AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 8/23/24

Amount, a digital origination and decisioning SaaS platform powering consumer and small business deposit account opening and loan origination, today announced the successful close of a $30 million equity capital raise. The company will use the funds to further invest in its world-class technology and accelerate its progress in the credit union sector, building on Amount’s successful track record of helping financial institutions simplify and streamline their business processes. 

Amount welcomes Curql, a collective of credit unions jointly investing in fintech, as a new strategic investor. The investment from Curql aligns with Amount’s strategy to further expand into the U.S. credit union market. Existing investors, including Growth Investing at Goldman Sachs, WestCap, Hanaco Ventures, and QED Investors also participated in the round. Amount also plans to use the new funding to enhance its current artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. 

As a longtime partner to banks like Fifth Third Bank, as well as major card networks such as Mastercard, Amount in 2022 announced a partnership with the largest credit union service organization in the country, Velera (formerly PSCU), to provide digital credit card origination solutions for its clients. Earlier this year, Amount strengthened its partnership with Velera when the latter announced the launch of its new digital lending suite, Origination Solutions. 

CIBC Innovation Banking announced today that it has provided $10 million in growth capital to Boosted.ai, a Toronto-based company that uses AI to automate investment management processes and increase productivity. Boosted.ai will use the funds to invest in product development and sales expansion in the Canadian and US market. 

Founded in 2017, Boosted.ai helps institutional investors and wealth managers save time, make data-driven decisions and maintain always-on monitoring by allowing them to train AI agents to work for them. 

CLARA Analytics (“CLARA”), a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) technology for insurance claims optimization, today announced two pivotal executive hires. Robin Spaulding, CPCU, AIC, has joined CLARA as Chief Insurance Officer, and Greg Toll has been named CLARA’s Vice President of Sales for Self-Insured. Together, they add decades of leadership experience to CLARA. 

The two executive hires add to CLARA’s arsenal of insurance experts who have developed the leading AI claims intelligence platform that has improved outcomes with claim guidance and document intelligence. Ms. Spaulding will advise clients on operational best practices to fully leverage AI opportunities as they transform their claims operations, while Mr. Toll will play a lead role in executing CLARA’s aggressive growth strategy in the rapidly expanding self-insured segment. The appointments come as CLARA was recently named one of the World’s Top Insurtech Companies of 2024 by CNBC and Statista. 

Ms. Spaulding is a seasoned insurance executive with deep domain expertise in property and casualty insurance. Over the course of her career, she has done what she describes as “almost every claims job from claim rep trainee to VP,” making her the ideal choice for Chief Insurance Officer at CLARA. Ms. Spaulding worked at multiple carriers and TPAs along with a managed care organization before becoming Divisional Vice President of Claims at Great American Insurance Company. After devoting many years as a multiline claims professional, she then served as an insurance consultant. In that role, she helped her clients design future state strategies and target operating models along with executing insurance platform implementations. Most recently, Ms. Spaulding was the Global Head of Claims for Capgemini’s insurance practice in the financial services division. She holds a Bachelor of Science in business administration with a major in marketing from Drake University. 

Communify, a Just Build It (JBI) company led by the former founders of InvestCloud, in partnership with Stellex Capital Management, will be combined with Fincentric (formerly known as Markit On Demand), a provider of digital experiences, curating financial data distribution and other solutions, which was carved out from S&P Global. The acquisition integrates Fincentric with Communify’s existing client communication, automation, and management business for the global wealth and asset management industries to form Communify Fincentric. 

The newly formed Communify Fincentric represents a significant leap forward in financial technology, addressing the industry’s long-standing challenge of disjointed data sources and subpar digital user experiences. By unifying market and client data communication, Communify Fincentric offers a comprehensive, on-brand, digital platform for any financial institution through an immediately available SaaS-based product suite. This suite includes Markets Apps, Client Apps, and Advisor Apps, all enhanced with the design, advanced AI, automation and personalization capabilities for which the JBI and Fincentric teams are known. 

Building on Fincentric’s strong presence in the US brokerage and self-directed investor markets, Communify Fincentric is poised for both domestic and international expansion, with a focus on serving the broader wealth and asset management industries. The company’s reach is made possible by a flexible delivery model, offering both off-the-shelf products and customized solutions for large organizations worldwide. Communify Fincentric will combine Fincentric’s 30-year legacy, which includes serving more than half of the top online brokerages in the US, with Communify’s cutting-edge design & technology expertise, in an effort to create a powerhouse in financial data communication and management. 

FutureVault, a category and industry leader of Digital Vaults and pioneers of the Client Life Management Vault™, announces Artificial Intelligence capabilities by integrating private Large Language Models (LLMs) into its Digital Vault Platform. The announcement underscores FutureVault’s commitment to continuous innovation and the platform’s capability to support enterprise front and back office operations and client-facing collaboration and experiences. 

Founded by G Scott Paterson in 2015, FutureVault was conceptualized with a view that the aggregation of critical documents when coupled with AI will ultimately change the face of financial services and advice for the better. 

While today’s announcement officially highlights the integration of private Large Language Models (LLMs) in the FutureVault platform, the company has adopted and introduced Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the platform as early as 2016. In 2021, FutureVault was successfully granted its first of many patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for its AI-driven Auto-Filing capability, a proprietary capability leveraging Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Artificial Intelligence to suggest optimal filing locations for documents. 

Grant Thornton, one of America’s largest brands of professionals providing end-to-end audit, assurance, tax, and advisory services, has named Will Whatton to lead the firm’s OneStream Software practice. 

OneStream is the leading enterprise finance management platform that unifies core finance and operational functions – including financial close, consolidation, reporting, planning and forecasting – to modernize and increase strategic impact of the Office of the CFO. 

Grant Thornton is a OneStream Global System Integration Partner, delivering strategic solutions with the OneStream platform for our clients’ business operations. Grant Thornton and OneStream work together to help companies optimize their corporate performance management with a focus on quality, scalability and value all within the secure OneStream platform. 

Indigo, the market’s first AI-powered home transaction platform, launched today with leading real estate agents and teams from Compass, Keller Williams, eXp, RE/MAX and more. Indigo is launching in Charlotte, N.C., with additional markets in the coming months. 

Indigo’s flagship offering, Home Checkout, elevates the industry from search portals to transaction platforms in order to bring unparalleled transparency to the market. Indigo’s Contracts AI and automation platform streamlines all communications, bidding and negotiations to deliver a delightful, transparent transaction experience for real estate agents, buyers and sellers. 

In light of the landmark industry settlement to decouple commissions, a seismic shift in how agents work and engage with buyers and sellers is underway. Today, agents and their clients are experiencing major change, communication challenges and an existential fear of being left out of the new industry model. Indigo’s technology solves this new reality, and gives real estate professionals the power to lead the industry forward – bringing transparency, data intelligence and market-first offerings to their buyers and sellers. 

Lendbuzz, an AI-based fintech company that helps consumers obtain better access to credit when purchasing a vehicle, announced today that it has secured a new $400 million forward flow program with Viola Credit, a global alternative asset manager specialized in providing asset based lending solutions to innovative technology enabled lenders. 

The new commitment represents the continuation of a longstanding partnership between the two firms, who have executed over $1 billion of financing and asset purchase transactions since 2018. This additional forward flow program will enable Lendbuzz to expand its reach and serve an even greater number of borrowers through its proprietary AI-based auto finance platform. By leveraging alternative data and machine-learning algorithms, Lendbuzz can evaluate the creditworthiness of consumers across the credit spectrum, many of whom are underserved by traditional banks. Additionally, Lendbuzz offers its consumers a modern, digital lending experience. 

NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) today announced that Open Network Exchange (ONE), a full-service business solutions provider serving the travel industry, has revolutionized its overall CX strategy through a digital transformation using NICE Enlighten AI. Enlighten, NICE’s purpose-built CX AI, enables ONE to create seamless customer experiences for every interaction. 

Open Network Exchange added Enlighten AI for Customer Satisfaction, Enlighten AI for Sales Effectiveness, and Enlighten XO to its existing CXone solution to augment its agent’s capabilities with AI built for CX. 

By using Enlighten to measure agent soft skill behaviors, they improved CSAT and Sales Effectiveness and provided targeted coaching that enables better guest and agent experiences. ONE Supervisors now receive relevant and precise AI-driven insights about individual agent and team performance, eliminating five hours of manual work per supervisor each week previously spent looking for qualified calls to score. With a visual representation of call drivers and agent behaviors, supervisors can now objectively monitor agent performance on every interaction. 

NICE (NASDAQ: NICE) today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Scott Russell as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer, effective January 1st 2025, to succeed Barak Eilam, who, as previously announced, will retire and step down by the end of 2024 after more than 10 years as CEO and 25 years at NICE. 

Scott brings tremendous experience, having spent more than 25 years in the enterprise software sector. For the last 14 years, Scott was at SAP, most recently as a member of the Executive Board of the Company and Global Chief Revenue Officer, leading Customer Success including global sales, partners, and customer engagement responsible for $31 billion of revenues spearheading the company’s transformation to cloud revenues. He also served as Chairman of SAP North America and Chairman of multiple business units of the SAP portfolio, and previously served on Qualtrics’ Board of Directors. As an Executive Board Member of SAP, he supported M&A, planning, market guidance, and corporate governance. 

Prior to his roles at SAP, Scott worked at IBM and PWC. Scott has a bachelor’s degree in computer and information sciences from Federation University, and a post graduate degree in business from Deakin University at Geelong Campus, Australia. Scott will be based in NICE’s Hoboken, NJ office. 

SigFig, a leading digital wealth management solutions and technology provider for financial institutions and their advisors, today announced new capabilities, including AI-powered functions, to its financial advisor collaboration platform, Engage. 

Powering collaborative digital experiences for the most essential aspects of financial advisor and client relationships, Engage is purpose-built to blend human expertise and technology. The platform combines a robust set of capabilities, including AI-powered assistance for advisors and their teams to increase their effectiveness, core integrations with leading industry systems to drive efficiencies and collaborative digital experiences to drive deeper client engagement. 

Engage also makes it easier for advisors to deliver personalized advice by seamlessly integrating with their most utilized systems, including Salesforce, Docusign, Microsoft and Google. The CRM integration establishes a bi-directional data sync allowing advisors to view client data in the Engage platform, and more importantly, sync meeting notes, updated client details, follow-up meetings and tasks into Salesforce – helping position the advisor to accelerate the sales process and client conversions. An open-architecture approach provides the flexibility to connect with proprietary systems. 

Today, Skyfire Systems, Incorporated announced the launch of the world’s first payment network built to enable fully autonomous transactions across AI Agents, LLM’s, data platforms, service providers, and other goods and services. Skyfire creates an essential operating layer, delivering critical missing components for AI commerce, including secure wallet access, verifiable Agent identity, and an open payment protocol for service requests, purchasing decisions, and instant transactions without human intervention. The result is the foundation of a new global economy where businesses can monetize their products and services to Agents, the world’s fastest-growing market of consumers. The company also announced $8.5 million from Neuberger Berman, Brevan Howard Digital, Intersection Growth Partners, DRW, Inception Capital, Arrington Capital, RedBeard Ventures, Sfermion, Circle, FBG, Gemini, Crossbeam Venture Partners, EveryRealm, Draper Associates, ARCA, and Ripple. 

Skyfire’s payment protocol enables LLMs to tap APIs and premium content, within a workflow, expanding the reach and versatility of what’s possible in workflows today. 

Prior to founding Skyfire, both Sarhangi and DeWitt served as early executives at Ripple and developed the fundamental payments tech that enabled instant, universally accepted payments for transactions that previously took weeks. They assembled a team of professionals including AI, payments, and blockchain experts and senior engineering leads from Google and Ripple. 

Snappy Kraken, the martech innovator powering simpler, smarter advisor marketing, today announced the official rollout of Snappy Kraken Enterprise, a complete marketing technology solution tailored for mid-market and enterprise firms, including registered investment advisors (RIAs), broker-dealers and independent marketing organizations (IMOs). Snappy Kraken Enterprise supports complex operations at mid-to-large financial services organizations by offering a comprehensive platform that enhances organic growth and boosts client engagement. It provides in-depth analytics and advanced marketing tools to attract and retain top-performing advisors, scale growth strategies and execute compliant marketing campaigns efficiently. 

Snappy Kraken Enterprise is built to scale, allowing large organizations to maintain brand consistency while empowering individual advisors with cutting-edge marketing and engagement tools. Financial companies can enhance advisor recruiting and retention by leveraging Snappy Kraken’s comprehensive enterprise solution, which provides data-backed insights on client and prospect engagement, along with differentiated marketing strategies. Additionally, Snappy Kraken Enterprise enables users to build and track automated marketing campaigns powered by custom integrations, AI-driven content creation tools and comprehensive performance reporting. It also streamlines administration and compliance processes, helping to ensure efficiency and regulatory adherence. 

Building upon Snappy Kraken’s track record of success with smaller RIAs and existing enterprise customers, this expanded enterprise offering delivers added customization capabilities, advanced reporting and tools specifically designed for managing large networks of advisors. 

Summit Technology Group (STG) announced Monday, August 19, 2024 that it is launching new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for its Federal loans and grants platforms, opening a new office to accommodate its growing workforce, and adding industry and technology experts to guide the company’s next stage of growth. 

STG is a leading provider of proprietary, cloud-based lending and grants platforms and solutions for complex public sector, regulatory, and financial workflows. STG’s loans and grants platforms deliver the full lifecycle of the loans and grants workflow, including detecting and preventing fraud, waste and abuse, automating underwriting and facilitating integrated loan servicing. 

STG investments in AI and machine learning (ML) are an outgrowth from their work inside large commercial banks and aim to simplify, accelerate, and help make more secure the complex processes that businesses, individuals and other borrowers are required to follow to receive funds from the government. 

Treasury Prime, a leading embedded banking software company, announced today the addition of Kobalt Labs, an AI-powered copilot for risk and compliance teams, to the Treasury Prime Partner Marketplace. Banks in Treasury Prime’s network now have the option to leverage Kobalt Labs to better manage their third party diligence with AI, including the ability to streamline legal, compliance and infosec diligence in one platform. 

Kobalt Labs modernizes and strengthens the entire third party diligence flow for banks and fintechs. The platform is synchronized with every existing financial regulation, regulatory guidance and security standard, and can conduct thorough checks on any external documentation against these regulations within minutes. The platform also automatically integrates with business intelligence sources and surfaces details on beneficial ownership, financing history, negative news, and recent lawsuits and enforcement actions. 

Additional capabilities within the Kobalt Labs platform include an infosec module that extracts relevant security information and suggests relevant next steps to streamline review, as well as a legal module that instantly identifies missing clauses and risky language in agreements. 

Unit21, a global risk and compliance leader that proactively mitigates risks tied to fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes, today announced a new bundle of features for Automated Clearing House (ACH) transactions. These features use Generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning (ML) to help banks, credit unions, payments companies, and fintechs proactively detect and block risky transactions. 

According to the National Automated Clearinghouse Association (Nacha), same-day ACH volume saw a 47% year-over-year growth when comparing the first quarters of 2023 and 2024, due to factors such as the continual increase in real-time payments usage among consumers and businesses. 

AMOCO Federal Credit Union (AMOCO), a Texas-based, member-owned cooperative organization with over 106,000 members and over $1.4 billion in assets, has announced a new partnership with Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, to provide personal loans to new and existing members. 

AMOCO Federal Credit Union started lending as a partner on the Upstart Referral Network in March 2023. With the Upstart Referral Network, qualified personal loan applicants on Upstart.com who meet AMOCO’s credit policies will receive tailored offers as they seamlessly transition into an AMOCO Federal Credit Union-branded experience to complete the online member application and closing process. 

Vanilla, the award-winning estate planning software company, today announced strategic fundraising led by returning investor Insight Partners, in addition to contributions from Venrock, Vanguard, and other previous investors. Vanilla also welcomes a new strategic investor, Edward Jones Ventures*, and new investor Alumni Ventures. In addition to supporting its rapid growth and customer adoption, the company will use the funding to expand its platform, including its first-of-its-kind embedded AI technology, to revolutionize how financial advisors and estate planners help households of all wealth levels build their legacy. 

The investment comes at an opportune moment for both the company and the greater wealth management industry as the adoption of estate planning software gains significant traction. According to the most recent T3 survey, the use of estate planning software spiked sharply among advisors, with a 259% increase over the last two years. 

Vanilla is leading and pioneering a new approach to fundamentally alter the $221 billion estate planning industry with its comprehensive, fully digital estate planning platform – the Estate Advisory Platform. Recent innovations in V/AITM, Vanilla’s AI technology for estate planning, and Vanilla Document BuilderTM, an on-demand trust document offering, complement Vanilla’s leading client estate summaries. Designed to simplify the legacy-building process from start to finish, the platform enhances client and advisor education, visualizes plan structures, illustrates how assets work with their plan, proactively monitors for changes, and supports document creation and plan execution. 

VeriFast, the AI-powered verification-as-a-service platform that automates financial analysis and decision making for resident screening, mortgage underwriting, and consumer lending, announced today a series of executive moves that reflect the company’s continued momentum as an indispensable partner to landlords focused on reducing delinquency and increasing occupancy. 

Bob Hansen, a distinguished property manager and real estate technology (“proptech”) professional, is joining VeriFast as a vice president of sales. Most recently, Hansen was a principal at Second Nature, a developer of a fully managed resident benefits platform. 

Prior to joining Second Nature, Hansen was a senior vice president for property management firm Home Partners of America. Before that, he spent 10 years with Apartments.com, where he served as vice president for the western region and launched a business unit, called rentalhomesplus.com, which targeted the single-family home sector.