AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 4/26/24

As part of its fraud investment, the insurer is announcing a new partnership with voice analytics tool Clearspeed, to detect more fraud and help accelerate the processing of genuine customer claims. Clearspeed provides a unique technology that not only helps identify potential fraudsters that were previously undetected, but also provides insight to help make better decisions and prioritise resources to boost efficiency and support a better customer experience. 

Allianz’s personal lines business has reported a 29% increase in fraud prevention in 2023 compared to the previous year. This spans across all types of insurance fraud from motor claims, home claims and application fraud, and the notable rise of ghost brokers and their tactics to lure innocent victims into a fake insurance policy. 

Unfortunately, a landscape of rapidly evolving fraud tactics is evident, with fraudsters regularly adapting their methods to pursue new scams, including a rise in moped crash for cash fraud and an increase in shallow fakes. Cases where apps were used to distort real-life images, videos and documents increased by 300% from 2022 and into 2023, and has all the signs of becoming the latest big scam to hit the insurance industry. 

Aurionpro Solutions Limited announced the acquisition of Banking and Insurance focused PaaS startup, Arya.ai. With Arya.ai, Aurionpro will enhance its portfolio of enterprise fintech offerings to expedite adoption of AI that is responsible, accurate, and auditable. 

Aurionpro Solutions Ltd. will acquire a majority stake (67%) in Arya.ai. This acquisition will bring products and expertise in Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Intelligent Automation, PaaS, Autonomous AI Platforms, and more, to complement and strengthen Aurionpro’s industry leading portfolio. 

The transaction comprises acquisition of shares held by the existing shareholders and subscription of new equity capital in the company. This will be an all-cash deal. The aggregate investment including  secondary acquisition and fund infusion is approximately 16.5 MN USD. 

Bold Penguin announced a collaboration with Salesforce, launching Bold Penguin Terminal and SubmissionLink on Salesforce AppExchange, a leading enterprise marketplace for partner apps and experts. The new product will empower customers to streamline their commercial insurance quote and bind process. Founded in 2016, Bold Penguin’s integrated digital solution platform simplifies commercial insurance for carriers, agents, and insureds. 

FSC customers can now access two Bold Penguin products: the Bold Penguin Terminal and SubmissionLink. The Bold Penguin Terminal allows agents to simultaneously quote multiple products with multiple carriers using one universal application to find the best coverage in minutes. Bold Penguin partners with leading national, regional, and specialty carriers, supporting both admitted and non-admitted markets, allowing agents to quote the right coverage for the right customer at the right time. 

SubmissionLink leverages proprietary, in-house artificial intelligence to automatically extract and enrich data from submission documents and coverage forms, reducing ingestion time from weeks to minutes while improving accuracy. Through the SubmissionLink integration, carriers can ingest unstructured emails and other documents to automatically create Cases, Accounts, and Contacts in Salesforce FSC and generate rates in real time with over 97% accuracy. 

CLARA Analytics announced it has been selected by one of the world’s largest personal auto insurance companies as the foundation for their AI-enabled claims management initiatives. CLARA helps carriers to make sense of voluminous information, streamline claims management, improve medical outcomes, and reduce administrative burdens for adjusters. 

The company’s CLARAty.ai platform incorporates machine learning, predictive AI, natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI (GenAI) to power a suite of products aimed at solving specific problems and challenges for providers of both commercial and personal insurance coverage. 

The top 10 carrier will be implementing CLARA Optics, a purpose-built document intelligence product that compiles legal demand packages and medical records for transcription, extracts meaningful details, and delivers actionable insights to claims managers. CLARA’s AI technology ingests incoming medical records and demand letters, identifies key information including problematic legal language, flags key deadlines and action items, and updates claims managers as new information emerges. 

Cognizant announced a planned collaboration with FICO, a leading analytics software company, to launch a cloud-based real-time payment fraud prevention solution powered by FICO Falcon Fraud Manager. The joint offering would leverage both firms’ artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology to help banks and other payment service providers in North America protect their customers from fraud in the growing world of instant digital payments. 

While real-time payments have ushered in a new era of speed and convenience, they have also opened the door for scammers. The Cognizant and FICO offering would tackle this challenge by providing real-time fraud prevention with a seamless integration of the real-time payments rails. The offering is expected to enable the detection and blocking of fraudulent transactions with greater accuracy, minimizing losses, and creating a secure and seamless consumer experience. 

For banks of all sizes, this proposed cloud-based solution can be implemented on a pay-per-use or licensing basis, eliminating upfront costs and simplifying the process. Additionally, the proposed solution will handle complex compliance requirements and integration tasks, allowing businesses to focus on their core operations. 

Conquest Planning announced a partnership with Desjardins Financial Security Investments, a leading mutual fund dealer in Canada. Through this collaboration, Conquest’s intuitively designed financial planning platform has become available to nearly 1,400 independent advisors affiliated with the Desjardins Financial Security Independent Network (DFSIN), Desjardins Financial Security Investments (DFSI) and SFL Wealth Management distribution networks across Canada. 

With access to Conquest’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform, advisors can leverage its strategic advice manager (SAM) to help their clients easily understand the impact of decisions on their holistic financial plans. SAM’s proprietary algorithm uses clients’ specific plan data to suggest a variety of ranked and prioritized strategies specific to their financial situations. Designed to make the financial planning process more interactive, SAM offers easy-to-understand recommendations that outline the impact a decision could have on each goal and the overall financial plan. 

In addition to tailored plan recommendations, Conquest’s software is built to evolve in line with clients’ changing life circumstances, objectives, priorities and risk tolerances. Using Conquest, advisors can provide ‘smart’ advice directly to clients by simplifying the interface and embedding in-context financial literacy information. 

Consilience.ai announced the early access launch of its proprietary AlphaIQ , an innovative analysis platform for investment professionals to leverage data for decision-making. By harnessing the power of its Quantitative Linguistics platform, AlphaIQ allows financial and investment professionals to immediately uncover nuanced insights from this traceable, generative AI tool trained using decades of historical data across industries, sectors, and companies, setting a new standard in the financial technology sector. 

Consilience.ai’s proprietary linguistics engine uses traditional AI methods and the company’s proprietary technology to build its own generative AI language models from the ground up. This approach ensures highly relevant and nuanced output, setting a new benchmark in language model innovation. These models draw on validated data across time and industries, ensuring the delivery of reliable intelligence without the risk of confabulation, commonly referred to as hallucinations, which marks a significant advancement beyond current methods. AlphaIQ addresses many of the critical challenges faced by investment professionals within the AI space by ensuring that every insight accounts for both sub-sector nuances and is backed by verifiable evidence that is clear, compliant, and traceable. AlphaIQ is meticulously trained from the vast expanse of corporate communications, including 10k, 8k, Transcripts, Footnotes, Presentations, and more. 

Figure Technology Solutions announced the launch of its AI-powered chatbot built using the latest generation of large language models. This strategic launch demonstrates Figure’s commitment to harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to help drive Figure’s transformative solutions for the lending ecosystem and maintain a highly consistent loan portfolio. With its already existing AI/ML processes spanning from advanced prospect targeting capabilities to processes designed to streamline operations, Figure continues to demonstrate its prowess in integrating AI into everyday operations, offering efficiency and effectiveness in serving and targeting its customers. 

Figure’s AI chatbot is designed to enhance and streamline its HELOC application and origination process as well as the broader customer service experience on Figure’s platform. The chatbot is available to provide operational support during and after Figure’s Customer Support Specialists’ operation hours. During operation hours, the chatbot provides Figure’s Customer Support Specialists with sample responses to common HELOC product and application process questions, with the aim of shortening response times to customers and allowing Customer Support Specialists to focus on resolving more complex inquiries in a timely fashion. 

During after-hours, Figure’s AI chatbot is designed to address fundamental inquiries, facilitating a seamless application process for customers. From guiding users through initial queries to providing essential information and assistance, this AI chatbot serves as around-the-clock support, improving the accessibility and efficiency of Figure’s loan origination platform. In turn, this will help strengthen the customer service experience on Figure’s platform and drive increased efficiency within its lending technology solutions platform. 

Gradient AI today announced at NAPEO’s Risk Management Workshop that Engage PEO is leveraging its Underwriting Solution to enhance its workers’ comp underwriting process and fuel its business expansion. This initiative is part of Engage PEO’s broader AI strategy to facilitate operational efficiency and improve results. 

Engage PEO, a leading professional employer organization (PEO) offering HR outsourcing solutions to small and mid-sized businesses nationwide, has been experiencing tremendous growth recently. The company’s strong growth during the past several years has included the completion of five mergers and acquisitions, the addition of three operational centers, and a significant increase of clients and worksite employees. 

To help meet this demand, Engage PEO implemented Gradient AI’s Underwriting Solution to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of its underwriting process. By leveraging the solution’s AI-powered predictive analytics and a large industry dataset, Engage PEO has enhanced its risk assessment capabilities, allowing for an increased risk appetite and better insights as it expands into new markets and services a broader range of clients. 

Insurity announced that its cloud-based claims solution reaffirms Insurity’s commitment to delivering a comprehensive, contemporary, and cloud-native claims solution for multiline carriers across all tiers. With over 330 customers deployed on AWS and Azure, Insurity is the largest cloud software provider for P&C insurance, a testament to its scale and expertise. 

Insurity’s claims solution aims to reduce the high costs traditionally associated with adapting to changing claims conditions, enabling carriers to extend their claims systems rapidly and adjust loss assignments, business rules, automated correspondence, and more in hours instead of days. This capability empowers business users to expand the system as configurations without the need for coding or database development while still retaining a base implementation. 

Insurity’s claims solution can also integrate with over 50 third-party services across supported lines of business for faster, lower-cost implementations. It is integrated with Insurity’s AI Assistant to drive faster claims intake by as much as 75%. Insurity’s claims configuration and integration flexibility represents a pivotal advancement in streamlining the insurance claims process, positioning it as a transformative development for the industry. 

LoanSnap today announced it has joined NVIDIA Inception, a program that nurtures startups revolutionizing industries with technological advancements. 

LoanSnap is focused on helping consumers save money by using artificial intelligence to minimize debt with technology-driven methods that were previously too time- consuming to research and implement. The company saved its customers over $80 million last year. Its proprietary neural network and software, called LoanFlow, accomplished this feat by sorting through thousands of options for the customer within seconds and closing loans in as little as 24 hours while competitors take 50 days or more, according to a May 2023 CNBC report. 

LoanSnap plans to use the resources available through NVIDIA Inception, including technological assistance and hardware access, to accelerate its LoanFlow product and find even more ways to help consumers save money. The program will also offer LoanSnap the opportunity to collaborate with industry-leading experts and other AI-driven organizations. 

Munich Re Life US and Clareto announced a new digital solution, Automated EHR Summarizer, which provides an intelligent and intuitive synopsis of electronic health record (EHR) data in two formats: an easy-to-use human-readable html report and structured digital data for use in rules, models and analytics. 

Automated EHR Summarizer extracts and normalizes EHR data directly from the source, highlights key points essential to underwriters and provides triage guidance. Reducing the burden of manual review of lengthy EHRs, it paves the way for a more streamlined and accurate picture of projected health trajectories in accelerated underwriting programs and is ideal for use in post-issue audit and light-touch underwriting. 

Napier AI announced that Napier AI Continuum has been selected as the anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing (AML/CTF) platform for world-leading impact asset manager, Finance in Motion. 

Napier AI is providing its Client Screening solution and Client Risk Assessment module as part of the Napier AI Continuum platform to Finance in Motion, to support its global growth in generating positive change in emerging markets. 

Napier AI’s solutions will bolster Finance in Motion with the tools to continue delivering public and private capital exclusively towards impact investments in emerging markets, while protecting funds from being used to finance criminal activity. 

The National Alliance for Insurance Education & Research announced the launch of AlliBot, the Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Bot built exclusively for the risk and insurance professional. 

AlliBot is a knowledge bot developed with The National Alliance’s industry-renowned curriculum and publications. Alli also has access to the most often used ISO forms not available online and therefore not accessible within other AI technologies such as ChatGPT. AlliBot is closely monitored by Academic Directors, who are tenured professionals in their field and who actively coach AlliBot to improve the accuracy of the responses the system generates. 

The National Alliance understands the nuances and needs for different learning and studying styles. This lead AlliBot, an artificial intelligent knowledge partner designed to elevate the professional development experience for every member. One of the key use cases for AlliBot is its ability to assist risk and insurance professionals in navigating intricate insurance policies, coverage scenarios, and other prompts 

Rocket Mortgage unveiled its latest technology innovation: Rocket Logic – Synopsis. This new tool leverages generative AI to listen to, transcribe and search client calls, analyze sentiment and record client patterns and preferences, creating bespoke experiences for the company’s millions of current and potential clients. Rocket Logic – Synopsis represents the next building block in the Rocket Logic ecosystem, the company’s proprietary and patented AI-driven technology platform aimed to streamline the homeownership process. 

Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and using Amazon Bedrock, the Rocket Logic – Synopsis technology is active for calls handled by Rocket’s client experience teams, including loans from mortgage brokers who work with Rocket Pro TPO. The tool is also used by the company’s servicing team, who oversee Rocket Mortgage’s 2.5 million serviced loans. 

In 2023, Rocket Mortgage’s servicing team facilitated 3.1 million client phone calls, with the majority of inquiries related to payments and escrow. To offer clients the best experience, Rocket’s servicing calls and chats are increasingly powered by AI, resulting in approximately 70% of the interactions being fully self-serve without the need for team member intervention. Rocket Logic – Synopsis will save the servicing team nearly 40,000 hours annually by employing transcription capabilities and tracking client sentiment. With this generative AI solution, running on AWS, Rocket’s team members can concentrate on cultivating strong, meaningful client relationships, while AI manages routine tasks like call summaries. 

Socure unveiled an AI-powered global watchlist screening and monitoring solution. The solution enables financial institutions to accurately screen, monitor, and assess new and existing customers against the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction lists and politically exposed persons (PEP) databases, adverse media, and custom watchlists. 

Organizations have long been challenged with outdated legacy watchlist tools that can increase risk of regulatory enforcement action from inaccurate results while also having high false positives that require error-prone manual reviews. These results require exceedingly large staffing costs associated with manual reviews in an environment of limited resources and budgetary constraints. Compliance analysts waste time chasing irrelevant alerts while organizations face legal and reputational risks from potential enforcement actions. OFAC violations for example, face monetary fines ranging from thousands of dollars to several million along with severe impacts to business operations. 

Leveraging AI and machine learning (ML), Socure solves for these challenges and sets the new standard for compliance, achieving a 20% lift in sanctions screening accuracy compared to legacy solutions, a 30% reduction in false positives, and a 75% reduction in manual review time from an industry average of 10 minutes to just 2 ½ minutes. 

Thomson Reuters announced the expanded vision for CoCounsel, its professional-grade GenAI assistant.  

CoCounsel will unify the entire customer experience and give customers a new way to access Thomson Reuters product capabilities through a single GenAI assistant with applications across Legal, Tax, Risk & Fraud, and Media.   

CoCounsel is an AI assistant that acts like a team member – handling complex tasks with natural language understanding. Completing tasks at superhuman speeds, CoCounsel provides high-quality information at the right time, maintains multiple threads of work, as well as keeping context and memory across the different tasks and products customers use each day. By augmenting professional work with GenAI skills, CoCounsel delivers accelerated and streamlined workflows, enables professionals to produce higher-quality work more quickly, all while keeping customer data secure. 

TIFIN announced the appointment of Rob Pettman as its Chief Revenue Officer and President. In his new role, Pettman will report directly to TIFIN’s Founder and CEO, Dr. Vinay Nair. 

With a proven track record of leadership and success in the financial services sector, Pettman brings a wealth of experience and expertise to TIFIN. He joins the company from LPL Financial, where he was Executive Vice President of Wealth Management Solutions. In this role, he was responsible for managing LPL’s wealth management platform, including overseeing investment product distribution, advisory platforms, research, retirement plan business, and relationships with product and technology companies. Throughout his 19 years at LPL, Mr. Pettman worked in various roles across product management and wealth management strategy. 

In his role as Chief Revenue Officer and President, Pettman will oversee revenue generation strategies, forge strategic partnerships, and drive the company’s growth initiatives across TIFIN’s companies. His leadership adds to TIFIN’s market presence and its position as a leader in AI-powered financial technology in the wealth management industry. 

Verafin, a Nasdaq company, announced the launch of Entity Research Copilot, the first of its integrated Copilot capabilities, bolstering its suite of financial crime management solutions. Building on 20 years of technology expertise for anti-money laundering, countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) and fraud detection, Verafin continues its commitment to innovation with the introduction of integrated Copilot features designed to further optimize compliance workflows and streamline operations for financial institutions worldwide. 

Following an extensive Beta program, Verafin is rolling out availability of its first copilot feature, the integrated Entity Research Copilot, to its customer base of more than 2,500 financial institutions. With the powerful combination of its targeted AI-based analytics, consortium data, and robust visual investigation tools, enhanced with new copilot capabilities, Verafin significantly improves investigator efficiency with up to 90% reduction in alert review time compared to legacy approaches. 

Leveraging multiple automation technologies, including generative AI (GenAI), Verafin’s Financial Crime Management Copilot capabilities automates compliance tasks and daily workflows to reduce operational costs and increase the efficiency of anti-financial crime programs. By integrating Copilot features directly into its purpose-built platform and workflows, Verafin enables financial institutions to accelerate alert review, investigation, and regulatory reporting processes, while assisting with compliance with regulatory expectations and helping to mitigate financial crime risks. 

Health plans are under greater scrutiny, navigating an increasingly complex regulatory environment. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates $4.7 billion will be recovered from Risk Adjustment Data Validation (RADV) audits, including extrapolation, from 2023 through 2032. To help mitigate this risk, Wolters Kluwer Health has introduced the Regulatory Audit Module as part of its Risk Adjustment solution. 

The new module is specifically designed to support Medicare Advantage Organizations (MAOs) during regulatory audits. The Regulatory Audit Module leverages clinically trained artificial intelligence (AI) to increase the efficiency and accuracy of risk adjustment auditing, helping reduce repayment liability by identifying an average of 5-7% additional codes. 

In the face of a regulatory audit, manual auditing processes leave room for error, data loss or even corruption of data. Further, aggregating thousands of lines of coding data can be overly complex and burdensome, making it nearly impossible to analyze and identify the most appropriate records to submit for a risk adjustment audit through manual methods. 

ZestyAI announced an agreement with Florida Peninsula Insurance Company. This partnership will leverage ZestyAI’s advanced property analytics solutions to provide Florida Peninsula with a deeper understanding of property-level risk in their homeowners book in Florida. 

Florida Peninsula will use ZestyAI’s Z-PROPERTY Location Insights solution, which applies advanced computer vision and machine learning to capture valuable insights from various data sources, including aerial and satellite imagery, tax assessments, building permits, and infrastructure data, among other unique data sources, for over 150 million residential and commercial properties. Florida Peninsula found ZestyAI’s insights to be highly accurate, matching and even enhancing the results of physical inspections. By implementing these insights, Florida Peninsula aims to further improve underwriting accuracy with the goal of a superior customer experience.