AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 6/21/24

AccountsIQ, the cloud-based accounting platform, announced that it has secured a €60M Series C investment from Axiom Equity, a specialist B2B SaaS growth equity fund. The investment will be focussed on continuing to develop the AccountsIQ product to shape the finance function of the future, particularly to take advantage of advancement in AI throughout all aspects of the solution. 

AccountsIQ provides a financial management system (FMS) Software-as-a-Service designed to transform the finance function, solving complex problems like multi-currency consolidation, multi-level approvals, third-party integrations, and automation of daily processes. It empowers finance teams to collaborate digitally with stakeholders in their businesses by giving the right information to the right user at the right time, enhancing the financial IQ of the organisation so it can make better decisions. 

This investment will enable AccountsIQ to move to the next level of its development as a leading international FMS, growing its resources to more than double its team to over 200 people over the next few years and enhancing its AI capability to deliver even more value to its diverse customer base. 

Ant International, a global digital payment and financial technology provider, unveiled bettr, a global digital lending service to provide micro lending to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in strategic markets through embedded finance partnerships. 

The IFC estimates that 65 million firms, or 40%1 of formal MSMEs in developing countries, have an unmet financing need of $5.2 trillion every year. Recognising the unmet need for inclusive and accessible financial services globally, bettr aims to enable an open, collaborative ecosystem to enhance the accessibility and ease of credit support by leveraging AI, privacy-preserving computing and other digital innovations to close the financing divide and unlock growth opportunities for MSMEs. 

Marking the launch, bettr announced its inaugural embedded finance collaboration with Asset World Corporation (“AWC”), Thailand’s leading integrated lifestyle real estate group and a member of the TCC Group. Wallapa Traisorat, CEO and President of AWC said, “AWC is very excited to partner with Ant International for the launch of bettr. This collaboration will allow both parties to fully leverage their strengths where bettr will intuitively avail digital lending to AWC’s ecosystem of micro and small businesses via our various platforms and engagement channels. The first phase of this partnership will launch AWC’s flagship project “Phenix,” the world’s food wholesale hub, featuring the largest food lounge in Pratunam, set to open on 26th June 2024. The partnership is expected to benefit sellers, buyers, and AWC suppliers, conducting business on Phenix both online and offline, and will eventually benefit merchants across AWC’s Hospitality, Retail and Wholesale and Commercial businesses.” 

ATFX announced a significant enhancement to its global trading infrastructure with the integration of PriceOn from TraderTools. ATFX is set to revolutionize how the firm manages trading flows from current institutional and retail clients, ultimately improving pricing and execution experiences, alongside attracting new clients with data and risk metrics driven confident, unique pricing. 

PriceOn will empower ATFX to manage trading flows more effectively and efficiently, ensuring clients benefit from superior execution and competitive pricing. The advanced technology underpinning PriceOn, which leverages artificial intelligence and sophisticated algorithms, is designed to handle complex client flows seamlessly. This capability will enable institutional clients flows to match with a broad range of retail client flows, (and vice-versa) even those with challenging characteristics, without compromising execution performance. 

PriceOn’s AI-based algorithms represent the cutting edge of trading technology, providing precise and strategic execution that maximizes profitability for clients. Unlike traditional models, this partnership focuses on delivering enhanced returns for ATFX’s global clients. 

Further building on its GenAI leadership in the fixed income market, LTX, an AI-powered corporate bond trading platform backed by global Fintech leader Broadridge Financial Solutions, announced GenAI-powered List Trading functionality. The new feature allows users to leverage GPT technology to generate and execute multi-asset class, multi-directional trade lists seamlessly via RFQ+. 

This new capability addresses the ongoing need to streamline workflows, as clients consistently seek to integrate GenAI into their pre-trade and trade execution processes. 

The introduction of this functionality coincides with the one-year anniversary of LTX’s GenAI application, BondGPT. Within the LTX platform, traders can use BondGPT to generate lists of bonds based on their specific criteria easily and quickly, then seamlessly construct and execute their list of trades. Traders can define rules for auto-execution, allowing greater workflow efficiency. BondGPT+ users can further enhance their portfolio management processes by using GenAI on their inventory and positions to inform portfolio construction decisions. 

Esker, a global cloud platform and leader in AI-driven process automation solutions for Finance, Procurement and Customer Service functions, announced that it is collaborating with EY Services France to address the challenges of digital business transformation. EY Services France (EY) is part of the EY France financial audit and consulting network. This alliance has the goal of offering companies comprehensive support for managing the emergence of disruptive technologies and important regulatory changes such as the French e-invoicing reform and the implementation of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. 

A 2023 French study on the digital transformation for Finance functions, which was sponsored by Esker, surveyed more than 140 Finance departments from large companies on their priorities for automating their processes. The main takeaway of this study highlights the growing importance of comprehensive e-invoicing management, as the upcoming reforms require an in-depth transformation of back-office operations as well as all related administrative and financial processes. 

Faced with these consequential shifts, companies require solid support to confidently prepare for the upcoming deadlines. Esker’s experience and technical capabilities in source-to-pay and order-to-cash automation, merged with EY team’s experience in business analysis and project management covers both the upstream and downstream phases of digital transformation projects. 

FactSet, a global financial digital platform and enterprise solutions provider, announced its suite of solutions designed to enable technologists and developers to build proprietary workflows and accelerate their AI-powered innovations. The new solutions include a GenAI data package, a Conversational API powered by FactSet’s large language model-based chat interface, and an AI Partner Program. 

GenAI has created an opportunity for financial professionals to drive better and faster decision-making, elevate research workflows, increase productivity, and automate tasks, including developing pitchbooks and client-ready documents, generating performance attribution reports, and more. As the appetite for development and integration grows rapidly, technologists are faced with optimizing the power of AI, digesting and storing vast amounts of clean, accurate data, and innovating at a faster pace to drive business goals. 

FactSet, known for a heritage of open and flexible solutions, combines packaged data, a conversational API, and an AI partner program, into its new three-pronged offering to advance the innovative development of AI-powered workflows that meet the needs of financial professionals across firms. 

Firstrade, a pioneer in commission-free online trading, announced the launch of FirstradeGPT. FirstradeGPT is an advanced research and analysis offering for everyday investors; an AI tool trained on in-depth data on global equities and business-specific KPIs, empowering investors to make faster and more informed financial decisions. 

The FirstradeGPT tool provides all Firstrade clients with access to AI-driven insights, research, in-depth analysis, and data visualization enabling them to streamline their investment research and find their trade ideas faster. Firstrade is the first U.S. broker dealer to partner with FinChat.io, offering investors institutional-quality data that’s been verified by human equity analysts. 

FirstradeGPT delivers financial insights that are crucial for self-directed investors looking to research or find investment ideas and compete with the pros. Firstrade users can now access advanced algorithms that analyze financial data, offer in-depth investment insights, and market analysis including analyst estimates. 

The Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) announced the launch of a new certificate program centered on the risks associated with the use of AI. GARP’s decision to launch the RAI Program was supported by a series of global studies of risk professionals over the past several years, with research confirming the expansion of AI applications in both the financial services and risk management practices. 

Developed by a committee of world-leading AI experts and senior risk practitioners, GARP’s Risk and AI (RAI) Program will offer a historical perspective on the evolution of AI and machine learning methodologies as well as comprehensive coverage of AI tools and techniques, AI risks and risk factors, responsible and ethical AI, and governance frameworks for ensuring AI is deployed responsibly within organizations. 

Registration for the RAI Program officially opens August 1, 2024, with Exams beginning in November. GARP will host a webcast on Wednesday, July 10, featuring a discussion with RAI advisory committee members on the value of the program. 

Investall Group, behind the AI-powered wealth management platform AllocateRite, announced the addition of industry veteran Jonathan (Jon) Beyman to its board of advisors. Since its commercial debut six months ago, AllocateRite has rapidly emerged as a disruptive innovation in the portfolio management arena, recently being featured in Michael Kitces’ influential Fintech Map as a newcomer in the portfolio management space. 

Jon Beyman’s addition as an advisor underscores AllocateRite’s commitment to excellence and innovation. Beyman, a distinguished figure with more than 40 years of experience in institutional finance, operations, and technology leadership at prestigious firms including Citibank, Lehman Brothers, Credit Suisse and McKinsey and Co will play a pivotal role in steering AllocateRite’s market strategies. 

Backed by over a decade of meticulous research and development, AllocateRite unifies all client accounts into a single, cohesive platform, supporting a diverse array of asset classes, currencies, and entities. The platform’s standout feature is its integration of advanced AI capabilities via an intuitive AI Agent named Newt. This pioneering AI agent equips advisors, portfolio managers, and operations teams with unprecedented insights derived from portfolio and securities data, all within a fully compliant environment. 

IRONSCALES, the AI-powered email security leader protecting 13,000 global customers from advanced phishing attacks, announced the General Availability (GA) of its game-changing GPT-powered Phishing Simulation Testing solution. This innovative capability, now available to IRONSCALES Complete Protect customers, marks a significant advancement in the ease, efficacy and accessibility of cybersecurity training and awareness. 

The new GPT-powered training leverages PhishLLM™, a proprietary large language model developed by IRONSCALES and trained on millions of data points crowdsourced from the company’s vast community of users. This technology enables the creation of highly personalized and socially engineered spear phishing simulation campaigns at an unprecedented scale and speed. 

This launch is the latest in a series of GPT-powered innovations from IRONSCALES, including the company’s game-changing Themis Copilot for Outlook, launched in July 2023. Themis Copilot recently won the Silver Globee® Award in the category of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Disruptors. With these advancements, IRONSCALES continues to expand its portfolio of generative AI capabilities, ensuring its continued presence at the forefront of inbound and outbound enterprise email security. These tools, powered by adaptive AI, help organizations stay ahead of the ever-evolving threat landscape by reducing human error and increasing security awareness. 

Loop, the modern audit & payment platform for the next-gen supply chain, announced its collaboration with J.P. Morgan Payments to help make financial operations more accessible and profitable for every shipper, carrier, and third-party logistics provider. Together, Loop and J.P. Morgan Payments will boost working capital with freight payments — and facilitate stronger relationships between carriers and shippers built on speed, transparency, and trust. Customers including Great Dane, Loadsmart, and J.P. Morgan Chase benefit from Loop’s logistics-AI solution and J.P. Morgan’s stability and innovation. Together, Loop and J.P. Morgan offer a market-leading financing rate which is a win-win for both shippers and carriers. 

This collaboration ensures carriers receive payments faster while shippers receive a market-leading financing rate thanks to the enhancements made through AI. Loop’s logistics-AI and automation improve accuracy, speed, and trust, enabling J.P. Morgan Payments to provide capital and payment flexibility with confidence. Together, the firms are unlocking working capital that propels growth and collaboration across the supply chain. In addition, Loop will join the J.P. Morgan Payments Partner Network, which delivers end-to-end payment experiences through an ecosystem of third-party applications that can grow businesses faster, provided by experts in industries such as energy, healthcare, transportation, consumer/retail, and more. 

Loop’s logistics-AI platform for spend management and auditing radically streamlines the invoice approval process for shippers, reducing the usual weeklong review to just four hours. Recognized carriers can receive payments often on the same day through J.P. Morgan Payments’ advanced payments platform for a small fee. Shippers can earn money back and configure the solution to extend their payment terms for more strategic capital management. J.P. Morgan Payments combines treasury services, trade & working capital, card, and merchant services capabilities to help clients pay customers or employees, in different currencies, around the world. It processes nearly $10 trillion in payments daily, operating in over 160 countries and over 120 currencies, and is #1 in USD payments volume. 

Jump, AI software for financial advisors, announced that it has raised $4.6 million in funding led by Sorenson Capital with significant participation from Pelion Venture Partners and strategic angel investors. 

Jump enables advisors to concentrate on their core competencies-advising and building relationships with clients-by using AI to automate repetitive administrative tasks like notetaking, sifting through data from previous client calls and notes to prepare for meetings, writing follow-up emails, generating task lists, and syncing relevant data to CRM (including deep integration with Wealthbox, Redtail, and Salesforce). 

After its founding by Ence, Tim Chaves, and Adam Kirk in 2022, Jump launched in January 2024, following over a year of intensive R&D, including a closed beta. After just a few months, hundreds of RIA and Broker-Dealer advisors are using Jump, which has grown almost entirely from organic word of mouth. 

JustPaid announced the company’s commitment to launching their financial AI assistant agent through new audio-based functionality coming from OpenAI via iOS. 

Following Apple’s WWDC (began 6/10), JustPaid is sharing the news of their soon-to-release audio assistant that can answer any and all finance-related questions for your business through a voice assistant which will feel like having a dedicated personal business accountant right at your fingertips, and only a button push away, leveraging OpenAI’s soon to be released GPT-4o’s voice capabilities. 

JustPaid is working to build an app on iOS, so everything from your business finance will be available 24/7 on mobile – and privately protected. 

MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ: MDB) today announced that Bendigo and Adelaide Bank (ASX: BEN) has partnered with MongoDB to modernize its core banking technology with MongoDB Atlas as the keystone of an ambitious application modernization initiative.  

In less than three months, the bank modernized its Agent Delivery System, a legacy retail banking application, on MongoDB Atlas with the help of MongoDB Relational Migrator and generative AI-assisted modernization tools. The Agent Delivery System is a retail teller application for the bank’s agent branches, and is used in communities where digital banking functionality is made available from non-bank businesses, like newsagents or pharmacies. Prior to partnering with MongoDB, the bank ran the system on a legacy relational database that lacked the flexibility to easily evolve to reflect the complex data mapping requirements that today’s modern applications demand. Because of these database-related challenges, the bank’s analysts and developers were committing significant effort to complex database management tasks in order to keep the application running. 

As a technological leader in the Australian financial services market, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank was eager to enable its developers to focus on more meaningful innovation so the bank could remain agile in a fast-moving market. To do so, the bank decided to modernize its Agent Delivery System to make it easier for its developers to work with data and create innovative, accessible banking services. Specifically, the bank sought to adopt a new microservices architecture to help integrate its data and a robust API ecosystem—a series of connective mechanisms that enable easy data exchange—to facilitate fast, easy data flow between the bank’s applications, third parties, and consumers. 

New York Life announced the hiring of Alain Biem as chief data science officer (CDSO). Mr. Biem will lead the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) team. In this newly created position, he will play a pivotal role in advancing broad AI and data science collaborations across the New York Life enterprise, particularly in enhancing the delivery and enablement of AI solutions. Mr. Biem will report to Don Vu, chief data and analytics officer, who joined New York Life in October 2023. 

Mr. Biem brings more than 25 years of experience in the field of data science, most recently serving as chief data scientist for S&P Global Market Intelligence, a division of S&P Global. In this role, he was responsible for AI and machine learning strategy, and the delivery of AI-based capabilities and assets for data processing, new and enhanced products and solutions, and customer-based solutions. 

Previously, Mr. Biem held data science leadership positions at Wayfair, Opera Solutions, and IBM Corporation, in addition to serving as a postdoctoral researcher at Advanced Telecommunications Research, an AI research center in Japan. 

Northspyre, a real estate development platform for project delivery and capital management, announced the launch of two new products – Complex Capital Management and Portfolio Analytics Plus. These new innovations give developers better control over their projects and help to reduce risk and improve reporting in today’s increasingly challenging financial landscape. 

Complex Capital Management delivers robust capabilities to help developers proactively monitor financial risk, track compliance and satisfy unique reporting requirements. This includes projects with complex capital stacks, including Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) developments and deals with multiple capital partners. Portfolio Analytics Plus enables developers to make data-informed decisions by automatically benchmarking costs, as well as project and vendor performance data. The portfolio-wide analytics tool also provides holistic portfolio insights, multi-year spending use and capital needs projections. 

Northspyre’s Complex Capital Management solution is purpose-built to address the nuances of financially intricate developments with a suite of predictive intelligence and automation tools. It also has specific applications for developers working on projects within the highly competitive LIHTC space. 

Oscilar, a provider of risk technology solutions to fintechs and financial institutions, announced the release of its state-of-the-art AI-powered ACH Fraud Detection product. The solution identifies and prevents fraudulent transactions with unparalleled speed and accuracy by leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, generative AI techniques, and real-time data analysis and explainability. 

This innovative solution is critical as the ACH Network – the backbone of the modern financial ecosystem – experiences unprecedented growth, with 8.2 billion payments handled in the first quarter of 2024 alone, including a staggering 47% increase in Same-Day ACH volume. ACH facilitates critical transactions such as payroll, bill payments, internet purchases, person-to-person transfers, and business-to-business settlements. 

ACH credit fraud increased by 6% between 2021 and 2023, and more than half of organizations with revenue less than $1B were unable to recover funds lost from fraud attacks. 

RWS, a provider of technology-enabled language, content and intellectual property solutions, introduced a range of AI enhancements to the latest version of Tridion Docs (15.1), allowing authors to be more productive and enabling enterprises to take advantage of generative AI when delivering highly reliable information to users. 

One of the key features within Tridion Docs Genius is a new AI-driven knowledge portal, which helps employees, customers and partners find the information they need more quickly across vast amounts of information and documents. It presents contextual information associated with a query, helping to solve problems faster. A revolutionary new way of dynamically displaying results, called Hexahops™, moves on from the notion of linear search, and instead displays suggested responses and resources around a central topic in a honeycomb format. 

A new ‘Trustable Chat’ feature is also included within Tridion Docs Genius. The chat gives clear, reliable answers to questions, together with direct links to the source materials – as well as follow-up actions based on the conversation topic. All information and responses displayed in the chat function are based on the underlying Tridion Docs content, providing a very high level of accuracy and reliability due to the use of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). 

TRUE announced the general availability of the TRUE Cloud. The TRUE Cloud brings all the power, features, and benefits of TRUE’s award winning, on-prem, AI-powered document-to-data capabilities to the cloud. This allows lenders to process documents in near real-time with extreme accuracy – greatly reducing and often eliminating the need for a BPO – while experiencing all the cost benefits and flexibility of a cloud-based infrastructure. 

As with all TRUE technology, the TRUE Cloud is designed to operate within the lending lifecycle. Early adopters of the TRUE Cloud state experiencing much easier deployment and significantly reduced effort than managing the implementation on their own. This makes it far easier than ever before to benefit from TRUE’s best-in-class document manufacturing capabilities and TRUE’s AI powered products and solutions, which intelligently automate mortgage workflows in near real-time. 

Vestmark and PureFacts Financial Solutions announced a strategic partnership that will enhance billing solutions and enable nimbler, faster operations for leaders in the wealth management space. 

Vestmark, renowned for its core platform encompassing portfolio management, trading, and client reporting, has identified billing as a crucial component of its comprehensive offering. The partnership with PureFacts provides an integrated billing platform that supports various billing models, including AUM-based, account-based, hourly, retainers, and more. PureFacts Financial Solutions has established itself as a global leader in revenue management and billing, offering an AI-enriched, end-to-end revenue lifecycle process through its innovative PureFees platform. 

PureFacts’ enterprise billing platform is designed to scale, accommodating the diverse needs of different types of wealth and asset management firms. As part of a comprehensive suite of solutions available to financial advisors who leverage Vestmark’s customized investment solutions, PureFacts’ platform provides Vestmark clients the ability to track, measure, and optimize every dollar, bringing flexibility to support a wide range of business models, from small independent practices to regional broker-dealers and wealth managers and large national clients. 

Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting (TAA) announced the release of new GenAI capabilities within its proprietary advanced virtual agent chatbot serving customers globally. 

Designed with an emphasis on customer experience, the advanced virtual agent understands questions asked and written in everyday language, enabling quick and efficient responses, significantly narrowing the gap between query and solution. The technological enhancements also extend to support service agents by aiding in the creation of case summaries and knowledge-based articles, freeing them to focus on complex inquiries. 

TAA’s advanced virtual agent operates in 10 countries, speaks six languages, and is integrated into 29 tax and accounting solutions, and the new enhancements will be first introduced in the U.S.