AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 9/13/24

Agree, an all-in-one agreements platform that seamlessly integrates money movement, has announced a $3M pre-seed round. The round was led by Better Tomorrow Ventures with participation from 8-Bit Capital, Everywhere Ventures, Expedite Ventures, Firsthand Alliance, Hustle Fund, NEA, Singh Capital Partners, and Trust Fund. With this investment, the company aims to become an end-to-end agreements platform that allows consumers to securely send, sign, and automatically generate invoices and payments from any agreement. 

Today, the experience of going from an agreement to a signature to payment fulfillment is highly fragmented. Typically, an agreement goes through multiple revisions before it’s uploaded to an e-signature platform. If payment is required as part of the agreement, the process is done separately using additional invoicing tools. Agree’s platform, which leverages generative AI and optical character recognition, removes this friction by integrating the e-signature process, contract development, invoicing, and payment all in one platform. With Agree, consumers can receive payment through ACH, credit cards, or wire transfers and sync their financial transactions with all major accounting software. 

The inspiration for the platform came from Marty Ringlein and Will Hubbard, two former founders with prior exits and early-stage investors, who experienced firsthand the many pain points of forming a contract and moving money when working with founders. In an effort to find a solution, both Ringlein and Hubbard looked for platforms to use but instead discovered organizations were left to duct-tape their own agreement and payment workflow. That’s when Ringlein and Hubbard decided to build an all-in-one agreements platform. They first started with market research to validate whether their own frustrations with agreements and money movement were a common pain point. After speaking to contractors, small business owners, startups, and large enterprise companies, they quickly learned their frustrations were not uncommon. 

Ant Group today unveiled its AI financial manager, Maxiaocai, at the 2024 INCLUSION·Conference on the Bund in Shanghai. The AI personal financial manager can be accessed via the Alipay app and the Ant Fortune app. The launch of Maxiaocai follows the introduction of the company’s AI life assistant, Zhixiaobao, and AI Healthcare Manager at the event, highlighting Ant Group’s latest progress in applying AI technology in consumer-facing use cases. 

Maxiaocai leverages Ant Group’s self-developed foundation model capabilities and partners with financial institutions to deliver expert-level, customized financial services for users. It offers tailored market insights, simplifies complex financial concepts, and provides personalized investment advice. For instance, Maxiaocai can swiftly generate visual summaries of company financial reports, highlighting key details for users, and breaking down intricate financial terms into easy-to-understand language. 

Ant Group has been public-testing the AI financial manager since early 2024. As of August 2024, it has attracted 70 million monthly active users, with 45% of them living in cities below the third tier. Over 200 financial institutions, including asset management companies, securities firms, financial media, and more than 15,000 financial content creators, are now connected to the platform. 

Bonterra™, a social good software company creating technology for the greatest good, today announced it has acquired DonorDrive, a leading provider of peer-to-peer and digital fundraising solutions that create meaningful relationships with nonprofit supporters and drive more revenue for their cause. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. 

The acquisition is part of Bonterra’s commitment to actively create more impact for every customer’s mission — continually building, acquiring, and integrating the best technology “for the greatest good.” Bonterra’s vision is to double the size of philanthropy over the next decade by enabling trust-based relationships between funders, volunteers and the nonprofits they support. An important part of that is empowering nonprofits to deliver more compelling, impactful experiences across every interaction with their supporters. 

The integration of DonorDrive with Bonterra’s suite of industry-leading fundraising tools will enable current and future customers to deliver one unified experience across all their fundraising platforms: email fundraising, online fundraising, event fundraising, social media fundraising, peer-to-peer fundraising, development, volunteer management, direct mail and online advocacy. Furthermore, this acquisition bolsters the quantity and quality of data that feeds Bonterra’s current and growing list of AI-enabled fundraising capabilities. 

Cashmere, an AI-powered client acquisition platform for wealth management firms, has successfully completed a $3.6 million seed funding round. The investment will drive rapid product development and strategic hiring – including a newly-appointed Head of Machine Learning. 

Co-founded by Farbod Nowzad and Eshan Govil, Cashmere leverages the state-of-the-art in AI to automate the discovery, research, and engagement of prospective clients for wealth management firms at scale. 

Its launch coincides with the ongoing ‘Great Wealth Transfer’ globally. Despite this unprecedented ‘inheritocracy’ and over $60 trillion assets under management already today, the wealth management sector has a major client acquisition problem. From small, independent firms to behemoths like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the industry lacks reliable systems to build and nurture high-net-worth sales funnels. 

The AI-powered, all-in-one finance and HR suite, finally, today announced that it has closed a $50M Series B from PeakSpan Capital and $150M credit facility from Encina. The new capital follows the company’s $95M Series A in 2022 and additional $10M capital injection in February of this year, bringing total funds to date to $305M. Since its Series A, finally has shown annual revenue growth of 300%. 

The Series B will supercharge finally’s explosive growth journey. finally will invest in growing headcount across the organization, continuing the research and development of its product stack, and expanding its go-to-market initiatives. 

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) employ nearly half the entire American workforce, but SMB owners often have only a fraction of the resources needed to thrive and focus on their unique businesses. finally addresses this exact pain point by equipping business owners with an all-in-one suite of tools for managing bookkeeping, payroll, billpay, expense management, and more. 

Fourcore Capital (“Fourcore” or the “Company”), an emerging leader in AI-powered, global asset and wealth management, today announced that it has signed a binding agreement with GEM Global Yield LLC SCS (“GGY”), part of GEM, a Luxembourg-based private alternative investment group, for a $500 million share subscription facility to be funded upon a public markets listing. The funds from the share subscription facility will be used to further accelerate the Company’s growth through strategic acquisitions and the expansion of advisor support capabilities, including the appointment of additional management talent. 

The $500 million facility from GGY will support Fourcore’s growth plans and empower the Company to accelerate global expansion initiatives, enhance AI and blockchain integrations across its platform, invest in research and development of next-generation financial technologies and bolster advisor support capabilities through strategic appointments and expansion of talent. 

Insurity, the leading provider of cloud-based software and analytics for insurance carriers, brokers, and MGAs, today announced it has partnered with Gain Life, a company specializing in improving the claims process through the integration of behavioral economics and AI. The partnership with Gain Life and use of its innovative claims communication platform will enable Insurity to offer automated 24/7 guidance and support to claimants and policyholders, making it the first major claims system to provide such a comprehensive solution. 

This partnership will address the critical challenges faced by insurers, including the high administrative burden of claims processing and limited time of claims professionals to support clients. 

This partnership empowers insurance companies to manage claims more effectively by providing claims professionals with the necessary documents and insights faster, reducing the administrative burden, and allowing them to focus more on client support. Insurers will also benefit from increased customer satisfaction, with Gain Life’s platform boasting an average cost savings of 25% on medical-only claims and over $18,000 per complex lost time claim, as well as saving more than 4 hours per claims professional per week. 

Illuma Labs, a leader in voice authentication technology for banking contact centers, has secured $9 million in Series A funding led by LiveOak Ventures, with participation from Forefront Venture Partners, Curql Fund, UsNet, Capital Factory, Connexus, and TDECU. This investment will accelerate the development of Illuma’s voice verification solutions, addressing threats like fraud, voice cloning, and deep fakes and expanding its reach to more credit unions and banks nationwide. 

The Illuma team was celebrated in 2024 for Innovations in Fraud, winning the CreditUnions.com award in the fraud category. This accolade was followed by recognition of the company’s leadership in the inaugural list of AI 75 by Dallas Innovates for pioneering work in artificial intelligence. 

Integrum ESG, the leading alternative ESG data provider, has today announced the launch of their Consensus ESG Ratings module. 

Just as investors monitor movements in consensus earnings estimates or credit ratings, investors now are aware of the demand for the ability to monitor long-term trends and short-term movements in consensus ESG ratings. 

This new feature enables Integrum ESG’s asset manager clients to now see the consensus ESG score for any company, either as an absolute rating or a relative percentile ranking, across a 10-year time series. These scores will indicate to any investor what the capital markets have ‘priced in’ for a company’s ESG performance, allowing users to quickly understand the market’s view on a company and easily conduct relative ESG analysis on the positions they hold within their Portfolio. 

Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU), the global financial technology platform that makes Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, announced major enhancements to its proprietary Generative AI Operating System (GenOS) that’s accelerating development velocity at scale across the company’s products and services to solve its customers’ most important financial problems and drive durable growth. Intuit’s GenOS now includes GenOS AI Workbench, a dedicated development environment for end-to-end application development, and enhancements to GenStudio, GenRuntime, and GenUX components. 

Introduced in June 2023, Intuit’s GenOS empowers technologists to responsibly design, build, and deploy breakthrough generative AI (GenAI) experiences with unparalleled speed, fueling innovation for its approximately 100 million consumer and small business customers. 

Since then, the company has continued to invest in GenOS to streamline end-to-end application development, with built-in governance and safety guardrails, and to enable rapid experimentation. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools with an extensible catalog of best-in-class large language models (LLMs), including commercial, proprietary, and open source base models for fine-tuning. To jumpstart app development, product teams can become productive with GenOS in a matter of minutes via self-serve onboarding tools and guided workflows. 

Alorica Inc., a global customer experience (CX) leader, has entered into an exclusive partnership integrating LoanPro’s modern lending and credit platform to introduce an all-in-one-solution that allows for more efficient and personalized lending and credit servicing, marking a pivotal moment in the financial industry. This first-of-its-kind collaboration layers LoanPro’s configurable lending and credit platform with the next generation digital loan processing from Alorica’s Systems and Services Technologies (SST), the nation’s leading consumer loan servicer. Coming off the heels of LoanPro’s successful integration with Visa DPS and with an enhanced managed services offering powered by Alorica IQ, the two companies will empower a new wave of card issuers, lenders, and lease providers to modernize their tech stack driving increased operational efficiency while reducing compliance burden and credit risk. 

Together, Alorica and LoanPro provide customers with a comprehensive lending, leasing, and credit platform, capable of creating and servicing any type of loan, line of credit, lease, or credit card. This deal also enables financial services companies to have on-demand customer support, contact center operations, and dispute management services, available in both a blended or managed service model. As a result, financial services companies can enhance operational efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and maintain compliance with ease. 

Minerva, a leader in real-time AML compliance technology, announced today its advanced AML Screening platform is now available in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalogue with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

AWS customers will now have access to Minerva’s AML screening and investigations platform directly within AWS Marketplace. The Minerva platform provides AWS customers with the ability to streamline the purchase and management of Minerva’s services within their AWS Marketplace account. 

Joining AWS Marketplace will enhance Minerva’s ability to meet the evolving compliance needs of customers worldwide, by allowing easy access to Minerva’s screening platform. The first product to launch through this channel is Minerva’s automated sanctions, PEP, adverse media, and open source intelligence (OSINT) screening for onboarding and continuous monitoring. 

MYbank, a leading digital bank in China and an associate of Ant Group, today introduced its AI-enabled system (Cuckoo System) for small and micro-sized enterprise (SME) money management at the 2024 INCLUSION·Conference on the Bund. 

The system forecasts the cash flow of SMEs across various industries, assisting bank-affiliated investment management companies in more effectively anticipating the timing of SMEs’ subscriptions and redemptions of investment products and helping SMEs generate reasonable returns from their idle cash. By aligning financial offerings with the operational cycles of SMEs, the system helps maximize efficiency in their financial management. 

Feng Liang, MYbank President, highlighted the liquidity management challenges faced by SMEs: While SMEs may not prioritize high returns, they require investment products that offer a high level of capital security, align with their variable cash flow cycles, and provide stable returns. 

NationsBenefits, a leading fintech, benefits, and outcomes platform for healthcare, has announced the acquisition of Health Data Decisions (HDD), a prominent healthcare data analytics and technology company specializing in gap closure, artificial intelligence (AI), and predictive analytics. 

This strategic acquisition positions NationsBenefits as the only vertically integrated platform that combines fintech, healthcare, and outcomes seamlessly. With over 100 health plans relying on its innovative solutions, NationsBenefits has established itself as one of the fastest-growing companies in the country. The company’s proprietary healthcare flex card technology, along with a comprehensive suite of supplemental benefits, enables health plans and their members to access essential services easily. 

Integrating Health Data Decisions will enhance NationsBenefits’ member engagement platform by merging its robust fintech infrastructure with HDD’s industry-leading analytics and AI-driven methodologies. Together, they will deliver unparalleled capabilities in gap closure and health plan outcomes, ultimately improving member experiences and health results. 

OneCause, a leading provider of digital fundraising technology, is proud to announce continued development of OneCause AI, a powerful suite of artificial intelligence tools built directly into the OneCause Fundraising Platform. Designed to streamline event and online fundraising, personalize donor engagement, and boost auction and overall fundraising performance, OneCause AI empowers nonprofits to achieve more — with less time, effort, and complexity. 

By leveraging OneCause AI, nonprofits can experience remarkable improvements in both efficiency and fundraising outcomes. The innovative tools can reduce auction preparation time by up to 8 hours, and many nonprofits have seen a notable increase in auction proceeds, with up to a 25% boost in item revenue. 

Two recent additions to OneCause AI, the Event Readiness tool and the AI Guide, are set to redefine how nonprofits plan and execute their fundraising events. Event Readiness provides a real-time overview of key event management tasks and milestones. It continuously learns from information entered into the OneCause Fundraising Platform and offers timely guidance on which actions are on track, completed, or need immediate attention. 

Polly, the leading provider of innovative mortgage capital markets technology and operator of the industry’s first cloud-native, commercially scalable product and pricing engine (PPE), today announced $25M in new growth equity capital. Led by 8VC with participation from other existing investors—including Menlo Ventures, Meritech, Khosla Ventures, and Fifth Wall—this capital investment will further accelerate Polly’s rapid growth and enable an even deeper investment in R&D, product innovation, and expansion. The investment comes on the heels of Polly’s continued momentum and market leadership. This calendar year alone, Polly increased lock volume by well over 150% and has more than doubled its customer partner base to include many more of the country’s top and most notable banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders. 

Since the company’s inception in 2019, Polly has represented a significant paradigm shift from the monolithic pricing solutions that once dominated the industry. Purpose-built in the cloud and for the cloud, Polly’s agile platform responds swiftly to emerging trends and market fluctuations. The platform’s unlimited flexibility, configurability, and functional depth—combined with an unrivaled pace of innovation—continues to deliver strong value and ROI by increasing margins, automating workflows, and driving a superior loan officer experience. As a result of strong growth, Polly invested significant resources into scaling its implementation, customer success, and white-glove support programs. The additional capital will continue to scale these important functions, and also enable Polly’s product and engineering teams to double down on new product innovation, including further evolution of the Polly/™ AI platform and new generative AI capabilities. The company expects to scale internal teams by at least 25% in short order to support continued growth. 

Polly’s growth underscores industry demand for an agile, vertically integrated capital markets platform that enables its users to effectively meet the demands of an industry prone to unpredictable ebbs and flows, without the need to constantly monitor and adjust staffing levels based on market conditions. 

Ren Systems announced its financing round to scale its AI-powered relationship intelligence technology. The $3.5M round was led by JLL Spark Global Ventures, the venture arm of commercial real estate firm JLL, with participation from Camber Creek, ZoomInfo, and Contour Ventures. 

Ren’s relationship intelligence is already used by 5,000+ sales and business development leaders in finance, commercial real estate, and professional services. Unlike most sales platforms designed for high-volume, transactional outreach, Ren is purpose-built for personalized relationship-building and dealmaking. 

Ren automates research, meeting prep, and outreach by understanding the users’ business objectives and syncing with their CRM, Outlook, calendar, and iOS contacts. Ren monitors hundreds of thousands of sources, surfaces timely and relevant alerts about key contacts and companies, and recommends actions to help uncover and win deals. 

Inglet Blair, a wholly-owned subsidiary of QC Ally and the industry’s premier residential mortgage loan due diligence firm, today announced their partnership with Saaf Finance to deliver enhanced data integrity checks and diligence powered by AI to reduce risk and increase efficiency. This collaboration will provide financial institutions with deeper insights, better risk management, and faster due diligence using automated workflows. 

The powerful combination of Inglet Blair’s proprietary PLUMS platform and Saaf Finance’s platform, Saaf Mortgage AI, will lead the way in redefining speed and accuracy in loan diligence. 

Savvy Advisors Inc. (herein “Savvy” or “Savvy Advisors” or “the firm”), a registered investment advisor (RIA) affiliated with Savvy Wealth, Inc. (“Savvy Wealth”), today announced the hiring of experienced financial advisors Drew Martino and Daniel Moore, CFP®. Martino and Moore have brought their respective practices to Savvy to gain access to Savvy Wealth’s proprietary, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technology platform. Savvy Wealth’s all-in-one, integrated technology and internal support team empowers its advisors to offload middle and back-office tasks, enabling them to spend more time serving clients and building their businesses. 

Martino comes to Savvy from Corebridge Financial, where he specialized in retirement planning with a focus on 403(b) plan guidance for individuals employed by schools, hospitals, municipalities, government entities and other tax-exempt organizations. With over 20 years of experience, the Los Angeles-based Martino is experienced in helping clients navigate tax-advantaged retirement savings plans. He has held positions at Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other independent wealth managers. 

Moore joins Savvy from TIAA, where he managed approximately $800 million in client assets. Based in the Chicagoland area, Moore brings extensive retirement planning experience from similar roles at Fidelity Investments, PNC and AXA Advisors. He specializes in serving higher education professionals and physicians, helping them optimize their after-tax returns and create personalized estate planning documents, in addition to traditional financial planning and investment management. Moore obtained his Certified Financial Planner™ (CFP®) certification in 2023, and recently earned his Master of Business Administration from the Quantic School of Business and Technology. 

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the AI platform for business transformation, today announced new AI-powered, purpose-built industry solutions in its Now Platform Xanadu release. The expansion of Now Assist into industry solutions for telecom, media, and technology, financial services, the public sector, and more allows organizations to recognize the value of GenAI, fast. For example, Now Assist for Banking integrates with ServiceNow Disputes Management, Built with Visa, to help drive productivity and boost customer loyalty through GenAI-powered dispute resolution. In addition, ServiceNow launched new Retail Operations and Retail Service Management solutions to unify a retailer’s ecosystem—its store associates, store leadership, customers, headquarters employees, and field technicians—to deliver consistent and connected experiences across every channel, and in the store. 

Now Assist for Financial Services Operations (FSO) provides banks and insurers with critical GenAI capabilities to boost agent productivity and improve customer experiences. Now Assist for Banking delivers GenAI-powered solutions for onboarding, service, and operations. The Xanadu release includes dispute summarization, integrated with ServiceNow Disputes Management, Built with Visa, which provides agents with concise summaries for complex card dispute cases so they can quickly action and resolve disputes, speeding card service resumption and boosting customer loyalty. 

Now Assist for Insurance helps insurers improve customer experiences and loyalty with GenAI-powered claims resolution and servicing. Claims summarization uses GenAI to equip agents with case context in a concise, digestible format. This improves response times, minimizes the need to ask customers repeat questions, and reduces mistakes across the various teams handling a claim through transparent and consistent data. 

Smarsh, the global leader in digital communications data and intelligence, has announced that its Data Science team has published the first comprehensive textbook on Large Language Models (LLMs), which are essential to emerging breakthroughs in artificial intelligence technology. 

Chief Analytics Officer Dr. Uday Kamath and members of his Data Science team, Dr. Kevin Keenan, Dr. Garrett Somers and Sarah Sorenson, co-authored the book: “Large Language Models: A Deep Dive: Bridging Theory and Practice.” Springer is the publisher, and the authors have over 65 years of combined experience. This is the eighth book Kamath has authored about artificial intelligence. 

SquareWorks Consulting, an ERP implementation and financial automation software provider, today announced the launch of its latest product offering, Expense Accrual Automation. Available through the SquareWorks Automate platform, a financial automation solution, Expense Accrual Automation is the latest feature designed to elevate the experience for financial teams using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with AI-enabled capabilities. 

Ensuring the accuracy of expense accruals is a crucial component of internal accounting operations, ensuring leaders have precise data for decision-making and to ease the audit process. The typical accruals process can be cumbersome, requiring estimates from internal stakeholders and vendors, thorough data analysis, correlating data from various locations and multiple reports and manual efforts resulting in many hours spent on this one accounting task.