AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 7/26/24

Amber Group recently announced the launch of BUIDL_QUESTS, a $40,000 innovation challenge designed to identify and support groundbreaking ideas and projects in the Web3 space. This challenge seeks to empower developers, builders, and innovators to leverage the power of blockchain and AI to shape the future of decentralized technology. 

BUIDL_QUESTS offers a unique opportunity for individuals and teams to showcase their innovative ideas and compete for a share of the $40,000 prize pool. Participants will join a vibrant community of innovators, receive mentorship from industry leaders, and potentially secure a spot in the amber.ac accelerator.  

The challenge welcomes submissions across three key themes: Expanding Bitcoin DeFi Applications: Driving innovation in Bitcoin’s DeFi capabilities and applications within the financial landscape; Distributed Infrastructure and AI: Exploring novel applications of distributed ledgers and decentralized technologies within AI systems; and Other Innovative Ideas: Welcoming any groundbreaking Web3 ideas that leverage emerging blockchain technologies to create a fairer and more open future. 

To strengthen digital economic growth in the Asia Pacific region, Ant International and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have announced a collaboration over the next five years to conduct breakthrough research to advance digital trust leveraging both Ant International’s industry experience and NTU Singapore’s research expertise on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). 

Senior Minister of State Tan Kiat How, Ministry of Digital Development and Information, witnessed the signing of the Master Research Collaboration Agreement (MRCA) between Ant International and NTU Singapore, represented by Mr Jerry Yin, Chief Technology Officer of Ant International and Professor Lam Khin Yong, Vice President (Industry) at NTU Singapore. The signing was carried out on 16 July at the Personal Data Protection (PDP) Week in Singapore. 

Under the MRCA, Ant International will collaborate with NTU Singapore’s Digital Trust Centre to advance the development of PETs in Singapore and the region. These technologies aim to help businesses unlock greater value from their data and create more use cases. Additionally, the development of PETs for Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enhance digital trust and make AI more reliable. This will be achieved by minimising the risk of data leaks, allowing businesses to share data and gain valuable insights without disclosing confidential information. 

april announced the appointment of Raj R. Doshi as its President and Chief Operating Officer (COO). Doshi brings over 20 years of experience in driving growth strategies and leading operations across prominent organizations including Google, TaxAct, and Avantax. april has already integrated into over 20 fintech platforms, including industry leaders such as Chime, Dayforce, and Gusto. april continues to add industry veterans to its leadership roster; just last year, Christina Taylor, who previously led tax operations at Credit Karma Tax and Cash App Taxes, joined april to lead tax development and delivery. With april poised to become the first new national e-file provider in 15 years, Doshi’s focus will be to scale the company’s embedded partnership model and expand april’s reach, further solidifying the company’s position as a leader in innovative tax solutions. 

Prior to joining april, Doshi served as the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Blucora, where he co-owned revenue responsibility for TaxAct and Avantax, one of the largest DIY tax providers and a Top 10 broker-dealer respectively. Under his leadership, he created and implemented transformative go-to-market strategies, built and scaled cross-functional teams, and structured and executed complex partnerships. These initiatives helped generate over $1.2 billion in shareholder value within four years following the sales of TaxAct in December 2022 and Avantax in November 2023. 

Raj will be responsible for driving the company’s next phase of growth, working with existing and new clients, and preparing the company for scale. 

Boosted.ai announced that Geoff Clauss has joined Boosted.ai as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). 

Geoff brings a wealth of experience and a proven track record in driving growth and sales in the financial technology sector. His strategic vision and deep understanding of the fintech landscape will be key assets as Boosted.ai continues to scale its AI platform for investment managers and expand its market presence. 

Geoff previously served as CRO of Blockdaemon, where he led efforts in driving the adoption of blockchain infrastructure and security solutions. Prior to Blockdaemon, he served as the Head of Sales for Anchorage Digital and sold Custody and Prime Brokerage services. 

SaaSWorks announced its rebranding to FinQore, reflecting a strategic expansion of its core capabilities and its continued commitment to meeting the evolving needs of the finance teams it serves. FinQore now supports many sophisticated business models, extending beyond SaaS and subscriptions to include payments, usage-based, transactional, and service revenue.  

Additionally, FinQore announced the general availability of “Qori”, a cutting-edge AI-powered Financial Analyst. Qori leverages a secure and dedicated large language model (LLM) to deliver finance teams instant revenue insights and analysis through a conversational interface. Qori is powered by the continuously cleansed and harmonized customer, revenue, and product data from the FinQore platform. FinQore programmatically verifies Qori’s outputs for accuracy, so CFOs and finance teams can trust this 24/7 resource to provide reliable multi-level revenue insights. 

FinQore’s new branding reflects its mission to provide finance and operations teams with unprecedented access to a highly accurate and deeply segmented source of financial truth. Unlike most finance software tools that simply extract data from source systems, FinQore’s AI-powered platform aggregates, transforms, and segments data based on its customer’s pre-approved business logic and industry best practices. FinQore automates the manual and mundane tasks of joining and reconciling data, empowering its customers to focus on critical analysis that drives strategic decision-making.  

Global Relay announced its integration between OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise Compliance API and Global Relay’s financial compliance platform. The new compliance capabilities launched by OpenAI in conjunction with Global Relay’s platform will help customers use OpenAI’s Enterprise Compliance API to meet industry standards for business communications recordkeeping, data archiving, and surveillance. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise Compliance application programming interfaces (API) allows ChatGPT Enterprise workspace administrators to manage their data to help ensure privacy and compliance with regulatory standards. Companies in all sectors, including Global Relay’s client roster of 20,000 financial institutions worldwide, will be able to use the Global Relay Connector for ChatGPT Enterprise solution to help compliantly capture and archive prompts, conversations, and file attachments between individual users and ChatGPT Enterprise, and securely store all this data in Global Relay Archive. 

Global Relay’s integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise Compliance API will enable enterprise compliance and risk leaders to capture, archive, and access ChatGPT Enterprise data alongside Global Relay’s existing monitoring of instant messaging tools, and social media, voice, files, and business collaboration tools — all within a single platform. 

Guidewire (NYSE: GWRE) and Indico Data Solutions (Indico), an Insurtech Vanguards program graduate, announced that Indico’s new Ready for Guidewire validated accelerator is now available for PolicyCenter on Guidewire Cloud users in the Guidewire Marketplace. 

Indico’s Intelligent Intake™ solution helps insurers quickly and easily process complex underwriting and claims submission data. It automatically ingests information from a submission, then classifies, unbundles, and extracts key data points from each document, producing a structured output. The rapidly delivered, accurate data enables insurers to quickly make better decisions regarding risk. Indico’s Guidewire accelerator integrates Intelligent Intake with PolicyCenter. 

Indico’s solution can handle any data type, from structured to semi- and unstructured data, and sorts through any submission regardless of document type, layout, or language, from any source, with precision. 

Guild Mortgage added an Artificial Intelligence (AI) System – GuildGPT – to its growing list of emerging technology tools. Built in-house and customized for Guild employees, this new tool is changing the way the company’s mortgage professionals help deliver the promise of home. 

Integrated into Guild’s vast knowledge database, team members can easily access the AI assistant for instant delivery of customized information on company products, guidelines and product-related questions. By streamlining this process, loan officers can free up valuable time in their day and better serve their partners and customers faster. 

Since its launch in June, nearly 2,000 of Guild’s employees have already taken advantage of the time-saving tool and it has helped answer more than 20,000 questions asked by team members. Feedback from employees has been overwhelmingly positive with many saying that GuildGPT has become “vital to improving how they are able to do business.” 

HouseCanary announced the beta launch of CanaryAI, a conversational AI tool designed to chat with anyone who may have questions about the real estate space and enable them to quickly and easily query HouseCanary’s industry-leading data and analytics platform to answer their toughest real estate questions. 

Historically, navigating the complexities of the $40 trillion U.S. real estate market has been dependent on aggregating disparate data sources, including public record data, county assessor data, AVMs, market forecasts, historical home sale data, rental yields, and comparable property data. Gaining access to and compiling this data can be challenging, costly, and time-consuming. Even with access to the data, finding the resources required to process and integrate it into daily operations can prove difficult, if not impossible. 

CanaryAI solves these challenges by bringing together the most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date information on more than 136 million US residential properties with a conversational chatbot that enables anyone to ask questions easily and get the answers they need quickly. 

Papaya Global and Cegid announced their partnership offering clients a holistic solution for hiring, managing, and paying their global workforce. 

By joining forces, Papaya and Cegid offer clients the technology and expertise to streamline their global payroll and payments through a single platform, manage workers in all employment models (full time, part time, contractors), and deliver accurate, compliant, and on time payments to over 160 countries. 

Papaya’s Workforce OS was purpose-built for payroll and payments. Harnessing its unique technology along with subject matter expertise, Papaya delivers a smooth payroll and payments process, with compliance and liability. The all-in-one platform serves as a single source of truth, providing critical, decision-driving data and visibility. Cegid’s full-cloud business model delivers its clients with superior experiences while accelerating their digital business transformation. 

Quantiphi announced its generative AI platform baioniq is available as a trial subscription on Quantiphi.com for enterprises, small teams and individuals to see first-hand how generative AI can transform their organizations. 

Quantiphi’s baioniq trial offers two trial plans, Starter and Enterprise. The Starter subscription allows adopters to explore the platform’s robust generative AI features like document uploading, content generation, summarization, parameter fine-tuning, assistance and discovery modes, model management and more for a nominal fee before fully committing to the Enterprise level. 

baioniq, which supports 16-plus models, is designed to be swiftly adopted and integrated with systems like Sharepoint, Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow etc., while ensuring data privacy. baioniq addresses critical issues enterprises often encounter in Large Language Models (LLM), like lack of domain understanding, hallucinations, data security and it fine-tunes the models responsibly and ethically. It also meets stringent compliance and security standards like HIPAA, SOC2 Type 1, and 2. baioniq is also available on Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and it can be integrated with NVIDIA AI Enterprise. 

Global AI-powered credit underwriting platform provider Scienaptic AI announced that Harvard Federal Credit Union has implemented its AI-based underwriting platform and is now live. This deployment is significantly streamlining the credit union’s underwriting process, leading to an increase in approval rates and a notable enhancement in the member experience. Importantly, all these advancements have been achieved while ensuring fairness, inclusivity, and compliance with regulatory standards, which are integral to Scienaptic’s AI platform. 

From its humble beginnings in 1939 by a group of employees of Harvard University for the purpose of providing affordable personal loans to all University faculty and staff, Harvard Federal Credit Union has evolved and expanded its reach to become a trusted financial services provider to Harvard affiliates, including faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees of Harvard University, Harvard teaching hospitals, and affiliated organizations. The Credit Union has over $1.2 Billion in assets and serves over 55,000 members. Through its innovative service, it seeks to deepen its long-standing commitment to housing issues, green initiatives, financial literacy, and access to credit for low and moderate-income borrowers. 

Following continued strong traction and robust demand, Slope has closed an additional financing round, taking total funding to $252M ($77M in equity and $175M in debt). The funding will be used to scale operations as the B2B payments platform continues serving many of the world’s largest enterprises. Alongside J.P. Morgan Payments, other participants in the round include Y Combinator, Jack Altman, and Max Altman’s new fund, Saga. 

Slope, a B2B payments platform for enterprise companies, offers order-to-cash automation using leading AI tools that power checkout, customer and vendor risk assessment, embedded short-term financing, and payment reconciliation. 

J.P. Morgan Payments has chosen Slope to help provide clients access to a short-term financing solution that offers an extension of payment terms to such clients’ business customers, powered by Slope’s platform. Slope 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. J.P. Morgan will also provide a debt facility to help the business achieve additional scale. 

TIFIN, an AI and innovation platform for wealth, announced the launch of TIFIN India. The launch of TIFIN India represents an important milestone in TIFIN’s vision to take its expertise in both direct-to-consumer (DTC) and business-to-business (B2B) AI for wealth applications to global markets. 

The Indian market is unique in its potential for impact. As it stands today, the penetration of wealth management in India is only 8% (compared to 72% in the U.S. and 44% in China). With a population of more than 1.4B individuals, TIFIN expects over 500M individuals to access wealth and asset management services in the next 7 years. TIFIN India will be organized into two main verticals, MyFi, an AI assistant to help individuals towards better wealth outcomes, and TIFIN India Enterprise, which will build AI native products for financial services firms.  

TIFIN India Enterprise was launched in partnership with the DSP family group, one of the oldest and most respected financial services firms in India. In addition to an investment from the DSP family group, Aditi Kothari Desai, vice chairperson of the DSP Mutual Fund company, will serve on the board of directors for TIFIN India Enterprise with TIFIN Founder & CEO Dr. Vinay Nair. 

TRUE announced the general availability of TRUE Data Intelligence 5.1. This new release dramatically 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. 

Yooz, a provider of AP automation and payment solutions, announced the recent appointment of John Gronen as Chief Financial Officer, and Jay Deubler as Chief Revenue Officer, who joined the team last year. These strategic hires reinforce Yooz’s ongoing momentum, integrating new leadership and diverse experience to further the company’s growth. 

John Gronen brings over 25 years of experience to his role as CFO, with a track record of significant achievements in financial strategy and operations. Gronen’s previous experience, including his time as CFO at VPay, provides him with deep insights into the platforms and organizations behind payment processing–expertise that complement Yooz’s integrated automation capabilities. His goals include advancing Yooz’s payment solutions, expanding its global footprint, and fostering a high-performing organization that delivers best-of-breed software, payments and support to customers globally. 

Jay Deubler, who joined Yooz last June as CRO, has since made a significant impact in aligning the sales team with the market ecosystem, enabling a deeper understanding of the market, its partners and customers. His experience in building teams in the SaaS space and developing go-to-market strategies has been invaluable to Yooz’s success.