Not everything about the adoption of artificial intelligence in the financial industry is going to be a net positive for the world.
Let’s dig into some recent marketing research for an example . Have you noticed that your social media network of choice has gradually become… eh, let’s say “less human,” over time? Repetitive content, more promotional content and more posts obviously copy-and-pasted and/or produced by bots?
Get ready for a lot more of that useless and annoying content thanks to the adoption of generative AI.
According to a survey of social media marketers from software marketplace Capterra, nearly half of all social media content created by businesses is going to be generated by AI by 2026.
That’s two years from now. Of course, according to the same survey, approximately 39% of business social media posts are already created by generative AI.
So, to add to the nuisance and criminal bot-generated content already present on social media, the world is experiencing a surge in official content generated by artificial intelligence.
At some point, the prevalence of bot-generated content will overwhelm the human-generated content on social networks. Bots never get tired of posting and can be targeted to respond to anything and everything.
Human social media participants are already tiring of bot-generated content on these networks. Social networks were intended to facilitate human connections, not to serve as automated marketing and service platforms for businesses. When there is too much bot content and too many promotions on their feeds, people will stop logging into their accounts and will generate less organic content.
It’s not hard to see how ham-handed adoption of generative AI on social media could take a bite out of participation on certain incumbent social networks already struggling to maintain their active user base.
The takeaway for content creators and the financial industry is that generative AI applications can’t just be set loose on a client-base or population of users because they create incremental efficiencies within the operations of a business. They must be applied thoughtfully with consideration given to the impacts on platforms, culture and user experience.
Let’s get to some AI headlines.
This week we have 11 AI and Finance headlines from across the financial and technology industries.
READ ON…..
1. Amber Group
Amber Group announced the launch of its new accelerator program, amber.ac. The company said that with this launch, it has reaffirmed its commitment to fostering blockchain and AI innovation and empowering the global crypto community.
The program was unveiled at a kickoff ceremony in Singapore, streamed live to a global audience. The event also introduced the first two incubated companies, Haven One and edgeX, and launched the inaugural BUIDL_QUESTS web3 innovation challenge.
Amber Group’s CEO and Co-founder, Michael Wu, presented the vision for amber.ac as a catalyst for frontier crypto innovation. As a seasoned player in the crypto realm with a seven-year track record, Amber Group brings to the table extensive technical expertise, liquidity, and professional acumen. The company has consistently demonstrated leadership in its core businesses: ALIR (Advisory, Liquidity, Investment & Research), Asset Management, Digital Wealth Management, and Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions.
2. CallMiner
CallMiner, the leading provider of conversation intelligence to improve customer experience (CX), has announced new and enhanced generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to advance post-interaction and real-time AI summarization features in the CallMiner platform.
Building on features delivered in Q1 2023, CallMiner has improved its post-interaction AI summarization capabilities through the adoption of an upgraded large language model (LLM). Improved AI-based summaries can be configured with use-case specific parameters, such as collections, support, sales, and more, making them even more precise, tailored and valuable. With enhancements to existing AI summarization features, CallMiner is empowering organizations with insights after every interaction, improving decision-making and strategy execution enterprise-wide.
Further, a new, automated follow-up actions feature, based on the AI-based summaries, makes it possible to initiate workflow tasks for contact center agents, such as sending notifications or closing the loop with specific teams. Integrating directly with CRM systems and the CallMiner Coach product, AI-based follow-up actions empower agents to concentrate on providing high-quality customer experiences, while reducing after-call effort and ensuring no crucial tasks get overlooked post-interaction.
3. Canoe Intelligence
Canoe Intelligence (“Canoe”) announced the completion of its Series C financing round of $36 million, led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives (“Goldman Sachs”) with participation from existing investors F-Prime Capital and Eight Roads. This latest round marks a significant milestone for Canoe, representing a more than 3x increase in company valuation since its Series B financing in 2023. With the additional capital, Canoe will continue its investment in building proprietary AI and machine learning technology to enhance its comprehensive back-to-front office capabilities.
Alternative investments now represent $22 trillion in assets under management, or 15% of global assets under management, highlighting the critical importance of advanced technology for managing investment documents and data. Through its automated infrastructure, Canoe drives improvements in data accuracy and access, team efficiency, and client satisfaction for investors. Canoe’s platform streamlines data management for a diverse client base of 325 institutional investors, capital allocators, wealth managers, family offices and asset servicing firms, including Blackstone and Hamilton Lane (Nasdaq: HLNE).
Since the completion of Canoe’s Series B funding round in February 2023 led by F-Prime Capital and joined by Eight Roads, Canoe has achieved 100% year-over-year growth in both clients and revenue. Canoe’s extensive partnerships with four of the top five global asset servicing firms, seven of the top ten global investment consultants, six of top ten fund of funds, five of the top ten endowments, 12 of the top 25 largest independent wealth managers, and many of the world’s largest single-family offices provide the firm with unique scale and market leadership. Canoe supports the alternative data management needs of over 1,000 LPs across more than 650,000 commitments and subscriptions to over 42,000 funds. This represents one of the most robust fund master databases in the world.
4. The Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard
The Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard (D^3) announced the launch of its Advisory Council and Industry Council to further its focus on using AI and digital technologies to advance business and society. The Advisory Council, made up of industry visionaries, will work with D^3 and Harvard Business School leadership to build and scale the structures needed to drive the future of global business with AI. In addition, the Industry Council, composed of senior leaders across industries working with AI and digital technologies, will collaborate with Harvard and Harvard Business School faculty at D^3 to identify the greatest potential impact of the Institute’s research.
Advisory Council members bring diverse expertise and global perspectives, invaluable to the mission of driving the future of business. Each Council member serves a term of four years to drive longer-term impact for the Institute.
Industry Council members, who will serve one-year terms, will offer faculty and their researchers at the Institute insights on high impact research opportunities across sectors and geographies. The Industry Council will provide guidance on the potential business impact of the research coming out of D^3. Industry Council members will review proposed field experiments, offering strategic advice on their relevance, reach, and impact, to foster rapid and impactful research outcomes.
5. Docyt
Docyt introduced GARY, the world’s first AI bookkeeper. GARY combines Precision and Predictive AI models with Generative AI tools to streamline the digital back office for small and midsize businesses. It automates manual bookkeeping processes and accelerates the month-end close from a matter of weeks to just 45 minutes through continuous reconciliation.
The GARY (Generative Accounting Retrieval sYstem) AI bookkeeper is built on the powerful Docyt AI SaaS platform that brings a new approach to accounting automation, integrating workflows such as expense management, revenue accounting, industry vertical reporting, and financial reporting of key KPIs. By automating every aspect of the monthly accounting workflow, Docyt AI prepares the month-end close and makes the closing process a formality.
GARY integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks, eliminating the need to migrate to a new ledger system. With an estimated 80% of SMBs running on QuickBooks, Docyt’s new AI bookkeeper gives these businesses an easy way to harness the power of AI without abandoning their legacy financial workflow.
6. Intelligize
Intelligize announced the launch of Intelligize+ AI, the next generation of its SEC compliance analytics and research platform. The reimagined platform includes generative artificial intelligence-driven capabilities and new search technologies that enable users to quickly and easily find, analyze, and compare documents using natural language processing.
Intelligize+ AI offers new search technologies, including a new Expand Keywords feature to make Boolean searching even more robust with variations and high-confidence substitutes. Advanced conceptual search technology also enables users to go beyond traditional keyword searches for more intuitive discovery of the most relevant documents based on the concepts of underlying queries.
The platform’s “Ask AI” feature enables users to ask questions in plain English about their search results to speed document review and pinpoint the most relevant examples. Two additional AI-driven features, “AI Compare” and “AI Summarize,” help users highlight similarities and differences between documents for faster review, and provide condensed explanations of sections within documents, reducing the time spent manually synthesizing information. Using these three features, painstaking tasks like benchmarking peer filings – critical to avoiding SEC Comment Letters – become dramatically easier.
7. Liquidnet
Liquidnet, a leading technology-driven agency execution specialist, announced its partnership with cutting-edge, Gen-AI startup Boltzbit to optimize its Fixed Income primary markets workflow.
Leveraging Boltzbit’s unique Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Learning solutions and its bespoke workflow model, Liquidnet is now able to receive, process, and display newly announced bond deals at a rate which significantly surpasses its prior parsing technology. As a result, bonds are more readily available through Liquidnet’s deal announcement dashboard and subsequently into its new issue orderbook.
The application of this custom AI model provides Liquidnet’s Members and partner syndicate banks with the distinct advantage of faster access to trading and information distribution. Liquidnet estimates the enhancement improves the time from when they receive unstructured deal data to the bonds being ready by 90%.
8. NICE
NICE announced that its NTR-X Compliance Recording and Assurance Solution has secured transactable solution status in Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace. NICE NTR-X, a fully integrated, cloud-ready, next-generation compliance recording and assurance solution, is part of NICE Compliancentral, the industry’s first end-to-end communication and trade compliance suite.
NICE NTR-X and all other Compliancentral solutions are now available for purchase through Microsoft Azure Marketplace and AppSource. As an eligible solution on Azure Marketplace, NICE NTR-X and Compliancentral software customers can leverage the benefit of their pretax purchase contributing 100% towards their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC).Through Microsoft Azure Marketplace, customers around the world can easily find, buy, and deploy partner solutions they can trust, all certified and optimized to run on Azure.
NICE Compliancentral unifies communications capture, archiving and surveillance into a single, robust cloud compliance platform, thereby eliminating costly integrations and ensuring interoperability. Consisting of three integrated solutions, Compliancentral also includes ARCHIVE-X, which securely stores all regulated employee communications data in a single application for records lifecycle management and regulatory records retention, and SURVEIL-X Communication, which offers one surveillance solution to monitor all regulated employee communications to effectively spot misconduct at its source and eliminate regulatory risk.
9. NWN Carousel
NWN Carousel, provider of AI-powered technology solutions, today announced a significant expansion of its long-standing partnership with BankFive, as it supports the transformation of a historic landmark on Main Street, Fall River, Massachusetts, into a modern, AI-driven headquarters for the multi- million dollar renovation project.
NWN Carousel is working with BankFive to design and implement integrated technology solutions including video collaboration rooms in all conference areas, huddle spaces, and training rooms, as well as the installation of a new video wall to create an ultra-modern banking experience for BankFive customers and staff.
BankFive leverages NWN Carousel’s fully integrated IT solutions including Full Lifecycle Managed IT Services delivered via the Experience Management Platform, including Visual Collaboration, Cybersecurity, Intelligent Infrastructure, Cloud Communications, and virtual agents for immediate assistance in the Contact Center. This results in high touch and efficiency across all communication channels including mobile, online, and video banking with reductant and secure infrastructure.
10. The Oasis Group
The Oasis Group, a consultancy for the wealth management industry, released their AI WealthTech Map, a resource that financial advisors and wealth management firms can use to discover leading artificial intelligence solutions and AI-focused firms serving the wealth management industry.
The Oasis Group identified 55 leading technology firms that specifically serve the financial services industry for inclusion in the map. The firms are not existing wealthtech solutions that are developing AI capabilities – these firms are AI first and were built to support the wealth management industry. The map follows the sales cycle of a wealth manager by starting with prospecting, followed by writing assistants, note takers, proposal generation, AI assistants, investment research, next best action, and compliance solutions – categorizing each of the solutions and providing all the tools that a financial advisor would need to convert a prospect into a client as efficiently as possible.
11. TRUE
TRUE announced the general availability of TRUE Data Intelligence 5.1. This new release decreases the time, cost, and human touch it takes to process mortgage related documents, while delivering enterprise-class capabilities previously not available in any other products of its type.
TRUE Data Intelligence 5.1 now includes industry leading coverage with its AI pre-trained on 845+ document types, providing greater than 99% accuracy on critical mortgage documents, 10,000+ data fields, with accuracy above 97.5%, and automated cross-validation to assure the highest level of data correctness of any vendor within the mortgage lending market.
Numbers are important, but so is the depth of data analysis. With 5.1, TRUE advances the capability of automatically and intelligently analyzing bank statements by delivering transaction-based data extraction and analysis. This is essential for efficiently processing borrower information for non-qualified (Non-QM) mortgages and for borrowers who do not meet traditional lending requirements.
