AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 11/1/24

Algebrik AI Inc., a New York-based company pioneering the world’s first cloud-native and AI-powered digital era Loan Origination Platform (LOS), today announced the appointment of Jesse Frugé as Vice President of Product Management. 

Founded by Pankaj Jain, a veteran in the industry, Algebrik is designed to address the challenges faced by mid-tier banks and credit unions struggling with high customer acquisition costs due to broken omnichannel journeys and manual processes. With its AI-first and cloud-native platform, Algebrik revolutionizes the loan origination process with cutting-edge, inclusive AI technology, delivering faster, more accurate, and personalized lending experiences. 

Amount, a leader in consumer and small business deposit and loan origination software solutions, today announced its new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy Optimizer, designed to revolutionize credit, pricing, and fraud policy management for lenders of all sizes. This tool empowers lenders to create optimal policies by leveraging AI to simulate scenarios that align with their strategic goals, all while minimizing overhead and enabling credit teams to efficiently analyze and implement changes in a compliant manner. 

Financial institutions are increasingly looking to expand their use of AI, according to a 2024 report by Cornerstone Advisors. The percentage of banks planning to invest and/or implement generative AI is forecast to more than double—from 6% who have already invested or deployed it, to 14%, in 2024. Amount’s AI Policy Optimizer provides lenders with advanced AI power to simulate various policy outcomes based on their unique data and selected goals. The tool offers precise insights tailored to lenders’ strategic priorities, like increasing approval rates and offer acceptances, reducing fraud escalation, and improving credit performance. 

Amount’s AI Policy Optimizer has the unique ability to generate personalized recommendations using the lender’s own application and performance data. By automating the development of multiple policy scenarios, the tool allows credit teams to shift their focus from manual data modeling to high-level strategy. This streamlines policy optimization, freeing up valuable resources while ensuring that policies are not only data-driven but also compliant with regulatory requirements. The result is a more efficient way for lenders to refine their credit, pricing, and fraud policies — all while maintaining a sharp focus on their unique business objectives. 

AnChain.AI, a global leader in AI-powered digital asset and DeFi investigations, anti-fraud, and AML compliance, today announced the successful completion of its SOC 2 Type II certification. SOC 2 Type II, a rigorous auditing standard developed by the AICPA, involves a stringent, third-party evaluation of AnChain.AI’s commitment to data security, integrity, and compliance, underscoring the firm’s dedication to protecting sensitive financial and personal information. 

Since 2021, AnChain.AI has been a pioneer in cybersecurity and regulatory compliance, earning AWS GovCloud certification to meet stringent US government requirements, including ITAR and FedRAMP High baseline. The company provides trusted solutions to the SEC, IRS-CI, FinCEN, JFSA, VARA, and other leading regulatory agencies worldwide. 

Bank of America is dedicated to the use of innovative technology to best meet the needs of its clients and employees. This commitment to innovation has led to a 94% increase in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) granted patents and pending patent applications since 2022. Today, the company has nearly 1,100 AI and ML patents and pending applications in its portfolio, with more than half having already been granted.  

Overall, the bank holds nearly 7,000 granted patents and pending patent applications, and the most granted patents of any financial services company. This is thanks to the creativity of its more than 7,500 talented inventors based in 14 countries and 42 U.S. states, and a culture that empowers teammates to explore and develop innovative solutions for individuals and businesses around the world. 

In addition to artificial intelligence and machine learning, other technology categories in which new patents have been granted to Bank of America this year include information security, online and mobile banking, payments, data analytics, and augmented and virtual reality. 

Brightwave, the leading AI financial research platform, today announced the close of its $15 million Series A funding round. Led by Decibel Partners with participation from OMERS Ventures, this round brings Brightwave’s total funding to $21 million following an oversubscribed Seed round in June. In addition to its impressive fundraising, Brightwave has achieved 4x revenue growth in the four months since the announcement of its seed funding. 

Brightwave’s client base is growing rapidly, driven by demand from diverse asset managers and financial services institutions ranging from long-short hedge funds and private credit investors to boutique consultancies and some of the world’s largest institutional asset managers. The platform’s ability to accelerate workflows and drive insight across markets and asset classes is a testament to the product’s powerful sector-agnostic AI capabilities, unique user interface that goes far beyond chat, and comprehensive data offerings. 

At the core of the Brightwave platform is a proprietary knowledge graph constructed from high-signal sources including SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, breaking news, and public internet content, that describes the structure of global markets in granular detail. The Brightwave knowledge graph includes data on hundreds of factors such as supply chain relationships, M&A and governance changes as well as long-tail factors including expedited regulatory approvals, intellectual property litigation, cybersecurity events, and more. 

Entrust today announced an all-in-one consumer banking platform that allows banks and credit unions to provide high-assurance security throughout the customer lifecycle – from account opening to financial credential issuance to on-going, everyday transactions and interactions. 

The solution integrates leading AI-driven identity verification technology with physical and digital card issuance capabilities to transform the consumer banking experience, dramatically reducing fraud at account opening and providing smart continuous account protection. 

Approximately 82% of consumers say they access banking services always or mostly online. Meanwhile, there’s been a dramatic influx of sophisticated cyberthreats including synthetic identities, deepfakes, and phishing attacks. It’s more important than ever to ensure every interaction – big or small – is secured with the highest level of assurance. 

FinQuery, a leading provider of AI-powered solutions built to efficiently manage companies’ largest areas of spend, today announced the launch of FinQuery Contract Management (FCM) with Prepaids and Accruals. This innovative solution empowers businesses to automate accounting for prepaid and accrued expenses stemming from contracts such as software, services, utilities, insurance and short-term leases, in addition to streamlining contract management for finance and accounting teams. 

FCM is the only contract management solution built with the needs of finance and accounting teams in mind. With Prepaids and Accruals, FCM offers a comprehensive solution designed to streamline contract management and accounting processes. 

The 2024 FinRegLab AI Symposium will bring together an extraordinary group of thought leaders from financial services, technology, academia, and public policy to engage in critical conversations on the evolving role of artificial intelligence (“AI”) in the financial sector. This year’s Symposium will explore how the industry can harness benefits from AI and machine learning while addressing its challenges, positioning it as the premier event for shaping the future of AI-driven financial services. 

As we look ahead to a new Congress and Administration, the Symposium will host conversations around the policy agenda for AI in financial services and provide an unparalleled opportunity for dialogue at this critical intersection of technology, policy, and impact. 

The symposium speakers include Lawrence Summers, Sen. Mike Rpunds, Oren Cass, Michael J. Hsu and Michael Barr. 

iCapital, the global fintech platform driving the world’s alternative investment marketplace for the wealth and asset management industries, and AltExchange, a leading AI-driven technology firm transforming alternative investment data aggregation, management, and reporting for financial advisors and asset managers, today announced they have entered a definitive agreement under which iCapital intends to acquire AltExchange. 

AltExchange’s advanced technology aggregates and converts unstructured data from scattered documents and multi-format data feeds into structured insights to support real-time data reporting and streamlined tax reporting. AltExchange’s AdvisorVue platform empowers financial advisors by aggregating clients’ portfolios, standardizing data and documents, and automating reporting processes. For asset managers, AltExchange’s Digital Custodian Platform (DCP) provides a powerful tool to standardize post-investment reporting data, automate investor reporting, and facilitate seamless integration with advisors’ systems. 

JLL (NYSE: JLL) today announced the launch of its artificial intelligence (AI) platform, JLL Falcon, designed to accelerate the digital transformation of the commercial real estate (CRE) industry. The new platform is a cutting-edge set of AI-enabled software services that combines JLL’s vast and comprehensive proprietary data with generative AI models to deliver timely, revenue-generating and cost-saving insights, as well as maximize returns. This revolutionary platform for the CRE industry will chart the future course for JLL’s AI journey. 

Featuring multi-modal AI foundation models, data pipelines, security and privacy features, natural language and semantic processing layers and advanced analytics capabilities, JLL Falcon will power a wide range of CRE applications, including custom assistants. Additionally, the platform’s open architecture seamlessly blends best-in-class internal and external technologies to streamline JLL’s approach to researching opportunities, extracting and analyzing complex data and delivering trustworthy, actionable insights. 

JLL Falcon will also power the next iteration of JLL GPT™, the first generative AI assistant purpose-built for the CRE industry, which, since being introduced in August 2023, has provided JLL’s entire workforce with the capability to create specialized insights based on curated datasets to deliver better client outcomes. 

Mave, the AI assistant for real estate, today announced it has raised CAD$2 million in pre-seed funding and launched its beta program for agents and brokers. The investment, which was raised and closed in just a few weeks, was led by Relay Ventures and N49P with participation from Alate Partners, Clarim Ventures, and Gambit Partners, along with several angel and strategic investors including a past-president of the Toronto Real Estate Board. 

When Mave founder and CEO Raz Zohar and his wife bought their first home, it sparked curiosity about the extensive, time-consuming work that real estate agents manage behind the scenes to close a deal. With over 4.5 million homes sold yearly in North America by 2 million agents across 350,000 brokerages, Raz wanted to understand why agents invest more than 35 hours doing administrative work for each transaction, and why the industry had not yet evolved to improve this. So he became an executive assistant for agents across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), gaining firsthand experience with the constant demands on agents’ time and their reliance on phone calls, texts, and emails to manage tasks while juggling client needs across the city. Raz discovered that brokerages strive to support agents, but with their commission split per deal getting smaller and smaller, many lack resources for dedicated backend assistance. Recognizing this gap, along with the opportunity presented by the rapid improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM), Mave was born as an AI assistant for real estate agents and brokers. 

While Mave has been operating in stealth mode, it has already attracted interest from over 6,000 real estate agents across more than 90 brokerages in the GTA. From this pool of prospective users, Mave has selected 1,000 to initially onboard as part of its beta program. Brokers interested in the beta program for the Mave AI assistant can join the waitlist at maveai.co/sign-up. 

Moat Metrics, a leader in AI-powered innovation analytics, today announced the launch of Innovation Alpha™, a groundbreaking platform designed to revolutionize investment decision-making. By leveraging advanced artificial intelligence to reveal a company’s demonstrated innovation behavior at both a product and market level, Innovation Alpha™ provides investors, corporate leaders, and other stakeholders with unprecedented insights into companies’ true innovative potential and strategy. 

Innovation Alpha™ processes billions of existing and new data points, providing real-time insights that would be impossible to achieve through human analysis alone. The platform’s advanced pattern recognition capabilities uncover emerging technologies and potential disruptors long before they become apparent through traditional analysis methods. Innovation Alpha™ broadly covers all public and private companies that offer a product or have registered IP. 

Moat Metrics has harnessed its deep expertise in risk assessment and intangible asset valuation to create Innovation Alpha™. With more than six years of rigorous testing and refinement, the platform stands as a trusted leader in innovation analytics, offering unparalleled insights into a company’s future potential. 

Nitrogen (formerly Riskalyze), the company revolutionizing how wealth management firms scale the delivery of personalized advice, today unveiled new, advisor-requested features across its risk tolerance, investment research, financial planning, and advisor marketing product suite in a keynote address by CEO Dan Zitting at the Fearless Investing Summit. Leading the product announcements were hotly anticipated tools for breaking down equity exposure within funds and visualizing analytics-rich side-by-side portfolio comparisons. 

During the product launch keynote, Nitrogen reiterated its commitment of total flexibility for both individual advisors purchasing its products and for larger teams and enterprise RIAs. Plans for Advisors offer simple access to individual Nitrogen products or full bundles of the entire product suite. Enterprises likewise can build their best-of-breed tech stack, accessing the products they need priced by the volume of accounts in their data feed with unlimited advisors and assistants accessing the system. 

The 2024 Fearless Investing Summit featured keynote presentations from NFL star Emmitt Smith and industry leaders Michael Kitces, Joe Duran, Craig Iskowitz, Daniel Crosby, and Samantha Russell. Nitrogen’s Fearless Investing Summit brings together leaders from firms representing thousands of advisors from across the wealth management industry as well as the entire spectrum of supporting wealthtech and asset management. The product launch keynote was the capstone of the annual event that drew attendees from wealth management firms ranging from solo advisors to ensemble practices to scaling mid-market firms to enterprises with 1,000+ advisors. 

Polly, the leading provider of innovative mortgage capital markets technology, today introduced American Financial Resources, LLC (AFR) as the latest adopter of its cloud-native technology and high-performance product and pricing engine (PPE). AFR selected Polly to support strong strategic growth ambitions, increase revenue on each loan, and decrease the cost of origination, while maintaining a hyper focus on the borrower experience. Executives cite Polly’s granularity, functional depth, and versatility—combined with an unrivaled pace of innovation—as key drivers in their decision. 

AFR, LLC announced completion of its sale to a fund managed by Proprietary Capital, LLC in February 2024, appointing Rob Pieklo, former AFR executive and partner (2003-2018), as Chief Operating Officer. Under Rob’s leadership, AFR sought to redefine its customer acquisition strategy and elevate the borrower and internal experience, which went part in parcel with technology. AFR selected Polly as its strategic technology partner, adopting its agile, state-of-the-art engine to help bring its vision to fruition and satisfy the diverse needs of today’s homebuyers. 

PureFacts Financial Solutions (“PureFacts”), an award-winning provider of end-to-end revenue management solutions for the wealth and asset management industry, announces the appointment of Pete Hess as President. Hess’ hiring follows the completion of a strategic investment from GrowthCurve Capital (“GrowthCurve”), a private equity firm focused on building businesses through data, analytics and machine learning, combined with a comprehensive approach to human capital. 

Most recently Chief Revenue Officer for the Americas at InvestCloud, a global financial services platform provider, Hess brings an impressive track record in the industry. Hess spent 23 years at Advent, which was acquired by SS&C Technologies in 2015, including three years serving as president and three as CEO. Hess also served as an operating partner at leading U.S. private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, which focuses on the technology and healthcare sectors. 

In his new role, Hess will report to Madej and is tasked with leveraging PureFacts’ position as the leading revenue management solution for global wealth and asset management firms. Hess will assume day-to-day leadership of PureFacts operations with Madej focusing his time on engaging with key clients, partners and prospects. 

Rate, a leader in fintech mortgage innovation, today unveiled Rate Intelligence, an AI platform designed to revolutionize the mortgage experience. 

Rate Intelligence introduces unparalleled efficiency and speed by automating crucial steps like income verification and underwriting. By instantly processing borrowers’ income documents, it calculates income and provides real-time automated underwriting approvals. This reduces the need for Loan Officers and underwriters to calculate manually, minimizing errors and accelerating the customer approval process. 

By leveraging AI and intelligent automation, Rate Intelligence transforms the mortgage experience for homebuyers and industry professionals alike. 

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 two experienced wealth managers, Craig Austad, CLU®, CFP®, and Eric S. Passin. 

Based in Denver, Colorado, Austad joins Savvy after nearly 30 years in the financial services industry. He has held financial planning-oriented roles at a variety of organizations including Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management where he served clients for 12 years. With nearly 35 years of experience in guiding clients toward their wealth management goals, applying a practical financial planning process, Passin brings a wealth of expertise to Savvy. Based in Denville, New Jersey, he was most recently a wealth advisor at Farther. 

Inclusive of these latest additions, Savvy has assembled a team of more than 30 advisors who offer a wide range of financial planning services including retirement planning, estate planning, tax strategy, alternative investments, direct indexing and more. Savvy Wealth designed these tech-forward services to provide an efficient and seamless client experience. Earlier this year, Savvy successfully raised $26.5 million in Series A funding to support the continued growth of its advisor team and accelerate the development of its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technology platform. 

SEI® (NASDAQ:SEIC) today announced the launch of SEIGPT, a new generative artificial intelligence (AI) framework that enables the rapid experimentation and implementation of generative AI applications. The company is currently leveraging SEIGPT-powered applications internally to enhance productivity, increase efficiency, and reduce costs in certain areas, such as client service, process automation, human resources, contract analysis, and code development. 

In 2023, SEI launched its AI Center of Excellence, led by Director of AI Vlad Coric, to prepare for AI’s impact on the company’s workforce and accelerate AI adoption across the organization. The team designed SEIGPT based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) architecture, which provides transparency into the data utilized to generate responses. By leveraging advanced natural language processing capabilities on disparate data sources within SEI, SEIGPT aims to enhance client satisfaction, streamline workflows, and support content creation across various operational functions. 

Socure, the leading provider of artificial intelligence for digital identity verification, fraud prevention and sanction screening, has signed an agreement to acquire Effectiv, a real-time risk decisioning company, for $136M. The acquisition is expected to close in November. 

This strategic acquisition pairs Socure’s best-in-class digital identity verification and fraud solutions with a developer-friendly AI orchestration and decisions platform – a combination of technology not held by a single competitor, and one that will elevate the way the market combats fraud and verifies identities across the entire customer journey. 

Effectiv’s open platform seamlessly integrates any risk solution, including identity and payment fraud controls, credit underwriting, Know Your Business (KYB) and anti-money laundering (AML), to drive real-time decisions that solve the toughest risk challenges of our time – identity theft, account takeover, scams, and real-time payment fraud. 

Tavant, a Silicon Valley-based provider of AI-powered digital lending technologies, announced today the availability of a new product, LO.ai, that augments its widely-adopted AI-powered digital lending platform, Tavant’s Touchless Lending® product. This latest addition complements the company’s digital lending platform, further driving down origination costs by applying generative AI and straight-through processing to the sales process. This enables a lender to drive down the overall sales expense, while increasing borrower confidence with automated tools to educate customers and close more loans faster. 

LO.ai leverages advanced compliant AI technology that anonymizes, masks and tokenizes sensitive data, ensuring the security of corporate, private, and borrower PII data. This enables Tavant to implement risk mitigations and operational controls while ensuring compliance with regulations such as TILA RESPA, TRID, Agency Guidelines, etc. 

As a leading Fintech software and solutions provider for more than 20 years, Tavant proactively anticipates customer needs and adjusts accordingly to provide the right configurable solutions. Tavant’s Touchless Lending® product suite, which now includes experiences not just for home buyers, brokers, and loan officers but also for underwriters, realtors, servicers, and more, maximizes data-driven decision-making to solve even the most complex lender and borrower challenges. Tavant’s growing customer base originates one out of every three home loans in the United States. 

TomoCredit, an innovative AI fintech startup founded by immigrants to enhance credit accessibility for millions of Americans lacking credit history, announced today the appointment of Joseph Lindsay as Chief Technology Officer and John Suh as Executive Director. 

Joseph Lindsay, previously Open Banking Chief Technology Officer at Experian, offers extensive experience in open banking and data initiatives. John Suh, former CEO of LegalZoom, is recognized for his ability to lead high-growth companies and drive substantial revenue growth, leading to successful IPO. 

Joseph Lindsay’s expertise in open banking will be pivotal for TomoCredit as it continues to expand its proprietary CashScore, known as TomoScore, which was launched in 2019. TomoScore builds a unique underwriting model that leverages real-time cash flow data, allowing lenders to assess individuals who lack a traditional credit history. Since its inception, TomoCredit has successfully amassed data from over 4 million consumers on its platform, demonstrating its commitment to finding alternative ways to underwrite creditworthy individuals. 

TradePMR, a technology and custodial services provider for registered investment advisors (RIAs), today announced the launch of Fusion SYNC, an automated solution for streamlining one of the most common and often daunting tasks for registered investment advisors (RIAs): transitioning to a new custodian. Enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), Fusion SYNC is designed to allow RIA firms to upload their complete client approved information data set and automatically populate it into TradePMR’s Fusion platform. Fusion SYNC also cross checks the data for errors, reducing the need for manual corrections, designed to significantly accelerate the transition process – ultimately expecting to shorten the timeline needed to transition an entire book of business from weeks to, hopefully, just days. 

According to Cerullii, 37% of financial advisors – collectively controlling $10.4 trillion or 40% of total industry assets – are expected to retire within the next 10 years. However, 25% of these advisors are unsure of their succession plan, creating what TradePMR believes is a unique opportunity to capture new assets when money changes custodians. 

Fusion SYNC demonstrates TradePMR’s leadership as an early adopter of AI among custodial providers, reinforcing its commitment to using new technologies in innovative ways that support independent RIAs rather than compete with them. For advisors considering a new custodian, whether as part of a succession or because of industry consolidation, Fusion SYNC was created to help minimize business disruptions and lessen the impact on end clients. 

Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, today announced the launch of its T-Prime lending program. This new initiative in the Upstart Referral Network enables banks and credit unions to reach America’s more affluent “super prime” borrowers. Fourteen lenders have already signed up for T-Prime. 

T-Prime focuses on the almost half of Americans who have credit scores above 720, a demographic which money center banks and fintechs commonly serve. By leveraging Upstart’s AI platform, lenders of all sizes can make best-in-class offers that pair competitive rates with instant and automated approvals. In 2024, approximately 90 percent of Upstart-powered loans were approved with zero documents to upload and zero time to wait. 

Uptiq, a leader in AI-driven financial solutions, is proud to announce the launch of its new, vertically integrated Uptiq AI Workbench, designed to transform how banks, credit unions, and wealth management will deliver AI-First experiences to their clients. 

Deployed in over 350 financial institutions including large, highly regulated financial services firms such as Focus Financial Partners, UPTIQ AI has processed over $1 billion in loans, proving its reliability and efficiency in the financial services sector. 

Specifically, UPTIQ AI brings a library of pre-packaged agents to assist financial advisors and their support staff, loan officers, bankers, credit analysts, underwriters and back-office staff to assist in better client engagement, accessing portfolio and client profiles using natural language, writing deal memos, and automating innumerable tasks. Another salient feature of the UPTIQ platform is that it deploys seamlessly with current workflows and is already integrated with industry leading WealthTech (e.g. Orion) and BankTech platforms (e.g. Alkami, Q2).