenAI exec says tariffs 'present AI's moment to shine'

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Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

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Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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Tesla's decade-long journey to robotaxis

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