Financial messaging system SWIFT unveiled a blueprint for a global central bank digital currency (CBDC) network on October 5, following experiments involving the central banks of France and Germany as well as HSBC, NatWest, Standard Chartered, UBS and Wells Fargo. SWIFT said it has carried out transactions between different blockchain networks, using both CBDCs and fiat currencies.

CBDCs are digitalized instruments issued by a central bank that can serve as an electronic extension of a form of cash. Figures published by the International Monetary Fund suggest that about 97 countries are researching, testing or deploying a CBDC, raising the question about how the different CBDCs would work together to enable cross-border payments – a process that would be costly and unreliable under the current, traditional finance system known as correspondent banking.

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In Jhakrand, a state in rural India, six in ten girls become child brides and thousands are trafficked each year as laborers or sex workers. Yuwa, a not-for-profit that aims to break the cycle through a soccer and education program, found an affordable way to nourish the girls through Blendhub, a Spain-based company that makes sustainable food from powder-based ingredients and recipes: a tasty personalized nutritious meal shake that the girls could drink on the soccer field. (see the photo).
 
Blendhub upcycles surplus food or scraps, such as orange peels, which would otherwise wind up in the garbage, by using a dehydration technique that transforms them into valuable powdered food ingredients with a high nutritional value and long shelf life, a process founder and CEO Henrik Stamm Kristensen’s calls fresh2powder2fresh. The end-product can be turned into liquids, solids or gels that are edible for five years, providing affordable nutritious meal ingredients for lower and no income families.
 
The Spanish company uses a platform business model that allows startups and SMEs around the globe to apply this approach to launch healthy and affordable food and nutrition in sustainable global supply chains, with an aim of having a real impact on food security and climate change.
 
Blendhub, which started life in a garage 25 years ago, is a member of the World Economic Forum’s New Champions community. “It is a good example of how smaller purpose-driven companies can impact real problems,” says the Forum’s Olivier Woeffray.

Amount Walgreens, the U.S.'s second-largest pharmacy chain, says it will save per year by turning to robots to ease workloads at drugstores. The Wall Street Journal reported that Walgreens is setting up a network of automated, centralized drug-filling centers where rows of robotic arms sort and bottle pills. The company says the setup cuts pharmacist workloads by at least 25%. The goal is to give pharmacists more time to provide medical services such as vaccinations, patient outreach and prescribing of some medications. Those services are a relatively new and growing revenue stream for drugstores, which are increasingly able to bill insurers for some clinical services.