AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 6/28/24

Archive Intel, a pioneering provider of AI-powered communications archiving and compliance solutions, announced today that Rossby Financial (Rossby), a tech-forward registered investment advisor (RIA) firm, is now utilizing its services as part of its industry-leading tech stack. Advisors affiliated with Rossby will have access to Archive Intel’s cutting-edge compliance technology to streamline compliance and mitigate risks. 

Utilizing advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, Archive Intel effortlessly captures client communications while reducing false positives across a comprehensive and growing list of platforms, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Outlook, Gmail, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Slack, Zoom, SMS, MyRepChat, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, and other websites. 

BlueFlame AI (BlueFlame), the generative AI platform for alternative investment managers, announced the successful completion of its Series A funding round. The $5 million private funding round, which was oversubscribed by 25%, was raised through BlueFlame’s network of industry leaders and strategic partners, along with significant participation from the management team. This round will enable BlueFlame to continue its rapid pace of product enhancement for clients and brings its valuation to $50 million. 

With this investment, BlueFlame will be able to accelerate its growth trajectory, enhance its generative AI platform, and expand its team of world-class client success managers, engineers, product managers, and operations professionals. This funding showcases BlueFlame’s commitment to client support as it continues to develop new AI use cases and technologies designed to enhance efficiency and streamline data sources for alternative investment managers. 

BlueFlame has quickly established itself as a pioneer in the alternative investment management industry, delivering innovative AI and machine learning techniques to build game-changing methodologies for harnessing the power of AI. Founded by former cybersecurity, financial technology pioneers, and GRC specialists, BlueFlame is uniquely positioned to not only understand the operational challenges faced by alternative investment managers, but also to proactively deliver an AI platform that provides security, privacy, and compliance features that address investor and regulatory mandates. 

Charlie, the fintech company on a mission to help older Americans get the most out of their money and keep it safe, announced the launch of SpeedBump, a proprietary combination of pauses, alerts, and real-time education introduced at the exact moments customers are most vulnerable to fraud. 

Research shows that when people are aware of a specific scam, they are 80% less likely to engage with it, and if they do engage, they are 40% less likely to lose money or sensitive information. As financial fraud plagues older Americans, with over $28 billion stolen from them each year, SpeedBump ensures customers are maximally aware of the latest information about fraud, so they are empowered to protect their money during the moments they are most at risk. SpeedBump is a major step forward in protecting older Americans from rampant financial abuse. 

SpeedBump is activated by certain triggers, like using unfamiliar devices to access an account or transactions of a certain size. When this happens, the system imposes a six-hour pause on transactions to allow the account owner to review, stop or verify the activity, after which the transaction will proceed as normal. 

Reaching a significant milestone in the companies’ transformational partnership, CME Group and Google Cloud announced plans to build a new private Google Cloud region, and a co-location facility, in Aurora, Illinois. The private Google Cloud region will host Google Cloud’s new, industry-first specialized platform designed to support global trading of CME Group’s futures and options markets, and offer derivatives traders cloud-based, ultra-low-latency networking, and high-performance computing. 

Locating the platform in the new private Google Cloud region in the Chicago area will allow CME Group’s clients to utilize existing connectivity options and access points to other global markets. Additionally, CME Group’s clients can choose between self-managed infrastructure in the co-location facility or Google Cloud’s specialized infrastructure-as-a-service offering, both with equal network latency to the exchange. 

The new specialized platform will enable a number of benefits for CME Group’s clients, including expanded flexibility, strengthened operational efficiencies, and increased access to cloud services, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, all of which will deepen the value proposition for market users around the globe. For example, CME Group clients will be enabled to rapidly experiment, test, and deploy new strategies without impacting their production trading environments. 

Concentric AI, a vendor of intelligent AI-based solutions for autonomous data security posture management (DSPM), announced it has incorporated new industry compliance capabilities into its Semantic Intelligence DSPM solution. With these new innovative features, Concentric AI now identifies data risk within organizations’ environments applicable to several compliance frameworks, helps remediate those issues, and satisfies compliance regulations like no other product available on the market. 

The new compliance functionality provides organizations with a comprehensive and detailed compliance dashboard for data security controls. The compliance capabilities include out-of-the-box monitoring and reporting for popular regulations and frameworks such as HIPAA, NIST, PCI, HITRUST, ISO 27001, SOC 2, GLBA, SOX, GDPR, CCPA, and others, enabling organizations to efficiently track their progress across multiple regulatory standards. 

This new functionality allows for easy mapping of data security controls to specific enterprise environments, ensuring compliance with various regulatory requirements. This helps organizations leverage Concentric AI to adhere to those security controls and gauge their compliance status. Unlike completing solutions, Concentric AI provides a clear view of an enterprise’s compliance status, with the ability to drill down into specific frameworks and controls. 

Confluence Technologies, Inc. (“Confluence”), a global technology solutions provider for regulatory, analytics, and investor communications, announced Rex 2.0, a significant advancement of its AI-powered SaaS offering that delivers capabilities beyond TSR/Annual Report reconciliation, allowing the investment management industry to gain a new level of operational efficiencies and insights. 

Last year, Confluence launched Rex 1.0, an AI-powered solution that offers intelligent reconciliation between Tailored Shareholder Reports and annual financial reports. Rex 2.0 expands the document-to-document reconciliation capabilities, covering use cases such as reconciling annual reports with prospectuses, excel working papers with annual report PDFs, quarterly reports with annual reports, and prospectuses with KIID documents. 

Rex 2.0 also expands capabilities beyond reconciliation such as intelligent data extraction, validation, and transformation with unstructured documents. These are the first sets of capabilities of Financial Document Intelligence, a new innovative way to work with unstructured documents that couldn’t be done with traditional technologies, giving investment managers unprecedented efficiency and access to insights. 

Digital Future (“the think tank”), a new public policy and advocacy think tank dedicated to promoting the development of the next generation of the financial services industry, announced its emergence from stealth. 

Led by CEO Michelle Bond, a former SEC senior counsel, Digital Future seeks to advance the interests of the financial services industry, consumers, investors, and the broader public by promoting transparency and efficiency in the evolving financial markets, and by facilitating capital formation and innovation. The think tank will work together with policymakers, stakeholders, and the public about issues impacting the financial services industry, and to advocate for policies that enhance the integrity and stability of the marketplace. 

Bond brings over 20 years of experience in financial policy and is an expert in securities, derivatives, banking, and fintech regulation. Most recently, Bond has served as the CEO of the Association for Digital Asset Markets (ADAM). Prior to ADAM, Bond served as global head of policy and regulatory affairs at two fintech companies, where she developed and executed global regulatory strategy for digital assets, blockchain, global payments, and fintech. Bond also worked at Bloomberg LP as head of global regulatory affairs. 

Fintova LLC and Nexgen360 LLC, consultancies offering strategic advisory, technology, operations, and risk management services to the financial services industry, today announced their merger to form Fintova Partners LLC. 

This powerful combination brings together accomplished financial services veterans with extensive domain experience at industry giants like Blackrock, BNY Mellon, UBS, Apex Fund Solutions, and Trident Trust Group. The company’s leaders have also been integral to the creation of leading technology and data platforms, including Blackrock’s Aladdin. Fintova Partners will leverage this deep expertise to continue to provide best-in-class services to investment management firms and other financial institutions as they navigate an ever-evolving industry landscape. 

Fintova Partners offers a comprehensive suite of services, starting with strategic advisory and on-demand C-level leadership to ensure clear direction and strong execution. The company provides clients of all sizes with the same industry competencies, innovative thinking, technology capabilities, and robust risk management solutions that are the hallmark of world-class investment management platforms. They also work with clients to drive operational efficiencies and process improvements that deliver real cost savings and reduced operational risks. Fintova Partners empowers its clients to focus on sustainable growth. 

Gong, the Revenue Intelligence leader, announced a series of enhancements to its industry-first AI Smart Trackers concept capture technology that users can train to help revenue teams achieve better accuracy, efficiency, and automation in their sales execution. Customers can now leverage insights from AI Smart Trackers – both out-of-the-box and those they have trained – and bring operational rigor into revenue workflows with new AI Methodology Playbooks and AI Scorecard Suggestions. 

In today’s hyper-competitive and constantly evolving market, revenue leaders struggle to get the right data to pinpoint gaps in their processes and understand what’s working and what’s not. According to a Gartner® Press Release, “Eighty-four percent of sales leaders agreed that sales analytics has had less influence on sales performance than what leadership expected.”1 This gap exists largely because tracking sales processes, such as coaching and methodology adherence, is still based on sales reps manually inputting data into CRM systems. 

To address the challenges of ensuring sales leaders have the right data to effectively evolve their organizations, Gong is announcing new AI capabilities to help teams autonomously capture this critical data and operationalize it within their revenue organizations. 

Instabase, an applied artificial intelligence (AI) solution for unstructured data, announced a partnership with Rocket Mortgage, America’s largest retail mortgage lender and a part of Rocket Companies (NYSE:RKT). The partnership helps Rocket Mortgage facilitate data extraction and automation from the 1.5 million documents the lender receives each month. 

The mortgage process is historically lengthy, complex and not conducive to automation. Traditional automation tools could not solve these problems because they struggle to maintain high variability and accuracy, especially when deciphering unstructured data trapped in complicated documents – a common occurrence in the mortgage industry. Rocket Mortgage has transformed the journey by creating automation-friendly workflows that enable plug-and-play AI solutions to further optimize processes. 

Rocket Mortgage is utilizing the Instabase platform to help automate the extraction of critical data elements to expedite the lending process. This technology, and several others pioneered by Rocket, has resulted in closing loans 2.5 times faster than the industry average. 

Materia, a comprehensive generative AI platform built specifically for public accounting firms, announced its launch with over $6.3 million in funding led by Spark Capital with participation from Haystack Ventures, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Exponential Founders Capital, and the Allen Institute for AI. 

Materia was founded to improve the lives of accounting service professionals by supercharging accounting firms with intelligent technology that augments a range of time-consuming day-to-day tasks to free up time for more energizing and value-adding work. 

Materia’s founders Kevin Merlini (CEO), and Lucas Adams (CTO), met while working at Facebook where they built AI systems to understand journalism content. Kevin’s motivation to start Materia was driven by the painful and tedious tasks that he personally experienced while working in the Audit practice at Big Four accounting firm KPMG earlier in his career. This ultimately led Lucas and Kevin to incubate the idea at the Allen Institute for AI during the Fall of 2022 (several months before the launch of ChatGPT). 

Moat Metrics Inc., a Spokane, WA based company that delivers AI driven next generation business and research intelligence, announced that it has acquired technology and intellectual property (IP) assets from Aon, a leading global professional services firm. 

As part of the agreement, Aon is retaining its IP broking team as part of Aon’s Global Specialty and Financial Products offering within Risk Capital and the firm will continue to support the development of the IP risk marketplace. 

Moat Metrics was formed to deliver an entirely new intelligence dimension in investment research and business intelligence to help clients make better investment and business decisions. Founded by Lewis Lee, former CEO of Aon’s IP Solutions, and a group of former Aon colleagues, Moat Metrics provides a proprietary AI Platform that generates insights into a company’s value continuum, starting with strategy and innovation and expanding into product mix and IP coverage, which ultimately informs future performance and value.  

Nextatlas announced the launch of Generate Suite, an advanced conversational AI designed to revolutionize market research. This cutting-edge tool empowers businesses to leverage AI for deep insights into market trends, consumer behaviors, and innovation scenarios. 

Since 2012, Nextatlas has been a pioneer in utilizing technology to analyze social media data, online content from hundred of thousands of early adopters and innovators, and other sources to identify and continuously track emerging trends and changing consumer behaviors. Generate Suite integrates this robust analysis with GPT-4o’s generative AI technology, offering businesses an unparalleled ability to visualize future markets and understand consumer behavior instantly. By conversing with Generate, users can quickly identify research foundations, test hypotheses, and comprehend end-user needs. 

Generate Suite stands out from typical chat companions by offering a suite of specialized AI agents, marking a significant leap in market research capabilities. These autonomous systems streamline traditionally time-consuming tasks, enabling businesses to achieve market research goals and strategic planning with unprecedented efficiency. Generate Suite’s agents, such as the Persona Generator Agent and the Sentiment Pulse Agent, provide fully automated workflows that address essential market research needs. 

Patra, a provider of technology-enabled insurance outsourcing and software services, announced the extension of its PolicyCheckingAI to a Self-Service solution that provides access to all brokers and agencies across the industry. As the first company to introduce AI for Policy Checking over a year ago, Patra’s patent-pending PolicyCheckingAI (‘PCAI’) offers insurance professionals an innovative solution to streamline operations and ensure complete and accurate coverage for clients – whether you perform this task in-house through this Self-Service solution or choose Patra’s tech-enabled outsourcing services. 

This new SaaS based Self-Service version of PCAI is introducing technologies that streamline workflows for users to automatically capture, compare, and validate policy data effortlessly. Leveraging AI, Patra automates labor-intensive extraction and comparison of policy data and form schedules, then enables quick and intuitive human review, ensuring a flawless process and achieving 100% accuracy. Patra’s AI-powered technology creates material efficiencies that save up to 85% of the time and effort typically needed for the critical task of policy checking. With PCAI, agency staff can now shift their focus from the policy checking process to customer acquisition and retention. 

Since the introduction of PolicyCheckingAI, Patra’s global service delivery teams have been using this proven capability to automate the checking of hundreds of thousands of commercial P&C insurance policies for dozens of Patra enterprise clients. That experience provided the necessary data to continue the evolution and material advancement of its AI models, leading to the introduction of this Self-Service offering. Insurance organizations that prefer to check policies in-house can now access this technology directly within their own offices and teams. 

PayPal Holdings announced the appointment of Srini Venkatesan as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), effective June 24, reporting to PayPal President and CEO Alex Chriss. In this role, Venkatesan will lead the development and implementation of technology across the entire PayPal ecosystem, including analytics and data science, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, information security, infrastructure operations, and product engineering.   

Venkatesan joins PayPal from Walmart where he most recently led the U.S. Omni Platforms and Tech organization. At Walmart, he led a team to build platforms, features, and capabilities to support the retailer globally. Prior to Walmart, Venkatesan oversaw Yahoo’s display and video ad technology platform. Earlier in his career, he led product and technology teams at eBay and was Chief Technology Officer at StubHub and Marketo. Venkatesan earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Bharathiar University.  

Archie Deskus, who currently serves as PayPal’s Chief Technology Officer, has decided to leave PayPal. Under Deskus’ leadership, PayPal has made significant progress toward operating as a true platform company and strengthened its technology team, processes, and systems. 

As the financial services world becomes increasingly digitized and consumer demands evolve, fraudsters and their methods are becoming more sophisticated. Provenir is helping organizations fight back by detecting these emerging threats via sophisticated decisioning tools and advanced analytics to increase fraud detection while minimizing friction in the customer journey. 

Identity theft and synthetic identities continue to be major concerns and will account for roughly half of all financial services fraud cases by 2025. Also, in a global survey of financial services executives, 43 percent said identifying fraud is a top challenge, yet only 7 percent report their anti-fraud measures are completely effective. This emphasizes the need for powerful fraud solutions that offer flexibility, putting control in the business user’s hands. 

Provenir is on a mission to help businesses navigate this increasingly complex landscape and has collaborated with best-of-breed third-party providers to bring a fraud onboarding solution to market. Provenir’s AI-Powered Decisioning Platform enables organizations to stay ahead of fraud threats, with readily available data sources that can be easily integrated into decisioning workflows, AI model creation and monitoring, to continuously optimize fraud risk models, with configurable rules to respond quickly when new threats arise. 

Quantifind announced an addition to its strategic leadership team. Michael Shepard, Deloitte’s global Financial Crime executive, has retired from Deloitte and is joining the Quantifind advisory board. 

Michael Shepard is an internationally recognized financial crime risk management executive with 37 years of experience. Over his distinguished career, he was a principal at Deloitte for 18 years and was the global Financial Crime leader for the past six years. Before joining Deloitte, he was the BSA Officer and head of Financial Crime Compliance and Deputy General Counsel at Commerce Bank, N.A., a partner in the White-Collar Criminal Defense practice at Blank Rome LLP, and a federal prosecutor at the US Department of Justice. 

As a Deloitte Forensic & Financial Crime principal, Michael assisted client executives and boards of directors at financial institutions and FinTechs in navigating financial crime and sanctions risk management and operational and regulatory challenges. His extensive experience provides deep industry insights to drive innovative technology adoption, which is critical as the field witnesses Artificial Intelligence challenge the status quo in regulatory expectations and software capabilities. 

Shift Technology, a provider of AI-powered decision optimization solutions for the global insurance industry, reported that customers using the company’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are achieving significant accuracy and efficiency improvements in claims processes. Shift introduced generative AI into the company’s detection products in 2023, tapping its power to extract the most relevant data from a wide variety of insurance documents and convert it into intuitive, targeted and actionable insights for claims handlers.  

It is estimated that claims professionals spend more than 30 percent of their time daily reading documents in order to extract the information required to effectively process policyholder claims. This traditionally manual process can be significantly time consuming, often resulting in delays that degrade the policyholder experience. Relying on claims professionals to manually review large volumes of physical or digital documents can also hinder the successful implementation of straight through processing or other claims automation initiatives. 

Generative AI is ideally suited to removing this responsibility from a claims handler’s daily “to do” list. Real-world implementations of Shift’s solutions demonstrate that insurers can achieve over 95 percent accuracy in extraction of key information from documents, providing the knowledge required to progress a claim through the system quickly and efficiently. This level of accuracy also provides confidence that a claim identified for straight through processing does not require human intervention. In the area of subrogation and recovery, Shift’s solutions using generative AI are delivering over 90 percent accuracy for liability determination. This has led directly to an average doubling of referral volume and a 30% increase in referral acceptance rate and has helped make recovery efforts faster, easier and more profitable. 

SymphonyAI announced entry into the trading and investing market with a division focused on bringing insights and analysis from predictive and generative AI capabilities to global financial markets. 

The SymphonyAI Trading and Investing division’s Tenor platform will combine new advanced AI capabilities, powered by SymphonyAI’s award-winning Eureka Gen AI platform, with decision science, data management, and data analytics technology from its acquisition of 1010data that leading financial institutions have trusted to simplify trading, research, valuation, and risk modeling workflows for more than 20 years. 

The SymphonyAI Tenor platform provides ad hoc analytics capable of flexible and fast data manipulation across billions of rows of data, customizable to specific customer requirements. The modularized solution automates orchestration and integration of disparate datasets and seamlessly connects it to proprietary data science tools to provide turnkey solutions for housing finance, consumer credit, and macroeconomic modeling workflows. 

SymphonyAI announced that Adam Quinones has joined the company as president of its newly launched Trading and Investing division. 

Quinones brings a unique and robust background with 20 years of experience in the financial industry, including 10 years of liquidity facilitating in global bond markets, five years of cutting-edge technology development in the Office of Innovation at a leading financial market data firm, and the founding of two successful analytics startups. Quinones will head a division focused on combining advanced AI capabilities, powered by the SymphonyAI Eureka GenAI platform, with 1010data’s sophisticated decision science, data management, and data analytics technology that leading financial institutions have trusted to simplify trading, research, valuation, and risk modeling workflows for more than two decades. 

TIFIN Give, a modern philanthropy platform serving families, employees, and other cause-based communities, announced a new strategic relationship with AssetMark, a prominent wealth management platform provider. This collaboration will empower financial advisors and their clients with a modern donor-advised fund (DAF) solution, designed to streamline the charitable giving process and enhance the impact of philanthropic and tax planning endeavors. 

Under this arrangement, TIFIN Give’s digital-first donor-advised fund technology will be integrated into the AssetMark platform, providing a seamless and efficient way for financial advisors and their clients to manage and optimize charitable contributions. This collaboration will provide AssetMark’s network of financial advisors with an innovative tool to facilitate more effective philanthropic and tax planning across multiple generations of their clients and their families. AssetMark clients will have access to TIFIN Give’s advanced DAF technology, which simplifies the process of setting up, managing, and distributing charitable donations, making it easier for individuals and organizations to support the causes they care about. Through seamless integration, AssetMark advisors can now incorporate philanthropy as an integral part of their clients’ overall financial and legacy plans. 

This strategic relationship between TIFIN Give and AssetMark is set to revolutionize the way financial advisors and their clients approach philanthropy. By combining TIFIN Give’s innovative technology with AssetMark’s wealth management expertise, this collaboration will empower individuals and organizations to give back more effectively and make a lasting impact on the causes they hold dear. 

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. 

These capabilities and benefits help lenders make decisions rapidly, reduce operating costs, and scale on demand to meet market opportunity. 

Vena announced the expansion of its Product & Technology (P&T) team with a new office in Indore, India. This strategic move underscores Vena’s commitment to expanding its global footprint and marks a significant milestone in the company’s continuous growth and development. 

With the addition of the Indore team, Vena will accelerate the delivery of its entire product roadmap, including its generative AI features for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams. Recently, Vena introduced Vena Copilot, which harnesses Microsoft Azure Open AI technology for Complete Planning. The expanded team will support the addition of new features and functionality to these innovative products, reinforcing Vena’s commitment to delivering tailored solutions that address the evolving needs of finance and operations teams. 

While Vena’s initial focus is on establishing a strong Product & Technology (P&T) presence, the company recognizes the broader talent potential in Indore and has a long-term vision to expand other teams there. Taking a phased approach, Vena plans to leverage the talent pool in Indore strategically while ensuring a smooth integration of new P&T team members into the existing global organization. 

Verint announced that a leading financial services brand selected the Verint Open Platform to support its contact center made up of 1,800 agents. The brand evaluated multiple vendors and awarded Verint the contract based on its open approach and ability to deliver tangible AI business outcomes. 

The Verint Open Platform will consolidate siloed behavioral data into a unified hub within the platform’s core. In addition, the brand will deploy multiple AI-powered bots trained on behavioral data, including the Verint Personally Identifiable Information (PII) Redaction Bot to protect sensitive personal information, the Exact Transcription Bot to accurately transcribe customer calls and the Data Insights Bot to transform the contact center into a data-driven operation. 

Wealth.com, an estate planning platform, unveiled its latest innovation: Family Office Suite, a cutting-edge collection of estate management technologies designed for highly complex estates. The Family Office Suite is specifically tailored to the needs of firms that service high-net-worth (HNW) and ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) individuals and families, enabling their advisors and in-house wealth strategists to deliver incredible estate planning value to clients, while reducing manual work through automation and processes that are both scalable and repeatable. 

With Family Office Suite, advisors gain the ability to quantify tax alpha, organize and collaborate with clients and other professionals using AI, visualize complexities and nuances and deliver refined reports. 

As wealth.com strives to revolutionize the estate planning experience for advisors and their clients, it is continually developing creative solutions that are underpinned by legal excellence and rigor. In support of these efforts, the company has appointed David Haughton, JD, CPWA®, as senior corporate counsel. Drawing from his experience as team lead of Advanced Planning at Commonwealth Financial Network (“Commonwealth”), in addition to his legal acumen, Haughton will aid in developing sophisticated yet intuitive products. Collaborating closely with the broader wealth.com team, he will work to ensure that all offerings are of the quality and caliber that advisors expect.