AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 9/27/24

Archer, a leader in enterprise risk and compliance management solutions, today unveiled its latest product, Archer Assurance AI, aimed at revolutionizing compliance management through advanced artificial intelligence. The company also introduced its new Archer AI Governance product, user-centric enhancements to the Archer interface to deliver a next-generation risk experience, and updates to a broad range of risk and compliance offerings. 

Archer Assurance AI, the latest innovation from Archer and a game changer for regulatory compliance, bridges the gap between regulatory change and compliance. It provides a powerful, fresh approach for regulated firms to rapidly assess, react and report on regulatory changes at scale, to help keep pace with their impacts to policies and controls while minimizing penalties and negative exposure. 

Archer Assurance AI links incoming regulatory intelligence directly to control implementations while integrating core risk assessment capabilities. It assists organizations in complying with all applicable regulations by establishing controls and policies to manage risks associated with both regulatory and non-regulatory requirements. 

Bella Protocol, a suite of DeFi products focused on unlocking liquidity potential and maximizing crypto yields, has officially unveiled its highly anticipated AI-powered trading tools. This launch marks a pivotal moment in the platform’s evolution, representing not only a significant brand upgrade but also a major step forward in democratizing advanced crypto trading strategies. With these AI-driven innovations, Bella reaffirms its commitment to making crypto trading and yield farming smarter, more efficient, and accessible to users of all experience levels—from beginners to seasoned traders. 

Bella Protocol’s new AI-powered tools are designed to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in the DeFi space, including the complexity of trading strategies, the need for constant market monitoring, and the inaccessibility of advanced yield optimization techniques for everyday users. With these innovations, Bella makes it easier for users to navigate the DeFi landscape and unlock the full potential of their crypto assets. 

At the core of this launch are the Bella Signal Bot and Bella Research Bot (the latter to be released by early October), two groundbreaking products that harness the power of artificial intelligence to deliver real-time trading signals and in-depth market analysis. The Bella Signal Bot provides users with actionable long and short signals across 12 perpetual token pairs, including popular pairs like BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, SOL/USDT, XRP/USDT, and BNB/USDT. The selection of token pairs will continue to expand, giving traders more opportunities to make informed decisions quickly and effectively. Tailored to suit different trading strategies, the bot runs on five distinct AI models, ensuring that both novice and professional traders can benefit from its insights. 

CLARA Analytics (“CLARA”), a leading provider of artificial intelligence (“AI”) technology for insurance claims optimization, today announced that Risk Administration Services, Inc. (“RAS”) will leverage its technology to enhance its claims processes. To achieve this objective, RAS will adopt CLARA’s full product suite, including Claims DocIntel Pro, Triage, Treatment, Fraud, and Litigation. 

As the leading expert in workers’ compensation insurance and loss mitigation management, RAS manages The Dakota Group® (“DG”), the largest voluntary writer of workers’ compensation in South Dakota and one of the largest in the Upper Midwest. DG is “A” rated by AM Best and has been named to the Ward’s 50 companies for the last four consecutive years, showcasing its commitment to best practices and consistent high performance. These successful traits make RAS the perfect customer for CLARA, a company that drives new levels of efficiency for insurance claims. 

Dream Builder Wealth Society, a global leader in fintech founded by Clemen Langston in 2009, has announced the launch of its latest product, AIΩApexTactics, a revolutionary AI-driven trading system. Building on the company’s core philosophy of “Rooted in America, Connecting with the World,” this new product aims to transform how investors navigate complex financial markets. 

Langston, a seasoned financial analyst and tech innovator, was inspired in 2016 while watching the AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol match. He realized the immense potential of artificial intelligence in enhancing investment decisions. Driven by this vision, he initiated the development of the AIΩ system—a proprietary platform that uses big data and machine learning to provide unparalleled market analysis and predictions. 

AIΩApexTactics, the latest evolution of the system, is designed to offer even greater precision in forecasting market trends and providing actionable investment advice. By integrating cutting-edge AI with robust data analysis, the system allows users to make informed decisions in highly volatile environments. The platform’s ability to adapt and self-learn ensures it remains a vital tool for investors seeking long-term growth. 

Education Pioneer Wealth Society, a leader in fintech, is transforming global investment strategies with its advanced AI technology and strategic vision. Co-founded by Cyrus Langston, the company combines financial education with cutting-edge tech to drive investor success. 

Founded in 2019, Education Pioneer Wealth Society empowers investors through its AI Ω trading system. This platform merges artificial intelligence with big data to deliver precise market insights, allowing for rapid and accurate responses to market fluctuations. The AI Ω system has set new benchmarks for investment efficiency and opportunity. 

Education Pioneer Wealth Society is excited to announce the launch of AI Ω AlphaPulse, an advanced version of the AI Ω system. Set to debut next month, AI Ω AlphaPulse integrates more sophisticated analytics and a streamlined user interface, delivering unparalleled precision in market predictions. With enhanced features, this new tool enables investors to make data-driven decisions more effectively, accelerating their path to financial success. 

Gradient AI, a leading enterprise software provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in the insurance industry, today announced at the SIIA National Conference that Breckpoint® has successfully adopted Gradient AI’s SAILTM Solution to enhance underwriting for its self-funded employee benefits programs. SAIL has helped Breckpoint improve risk assessment, leading to more accurate pricing and better financial outcomes. 

Breckpoint, a self-funded insurance provider recognized for its advanced risk financing strategies and customized self-funding arrangements for employers and groups of all sizes, chose Gradient AI to refine its existing rating tools. Gradient AI’s SAIL Solution has created a stronger, more precise data driven process in underwriting and pricing. Powered by advanced machine learning algorithms and an extensive dataset composed of medical, prescription, and lab data, SAIL has provided Breckpoint with comprehensive insights into group health risks, significantly enhancing its medical loss ratio (MLR) performance. 

Breckpoint implemented SAIL to better understand specific group risks and achieve several critical goals. These included filling data gaps for new business by accessing more detailed medical and pharmacy utilization reports, improving match rates for more accurate risk projections, and streamlining processes to accelerate quote turnaround times. 

Hummingbird, a leading provider of financial crime risk management solutions, today announced the acquisition of LogicLoop, a pioneer in no-code data integration and automation. The acquisition marks a significant step forward in Hummingbird’s mission to become the core operating platform for financial crime fighters, empowering financial institutions to unify, explore, and act on their risk and compliance data. 

Data fragmentation continues to be the top challenge facing financial institutions globally. Risk and compliance teams, in particular, struggle to access their data and leverage it for risk management and financial crime investigations, resulting in gaps and inefficiencies. With LogicLoop’s innovative technology, Hummingbird is poised to tackle this problem head-on. 

Use cases for this suite of customer benefits include assessing customer risk, simplifying data exploration to identify trends, and enriching existing data for deeper insights and more informed decision-making. By empowering risk and compliance teams to set up automated procedures on top of their data without the need for engineering resources, LogicLoop enhances the existing Hummingbird platform and offers even more ways to streamline their operations and keep their institutions safe. 

Doug Clinton, co-founder and Managing Partner at Deepwater Asset Management, today announced the launch of Intelligent Alpha, a new investment firm designed to capitalize on the transformational capabilities of artificial intelligence. Intelligent Alpha employs an investment committee built on three large-language AI models — GPT, Claude, and Gemini — to construct various investment strategies. 

The firm’s first ETF, launching today, is the Intelligent Livermore ETF (LIVR), named for famed trader Jesse Livermore. 

After more than a year testing dozens of strategies, LIVR will be the first public offering of an AI-powered investment strategy built entirely on large-language models. The evolution of AI to current large-language models from the prior popularity of machine learning models has enabled the technology to provide differentiated investment analysis compared to human peers to enable a variety of investment styles. At launch, the LIVR portfolio will focus on opportunities in AI, Latin American equities, Asian equities, renewables and energy, and defensive stocks as selected by the AI investment committee. 

Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU), the global financial technology platform that makes Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, is pioneering a done-for-you future with agentic AI. Developed using its proprietary Generative AI Operating System (GenOS), Intuit’s new agentic AI systems will do the hard work on behalf of consumers and businesses, complemented by personalized AI-driven insights and recommendations, with a seamless path to AI-powered human tax and bookkeeping experts whenever needed. Intuit is bringing together the best of human expertise and the company’s AI capabilities to accelerate delivery of agentic AI experiences across its AI-driven expert platform. 

Initial agentic AI capabilities will be available starting in December, with additional use cases rolling out throughout 2025 across the company’s platform and products. For consumers, businesses, and experts, Intuit agentic AI use cases will eliminate routine tasks so they can focus on higher value activities. Agentic AI workflows will dynamically determine the right sequence of operations, executed by specialized AI agents to achieve goals and complete tasks autonomously, with human direction and oversight. 

Intuit is actively exploring new experiences ideally suited for agentic AI to address complex business workflows, among them: a collection of customizable agents equipped to manage a breadth of tasks across the company’s platform and products (tax, accounting, marketing, personal finance). 

Marqeta (NASDAQ: MQ), the global modern card issuing platform that enables embedded finance solutions for the world’s innovators, today announced that Fouzi Husaini has joined the company as its Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer. Previously at Capital One and Amazon, Husaini will play a pivotal role in scaling Marqeta’s AI organization to help increase purchasing power for all by reducing risk and improving consumer and commercial rewards, while also helping accelerate our pace of innovation. 

Most recently, Husaini served as the Vice President of Machine Learning Engineering at Capital One, where he focused on building ML models to support Capital One’s credit products and services, including marketing, fraud, small business, and more. Before Capital One, he led a technical team at Amazon who delivered AI/ML customer-facing experiences to Alexa customers, and also focused on Amazon’s machine learning risk platform. 

Last year, Marqeta announced its first investments in generative AI, including Marqeta Docs AI, an AI-powered question and answer tool that allows customers to quickly navigate the Marqeta Docs site by asking questions specific to their use cases. Marqeta has continued to invest in AI and machine learning to improve risk decisioning. The appointment of Husaini to the team aims to accelerate and expand the rollout of additional key features into Marqeta’s platform. 

Today, Nasdaq Verafin®, leading provider of crime fighting technology, announces enhancements to its robust suite of artificial intelligence (AI) based Targeted Typology Analytics, with new detection capabilities for terrorist financing and drug trafficking activity. These destructive crimes are fueling trillions of dollars in illicit flows globally, with 2023 estimates topping $11 billion for terrorist financing and nearly $800 billion connected to drug trafficking, according to Nasdaq Verafin’s Global Financial Crime report. Leveraging more than 20 years of deep domain expertise in anti-money laundering (AML), countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) and fraud detection technology, Nasdaq Verafin continues to deliver innovative new approaches to help banks improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their AML/CFT programs and ultimately safeguard the global financial system from the multi-trillion-dollar epidemic of financial crime. 

Different illicit activities have unique characteristics and red flags that are indicative of risk of the specific underlying crime. Nasdaq Verafin applies advanced AI techniques to risk-rate multiple pieces of evidence based on specific indicators of the financial crime typology to more effectively detect suspicious activity. This approach helps banks stay ahead of evolving threats and manage increasing regulatory expectations to align their programs to national AML/CFT priorities, including terrorist financing, drug trafficking, human trafficking, fraud and other critical money laundering risks. 

Targeted Typology Analytics address an industry-wide pain point of high volumes of false positive alerts that result from conventional rules-based AML systems. In developing new analytical solutions, Nasdaq Verafin applies its proven approach from its highly performant analytics for Elder Financial Abuse and Human Trafficking that have proven to be more effective in identifying suspicious activity associated with specific crime typologies. Nasdaq Verafin’s targeted analytic to identify human trafficking activity delivers exceptional performance, with as few as one in four alerts resulting in a case investigation, and one in seven alerts resulting in a bank filing a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR). 

NICE Actimize, a NICE business (Nasdaq: NICE), today announced the availability of the market’s first AI-powered Fraud Investigations solution that facilitates end-to-end fraud management capabilities from detection to investigations. Explicitly designed to enable fraud investigations post detection, the new solution helps financial institutions save both time and money with its automated workflow and robust fraud-specific case management capabilities. Advanced Generative AI embedded in the solution also provides automation that help financial institutions quickly address customer concerns and consistently meet regulatory timelines. 

The NICE Actimize Fraud Investigation solution breaks down the siloes between the fraud prevention and investigation functions while creating an automated feedback loop that helps financial institutions use operational findings to stop more fraud from occurring. 

Additionally, the solution streamlines the management of claims and facilitates efficient reimbursement processes, while lowering the cost of recovery. Among its capabilities, the fraud investigations solution simplifies SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) filing for fraud teams with automated fields, narrative generation, and e-filing capabilities. 

Options Technology (Options), a global leader in capital markets infrastructure, proudly announces the opening of its new office in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), marking its commitment to the fast-growing Middle Eastern market and reinforcing its global growth strategy. 

As an industry leader in delivering cloud-enabled managed services, colocation, connectivity, and high-performance trading infrastructure, Options will use its Dubai office to provide enhanced, localized offerings to clients throughout the region. These services enable financial institutions to access low-latency trading environments, comprehensive cybersecurity solutions, and real-time market data integration—all vital for businesses operating in today’s fast-paced financial markets. 

Establishing a presence in Dubai will allow Options to enhance its service delivery, offering 24/7 local support to meet the specific demands of international clients. Strategically located in DIFC, Dubai’s financial epicenter, the new office underscores Options’ broader mission to support the global capital markets through cutting-edge technology and unmatched expertise. 

Rapid Finance, a leading small business financing platform specializing in providing customized financing solutions, announced its new partnership with Texas-based Gestalt Tech, a provider of a cutting-edge data warehouse solution designed for financial institutions. Through this partnership, lenders using Gestalt can seamlessly integrate with Rapid’s small business lending automation solution, Decisioneer. Additionally, they will be able to use Lynx fraud detection to get insights on their data in Gestalt. 

Through this systems integration, lenders can gain a holistic and real-time view of applicants through a frictionless, fully automated loan application and origination process that leads to faster and better-informed lending decisions. Once a loan is originated, that data is seamlessly migrated into Gestalt’s data warehousing platform where lenders can readily access, analyze and leverage it to support ongoing business intelligence (BI) initiatives. 

Rapid Finance’s Lynx is built with a modular, cloud-native API-first design that enables lenders and financing companies to drive more efficient and intelligent decisions by validating, enriching and comparing new customer applications with large databases of historical data in Gestalt. Additionally, Decisioneer is a scalable, automated end-to-end digital platform that connects lenders with real-time accounting, tax, KYC and KYB data to help accelerate origination, enhance underwriting efficiency and reduce risk in real-time. 

Barchart, a leading provider of market data and technology solutions to active traders, investors and businesses, announces a strategic partnership with SIGMA Financial AI, a financial technology company known for its AI-driven trading solutions.  This collaboration aims to leverage the strengths of both Barchart and SIGMA to deliver cutting-edge tools and insights that facilitate better decision-making, mitigate risks, and uncover valuable trading opportunities. 

As part of the partnership, SIGMA will integrate Barchart market data into its suite of AI-powered tools, helping investors make faster and more informed decisions.  SIGMA’s machine learning product suite, supported by scalable, ultra-low latency architecture, can enable users to unlock new trading opportunities and refine their strategies.  Through the integration of Barchart’s extensive data across multiple asset classes—spanning analytics, fundamental data, price information, and news—with SIGMA’s cutting-edge analytics platform, this partnership delivers a comprehensive solution for investors and traders aiming to stay ahead in today’s competitive market. 

In addition, SIGMA will collaborate with Barchart to produce content for publication on Barchart.com, further enhancing the platform’s value by offering deep market insights, data-driven analysis, and emerging trends powered by AI.  This content aims to empower traders and investors with actionable knowledge to improve their strategies and uncover valuable investment opportunities. 

Smarsh announced its AI-powered Intelligent Agent. This groundbreaking product leverages advanced large language models (LLMs) to streamline the review, escalation, and disposition of alerts generated within Smarsh’s Enterprise Conduct Surveillance solution. Smarsh’s Intelligent Agent will be available as an add-on starting in 2025. 

Today’s compliance teams spend up to 80% of their time sifting through noise to find real risks.  Smarsh’s Intelligent Agent changes all of that — proactively screening out less relevant communications before they ever need review. By learning from historical alert patterns and human analyst decisions, the AI agents emulate the expertise of experienced compliance professionals. This enables compliance teams to focus on what matters most: de-risking their organizations. 

This is another industry-first for Smarsh. Nearly a decade ago the company introduced machine learning to communications surveillance. In the subsequent years it has been the first to introduce transcription-powered voice surveillance, model governance, multilingual detection capabilities, productized AI, and the ability to “own your own risk” through augmentation. Smarsh’s Intelligent Agent represents the next step in this evolution. 

Smarsh®, the global leader in digital communications data and intelligence, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leading provider of secure, resilient, and scalable cloud technologies, today announced they have strengthened their existing partnership by signing a five-year agreement to bring cutting-edge Generative AI offerings to the financial services industry. 

As banks, insurance companies, investment advisors, and other financial institutions navigate increasingly complex regulatory and compliance requirements, the partnership will give the financial services industry tools to manage risk and surface intelligence from their digital communications data at unmatched global scale through the Smarsh Enterprise Platform’s cloud-based AI-enabled applications and new Generative AI capabilities. 

Smarsh recognizes that communications data contains information critical not only to compliance teams but businesses at large. 

Wealth.com, the industry’s leading end-to-end estate planning platform, today announced the successful completion of a $30 million Series A funding round, led by GV (formerly Google Ventures). This investment underscores the growing significance of combining scalable next-generation technology with the essential human touch that is required for financial planning. 

The Series A round includes participation from Citi Ventures, Outpost Ventures (an investment platform of Neuberger Berman), 53 Stations (supported by The Pritzker Organization) and Firebolt Ventures (headed by prolific technology investor Gokul Rajaram). The new capital will fuel wealth.com’s continued expansion and product innovation, further establishing its position as the go-to platform for estate planning among financial advisors and wealth management firms. The funding will support the enhancement of its innovative technology and integration capabilities, as well as the development of new features tailored to the needs of advisors and their clients. 

This funding comes on the heels of wealth.com’s recent launch of its Family Office Suite™, a collection of sophisticated estate management tools designed for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients. The suite enhances advisors’ ability to efficiently manage complex estates, with features that simplify estate visualization, optimize tax planning and streamline reporting processes. By integrating powerful artificial intelligence with human expertise and an intuitive user experience, wealth.com has firmly established itself as an industry leader. This leadership is validated by widespread industry adoption and recognition, such as recent inclusion in Fast Company’s 2024 Best Workplaces for Innovators list. Additionally, at the 2024 WealthManagement.com Industry Awards, the company was recognized as the ‘Best Technology Provider’ in the Trust category, while CEO Rafael Loureiro received the Advisor Choice Award for Technology Providers: CEO of the Year.