AUC will graduate its Fall 2017 cycle from the AUC Venture Lab FinTech Accelerator today at the New Cairo Campus. The program is sponsored by our friends at CIB. AUC and CIB partnered last year to open the AUC Venture Lab Fintech program to help support startups in the sector.

Prime Minister Sherif Ismail will be discharged from hospital in Germany within the next few days, acting PM Mostafa Madbouly said yesterday, Ahram Gate reports. Ismail will remain in Germany to continue his recovery and return to Egypt “soon,” Madbouly said.

** Take our end-of-year survey — get a bag of Enterprise-branded coffee and cool mugs from which to drink it:It’s that time of the year again — we want you to help us gauge how well business went during the year. What are the biggest challenges you faced during the year? Where will the exchange rate stabilise? Do you expect big raises in 2018? Are you hiring? Help us find out. You’ll get the chance to become one of 25 people who’ll get our end of year giveaway package consisting of Enterprise swag and our first-ever Enterprise-branded batch of coffee, which we’ve put together with good friends in the coffee business. (More on that in a later issue.) The survey runs through sometime next week, and we’ll have the results when we’re all back from the Christmas-New Year’s-Christmas break.

With the MiFID II requirement that research be paid for set to come into effect with the new year, most high-profile asset managers are going to absorb the cost of research rather than pass it on to clients. Of nearly 80 managers listed by the Financial Times, only Amundi, Carmignac, Deka and Fidelity International are down as planning to pass the cost on to clients starting 3 January. Goldman, HSBC, Deutsche, Franklin Templeton, Investec and more than 70 others will be absorbing the costs themselves. Read this along with Mifid II impact on investment banking ‘exaggerated’ from last week.

Nobody is extending a helping hand to Kingdom Holding the way founder Alwaleed bin Talal rode to the rescue of Citi in the early days of the global financial crisis a decade ago, the Financial Times notes. The “Warren Buffet of Arabia” remains in detention in Saudi’s so-called graft probe, and “in his hour of need, nobody has publicly come to his aid as bns of USD have been wiped off his fortune and the investment firm he founded, Kingdom Holding Company, has been plunged into uncertainty. KHC has lost almost a fifth of its value since Prince Alwaleed’s detention, falling to USD 8.5 bn.”

Trade in the era of Trump: The Wall Street Journal’s “From German faucets to Italian chocolate, trade barriers are rising again in Europe” is rather timely after the WTO’s Buenos Aires ministerial meeting this week ended with little progress on anything of substance.

Learn when to shut your mouth — and better still, to listen to others. Talkaholics Sink Partnerships, Presentations—and Careers is one of our favourite pieces to run in the Wall Street Journal in years. The takeaway, of which we will remind ourselves daily: “Long-winded executives think they’re personable, but loquaciousness can turn off colleagues and potential clients.”

It’s been months since one of us has had pizza, but even discounting our longing for warm, cheesy-carby goodness, it’s hard not to smile when reading It’s Official: Naples Pizza Is One of Civilization’s Glories. Even without words, the glimpses of perfect pies in the accompanying photos would be satisfying.

May we suggest some enterprising young Egyptian out there mount a similar campaign to earn international recognition for hawawshi? For it is, verily, the True Breakfast of Champions.

And speaking of delicious carbs: We love Ovio’s Christmas cookies. The pizza-less one among us is plotting whether he gets to have one before year-end travel, or afterward. Want to bake your own instead? Start with Five cookie recipes that could be your new holiday standbys from Canada’s Globe and Mail.

We’re not getting older, we’re getting wiser. At least that’s what we hope after reading Things I’ll do differently when I’m old in the New York Times. Anyone else notice how the goalposts for what you consider “old” keep getting pushed back with every year?

Still on the fence about going to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi this weekend? The reviews of reviews are coming together to help you make up your mind.