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Grassrunner’s Godwin Raphael Itotomi Completes Move to French Club Stade de Reims

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Nigerian youngster Godwin Raphael Itotomi has taken a significant step in his football career after completing a move to French club Stade de Reims, where he will continue his development with the club’s youth setup.

Sports247 reports that the highly-rated centre-back, who captained Grassrunners FC of Ogun State, officially signed his contract with the French outfit and is expected to feature for Stade de Reims Révélations, the club’s reserve and youth development team competing in the Groupe Élite Championnat des Réserves Professionnelles.

The transfer marks another milestone for the promising defender, whose leadership qualities and commanding performances at the heart of Grassrunners FC’s defence earned him recognition and opened the door to European football.

Renowned for his composure on the ball, strong aerial presence, tactical awareness and ability to organise the backline, Itotomi now has the opportunity to further develop his game in one of Europe’s respected youth development environments.

The move is expected to expose him to a higher level of competition and professional coaching as he works towards breaking into senior football.

Speaking on the move, those close to the player believe the switch to France represents the perfect platform for the young defender to realise his enormous potential.

Joining Stade de Reims provides him with access to world-class training facilities and a structured development pathway that has produced several top talents over the years.

For Grassrunners FC and Ogun State football, the transfer is another testament to the quality of young players being nurtured at the grassroots level. It also reinforces the growing reputation of Nigerian academies in producing talented footballers capable of earning opportunities with European clubs.

As he begins life in Reims, located in the Grand Est region of northeastern France, Itotomi will be aiming to adapt quickly to his new environment, impress the coaching staff and establish himself as a key figure in the club’s youth ranks.

The move is expected to serve as an important stepping stone in his career, with the long-term ambition of progressing into Stade de Reims’ first team and eventually making his mark at the highest level of European football.

For Nigerian football enthusiasts, Godwin Raphael Itotomi’s transfer is another encouraging success story, highlighting the increasing pathway from grassroots football to elite European clubs.

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FULL LIST: NIIRA 2025: NAICOM Eyes Liquidation for Non-Compliant Operators

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BY NKECHI NAECHE-ESEZOBOR—The National Insurance Commission,((NAICOM),  on Monday said only eight insurance companies are yet to be verified by the commission.

The commission disclosed this today while releasing the 43 insurance firms that met the new minimum capital requirements set up by NIIRA

According to NAICOM “The eight insurance companies submitted evidence of compliance shortly before the statutory deadline are currently undergoing final verification and regulatory review.

This, the commission said would be concluded within fourteen days.

Insurance companies not listed among the 43 verified firms include those currently undergoing final regulatory review, as well as unverified operators at risk of liquidation—such as NICON Insurance Plc; Goldlink Insurance Plc Nigerian Reinsurance; Nigerian Agricultural Insurance Corporation ; Royal Exchange Prudential Life Plc;  Tangerine Life Insurance Limited; Sovereign Trust Insurance Plc; African Alliance Insurance Plc; Guinea Insurance Plc; Regency Alliance Insurance Plc; Staco Insurance Plc; Alliance & General Insurance; Universal Insurance Plc; emPle General Insurance Company Nigeria Limited and emPle Life Assurance Limited.

NAICOM had announced the successful completion of the twelve-month insurance sector recapitalization exercise undertaken pursuant to Section 15 and other relevant provisions of the Nigerian Insurance Industry Reform Act (NIIRA) 2025, signed into law on 31 July 2025 by His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as part of his administration’s financial sector transformation agenda towards the attainment of a US$1 trillion economy by 2030.

The successful conclusion of the exercise marks a defining milestone in the transformation of Nigeria’s insurance industry and signals the beginning of a new era for insurance in the country.

Following the enactment of NIIRA 2025, the Commission commenced a structured implementation process to provide strategic oversight, ensure transparency, support operators throughout the transition, and facilitate the effective implementation of the new minimum capital requirements within the statutory compliance period.

To ensure an orderly, transparent, credible, and verifiable process, the Commission issued the Guidelines on the Implementation of Minimum Capital Requirements (MCR) for Insurance and Reinsurance Companies in Nigeria.

The Guidelines provided detailed guidance on the statutory minimum capital requirements under NIIRA 2025, eligible and ineligible capital instruments, admissible and non-admissible assets, verification and validation procedures, regulatory timelines, reporting obligations, and supervisory expectations throughout the implementation period.

The post FULL LIST: NIIRA 2025: NAICOM Eyes Liquidation for Non-Compliant Operators appeared first on Business Today NG.

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AWS is helping vibe-coding startup Superblocks, and the implications are big

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Vibe coding startup Superblocks announced a multi-year joint marketing agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables its tool to be embedded within the private clouds of AWS customers.

That means an enterprise on AWS that subscribes to Superblocks will be able to offer vibe coding to the company’s business users, and those apps will not send data or information externally to model providers or databases. The apps will spin up Amazon Aurora databases within the company’s private cloud, not, for instance, create external Supabase databases, the vibe-coding database of choice.

The apps will also integrate with Amazon Bedrock, the cloud giant’s AI app development/AI gateway/inference platform. Essentially, these apps will automatically fall under IT’s management and security, rather than be rogue applications.

“We’re going to bring it to your data inside your private cloud,” Superblocks co-founder and CEO Brad Menezes tells TechCrunch of vibe coding. “The big thing about that is data never leaves. … It’s their AWS account and basically secure with all of the auditing, all of the encryption, all of the network controls.”

AWS will also help sell Superblocks to enterprises as it does for many of its Marketplace partners. “We support partners where we see strong customer demand and alignment with how customers want to build,” an AWS spokesperson tells TechCrunch.

Still, AWS does not yet have its own vibe-coding agent aimed at business users. It has Kiro, an AI coding agent aimed at developers, but it’s not a vibe coder. Amazon also has an AI assistant, Quick, for business users. But again, that’s more like a Claude Cowork or Microsoft Copilot, rather than a Lovable or Replit.

So this should be a nice boost for early-stage Superblocks, which has 50 employees and raised a total of $60 million as of its Series A, announced in May 2025, backed by Spark Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Meritech Capital, and Greenoaks.

Yet, it’s actually a more significant symbol than that. It’s part of a growing trend where the hyperscaler cloud providers urge their enterprise customers to separate their AI models from all the other scaffolding needed to run enterprise AI and do so on their clouds. They want enterprises to buy AI harnesses (aka agentic apps), AI orchestration, security tools, and the like from them, and not from the frontier providers.

In the past few weeks, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been banging the drum with exactly that message. He’s been telling his many enterprise customers to use multiple models to reduce costs and avoid lock-in. He’s also been preaching that the AI labs are not trustworthy enough to turn to for agent orchestration or app-level harnesses because they may use that data to study a business and later compete with it.

Enterprises perhaps don’t need such warnings. They have already decided to adopt multiple models, particularly frontier Chinese open-weight options. “That is flipped because 60 days ago they were like, I want a specific model. It’s called Anthropic,” Menezes adds.

Open models, for instance, accounted for 29% of all traffic routed through Vercel’s AI gateway last month, a popular tool among enterprises to manage multi-model AI use.

Then, by necessity, all of their AI scaffolding can’t be tied to one provider.

“Having a multi-model strategy across big frontier labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, and open source — and I’d say Chinese open source right now, but also U.S. open source is now starting to come up. It’s a must-have for the CIO,” he says. They want model choice for coding as well as customer service, HR, [and] sales automation, he adds.

Menezes says the movement is so strong, he predicts that “any enterprise that is betting on a single model provider, that executive will be fired.”

So now, we’re seeing the cloud providers bring vibe coding for business users into private, secure clouds, too. That’s like a potential second wave after bringing AI coding agents for enterprise developers. “It’s an emerging category with real momentum, and exactly the kind of innovation we support,” AWS tells TechCrunch.

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