Bank of America is set to acquire as much as a 49.9% stake in Jio Financial Services’ non-bank lending business for 182.68 billion rupees ($1.92 billion), strengthening the U.S. bank’s exposure to India’s rapidly expanding financial-services market.

The agreement announced Wednesday will make Bank of America a joint-venture partner in Jio Credit, a non-banking financial company (NBFC) that has expanded rapidly since beginning operations two years ago.

Under the transaction, BofA will initially acquire a 26.5% stake through a preferential allotment of equity shares and warrants. Its ownership could rise to 49.9% if the warrants are fully exercised.

The deal values Jio Credit at about $3.8 billion, based on a Reuters calculation.

Jio Credit will issue up to 66.13 billion rupees of equity shares and up to 116.55 billion rupees of warrants to Bank of America. The transaction remains subject to regulatory approvals.

The investment gives Bank of America access to Jio’s rapidly expanding lending platform and customer base without amounting to a direct expansion of its retail banking operations in India.

A BofA spokesperson told Reuters that the transaction is not a retail banking expansion in the country. Instead, the partnership combines Jio Financial’s domestic distribution and digital infrastructure with BofA’s international financial-services capabilities.

“By combining Jio Financial Services’ scale, local expertise and customer base with Bank of America’s global reach, digital experience and close to 250 years of leadership in banking, we can help expand access to financial services and support India’s continued economic growth,” BofA CEO Brian Moynihan said.

The structure is significant because India’s financial sector is increasingly attracting international capital as demand for credit, payments, insurance and investment products grows alongside the country’s expanding economy.

Jio Credit has emerged as one of India’s fastest-growing NBFCs. Its assets under management exceeded $3 billion as of the end of June, only two years after the business began operating. That growth gives BofA exposure to a financial platform that is still in an early expansion phase rather than an established lender with a mature balance sheet.

Jio Financial Services was listed in 2023 following its demerger from billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries. Since then, the company has expanded beyond lending into several areas of financial services, including digital payments, insurance broking and asset management. Its strategy is built around leveraging the enormous customer ecosystem associated with the broader Reliance group and using digital distribution to scale financial products.

Jio Financial has been pursuing partnerships with major international financial institutions as it develops that ecosystem. The company operates asset and wealth-management ventures with BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. It has also established a joint venture with Germany’s Allianz to offer general and health insurance products.

The BofA transaction therefore adds another major global financial institution to Jio Financial’s growing network of international partners.

The deal also comes amid a broader increase in foreign investment in India’s financial sector.

Japanese financial conglomerate MUFG has invested in Shriram Finance, while Dubai-based Emirates NBD has agreed to acquire a 60% stake in RBL Bank.

The interest reflects the scale of India’s financial opportunity. The country’s large population, expanding middle class, growing digital-payment ecosystem, and increasing demand for consumer and business credit have created significant room for financial institutions to expand.

NBFCs are particularly important because they can provide credit to segments of the economy that may not be fully served by traditional banks.

BofA’s investment shows that international banks can participate in India’s financial growth without building a conventional retail banking operation from the ground up. Rather than competing directly for retail deposits and branches, BofA is taking a substantial strategic position in a fast-growing domestic lending platform.

The initial 26.5% ownership gives BofA significant exposure to Jio Credit, while the warrants provide a route to nearly half of the company if exercised.

An emerging advertising format designed specifically for artificial intelligence agents is facing an early test after Perplexity moved to prevent the ads from influencing its AI systems, raising questions about whether publishers can turn chatbot visibility into a new advertising market.

Brands including Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute have been testing the format on Time’s website through an initiative designed to present advertisements directly to AI crawlers rather than human readers.

The experiment has opened a broader debate across the advertising industry over whether so-called “Agent Ads” can become a viable marketing channel or whether AI companies will block the practice as an attempt to manipulate their search and answer systems.

Perplexity has already taken a hard line.

The AI search company has begun preventing the advertisements from influencing its models, according to Digiday. Perplexity also warned publishers that running what it considers “deceptive advertising” could lead to lower rankings in its search index.

At the center of the dispute is a fundamental question about how information should be presented to AI systems. Time has created stripped-down, text-only versions of some webpages intended specifically for AI agents. The publisher directs AI crawlers toward those versions rather than the pages designed for human visitors.

It then partnered with adtech company Mobian to place “Agent Ads” on the AI-readable pages.

Unlike conventional display advertising, the ads appear as blocks of FAQ-style text containing current facts about the advertiser. The format is intended to provide information that an AI system can read, process, and potentially incorporate into an answer.

The underlying strategy is that if an AI system retrieves information from a respected publisher, the advertiser may have a greater chance of being accurately represented when users later ask a chatbot about the company or its products. That could become more valuable as consumers shift from traditional search engines toward AI assistants for product research, recommendations and factual queries.

Jonah Goodhart, chief executive of Mobian, defended the approach, saying the advertisements are clearly labeled and contain cited, verifiable information that AI systems can decide whether to use.

“This is the opposite of deception,” Goodhart said.

Perplexity disagrees.

Jesse Dwyer, a spokesman for the company, said providing one version of a webpage to human visitors and another to AI systems amounts to “cloaking,” a practice that traditional search engines have historically penalized.

“You can’t just rebrand spam,” Dwyer said. “If the ads are so helpful, why not just put them right on the site for everyone to see?”

The disagreement exposes a potentially important fault line in the emerging AI advertising economy.

Traditional search advertising works largely because users can see the advertisements and distinguish them from organic results. AI systems introduce a different environment. A chatbot may absorb information from a webpage and present it in a synthesized answer without showing users exactly which portions of the source influenced its response.

That creates an incentive for marketers to optimize content specifically for machines, potentially producing a new form of search-engine optimization aimed at AI models rather than people. It also creates a significant governance problem for AI companies. If paid promotional material is deliberately structured to resemble ordinary informational content, platforms must determine whether it should be treated as advertising, useful data, spam, or an attempt to manipulate model outputs.

Perplexity’s response suggests that at least some AI companies intend to apply existing anti-manipulation principles to the new format.

The stakes could rise as AI search becomes more commercially important. If consumers increasingly rely on systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to research brands and make purchasing decisions, appearing in an AI-generated answer could become as valuable to marketers as appearing prominently in conventional search results. That could create a new competition among publishers, advertisers and AI platforms over who controls the information that models consume.

Time’s position is that the industry needs to develop standards rather than simply reject the concept.

Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer, said the publisher had contacted Perplexity and looked forward to “a constructive dialogue about the standards and safeguards that will allow advertising and AI to develop responsibly together.”

The Project Management Institute is taking a similarly experimental approach. Menaka Gopinath, its chief marketing officer, described the organization’s work with Time as part of a “learning journey” aimed at understanding how information about project management, professional skills and career development appears in AI-driven environments.

For advertisers, the immediate value may therefore be less about direct sales and more about learning how AI systems discover, interpret and reproduce information about brands. That distinction could be important because AI advertising remains an immature market, and advertisers do not yet have the same established measurement systems for chatbot visibility that exist for conventional digital advertising.

But the dispute with Perplexity shows that the industry may face an even more basic obstacle: AI platforms control the systems that marketers are trying to influence.

A publisher can create content designed for AI crawlers, but an AI company can decide whether that content enters its search index, influences its models, or appears in its answers. That gives AI platforms significant power over the emerging market.

President Donald Trump has been sued in Manhattan federal court over a new Truth Social service that charges customers as much as $100,000 a month for faster access to posts from Trump and other prominent accounts, with the plaintiffs arguing that the arrangement allows his private company to profit from potentially market-moving government information.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday by nonprofit news organization The Intercept Media and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, describes the service as an “extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional” scheme and asks the court to stop it.

The plaintiffs allege that Trump is effectively selling advance access to official government announcements through Truth Social, creating a system in which financial firms and other paying customers can receive information before the broader public.

“President Donald Trump is charging $100,000 per month for advance access to his official government announcements on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns,” the lawsuit says.

It alleges that Trump “stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company.”

The legal challenge centers on Truth API, a business-to-business data service announced last month by Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social. The service is designed to provide customers with a machine-readable feed of posts from the platform’s highest-profile accounts, including Trump’s account, which has about 13 million followers.

Trump Media’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn provided further details about the service during the company’s first earnings call on Monday, saying customers would receive posts from top accounts faster than ordinary users. McGurn said the company had signed more than 10 customers since announcing the service, primarily high-frequency trading firms.

Subscription prices range from $60,000 to $100,000 a month, he said.

The company is also in discussions with major cloud-computing companies, large news organizations and developers of large language models, according to McGurn. Trump Media is also evaluating potential opportunities to license Truth Social data to prediction market companies.

“Truth API provides a machine-readable feed of publicly available Truth Social posts from the platform’s top accounts in milliseconds,” McGurn said.

Customers, he added, receive “published and publicly available posts fractionally faster.”

That distinction is central to the dispute. Truth Social posts are publicly available, but the plaintiffs argue that selling faster access to posts from the president creates a meaningful commercial advantage when those posts contain information capable of affecting financial markets.

The lawsuit specifically objects to the possibility that presidential announcements could be monetized through the president’s privately controlled social media company.

The plaintiffs argue that the arrangement violates the First and Fifth Amendments and constitutes an unlawful use of government information for private financial gain.

“There is no legitimate interest, let alone a significant one, in permitting President Trump to profit from selling government information,” the lawsuit says.

The legal challenge comes as Truth Social has increasingly become an important communications platform for Trump, who frequently uses social media to announce policies, respond to political developments and comment on financial and economic issues.

The potential market impact of Trump’s posts has also become an important consideration for traders. A presidential statement concerning tariffs, trade policy, sanctions, interest rates, companies, or other economic matters can potentially affect financial markets within seconds.

That creates a commercial incentive for firms capable of receiving and processing such information faster than other market participants.

High-frequency trading firms are particularly relevant because their strategies depend on extremely fast access to information and automated execution. Even a small reduction in the time between the publication of a market-sensitive post and a trading firm’s receipt of that information can potentially matter for certain trading strategies.

Trump Media’s decision to charge substantial monthly fees for that faster access therefore puts a new commercial dimension around Trump’s social media communications.

Although the company has characterized Truth API as a data service providing access to information that is already public, the lawsuit, not alleging that the underlying Truth Social posts are secret, focuses on the commercial value of receiving them before other users and whether Trump can personally benefit from that speed advantage when the posts involve official government information.

For Truth Media, Truth API represents a potentially significant expansion of Truth Social beyond conventional social networking. Its proposed customer base extends from financial firms to major technology companies, news organizations, and AI developers.