Here at AI & Finance, I believe that, week in and week out, we offer an editorial tableau that stands as a convincing argument that, if artificial intelligence is in a bubble, it nonetheless has staying power and will help shape the world in the decades to come.
This week, before we go through our financial AI headlines, we’ll offer some more evidence that AI is probably going to be around for a long time, and is only going to get bigger and more prevalent. Our next exhibit is in the energy sector. Have you been paying attention to what’s going on in energy in the U.S. right now?
Nuclear is having a bit of a renaissance.
In fact, we’re suddenly so eager to get more nuclear power online that the process to recommission and restart Unit 1, one of the defunct reactors at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant—yes, that Three Mile Island—is well underway.
What makes us lean forward is why the reactor is expected to clear regulatory and financial hurdles and restart: Microsoft has entered into an agreement with the plant’s owner, Constellation Energy, to buy the equivalent of its entire energy output over the next 20 years, ostensibly to power its data centers.
To the technological wizards at Microsoft, responsible for some of the best technology bets of all time, AI is a sure enough thing that it’s worth the expense and reputational risk of restarting a reactor associated with (but not itself at all involved in) the most notorious nuclear accident in U.S. history. Unit 1 was actually deactivated in 2019 due to economic reasons—it seems that, in the past five years, the energy demand picture in the U.S. has changed dramatically enough to create a reversal of fortunes for the reactor.
Never mind that nuclear energy is expensive and the cost of restarting a reactor is high, even for a reactor slated for decommissioning not located at Three Mile Island, though restarting a reactor is not nearly as expensive as building a new full-sized nuclear powered electrical generating facility from scratch.
The renewed interest in nuclear energy is not just a sign that Microsoft expects to need a lot more energy—according to The Economist, $1 trillion worth of AI-oriented data centers are in the process of being built—it’s a sign that Microsoft’s biggest bet is likely on transformer-based AI becoming a dominant technology over the next 20 years (see AI Education for more about that), and also that the company believes that energy demand cannot be easily met with the potential hydrocarbon power (generated by fossil fuels) left at our disposal, nor can it be reliably met with renewable energy resources. Nuclear, for all of its risks, costs and other issues, is becoming the best option to power technology’s future demands.
A couple of more interesting Three Mile Island-related tidbits—the future plans for the site actually include an expansion of generating capacity with the addition of small modular reactors in the 2030s. It’s also not the only power-generating nuclear reactor in the process of restarting.
AI is already so big, it’s changing the future of U.S. energy.
Now, who’s ready for some headlines?
1. Arc
Arc, the leading capital markets and cash management platform, today announced the launch of Arc Intelligence, the first AI platform designed to automate complex financial tasks for private credit. Arc Intelligence’s initial product, the AI Private Credit Analyst (“AI Analyst”), empowers credit teams to make more confident investment decisions faster, with 99% accuracy on complex financial analyses. It allows investors to ingest unstructured private company financial data and generate detailed credit memos, transforming a process that would typically take deal teams several days to a matter of minutes.
Credit funds have historically relied on offline and manual processes to collect, enrich, and analyze borrower data before producing cleanly-formatted reports. This archaic model of slow data ingestion and repetitive financial analyses means that credit analysts spend days developing a basic picture of the businesses they’re evaluating. Arc Intelligence changes that.
The private credit market has grown 50% over the past three years and is projected to grow to $2.8 trillion by 2028, according to Morgan Stanley. That massive demand for credit has prompted participating funds to accelerate their adoption of technology across their operations, from deal origination to diligence to risk monitoring. Arc Intelligence equips lenders to run a more efficient qualification and underwriting process, without sacrificing precision on quantitative analyses.
2. Bluespine
Bluespine, an AI-driven claims cost reduction platform for self-insured employers, today announced it has raised $7.2 million in a seed funding round led by Team8, with participation from strategic partners, to tackle medical overbilling, which is a symptom of the $300 billion fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA) healthcare crisis. With employer healthcare expenses up 14% over the past two years, Bluespine’s innovative solution helps plan sponsors to lower costs without compromising care, protecting employers from financial leakage and helping them meet their fiduciary obligations.
As much as 80% of medical bills are estimated to contain errors, underscoring the urgent need for innovative solutions in healthcare cost management. Bluespine applies proprietary AI to unlock new capabilities that help self-insured employers identify, recover, and prevent overbilled claims at scale.
Bluespine was co-founded by technology experts with extensive experience in AI, data analytics, cybersecurity, and enterprise solutions. Co-Founder and CEO David Talinovsky brings over 20 years of experience leading global operations servicing Fortune 50 companies. Gal Frishman, Co-Founder and CTO, previously led a unit of 120 researchers and AI experts at IBM, and Yossi Mansano, Co-Founder and VP of R&D, is the former GM of Fortinet in Israel and has over two decades of experience developing deep system architectures to serve Fortune 100 companies. The company was established under Team8’s unique Venture Creation model, led by Team8 Partner Galia Beer-Gabel.
3. Communify Fincentric
Communify Fincentric, a leader in unifying the communication of market and client data through best-in-class digital experiences, today announces the appointment of Nicole Nakashian as Chief Operating Officer (COO), effective immediately.
Nakashian, recognized as one of The Top 25 Financial Technology COOs by The Financial Technology Report, brings over 25 years of operational leadership to Communify Fincentric. Most recently, she served as COO of InvestCloud, where she helped scale the platform to over $6 trillion in assets. Her expertise will be instrumental as Communify Fincentric expands to meet the growing demand for the next generation of data-rich client portals, advisor portals, market data portals and AI functionality.
Communify Fincentric’s SaaS-based product suite unifies the communication of market and client data through its library of financial applications, including Markets Apps, Client Apps, Advisor Apps and AI Apps (MIND). The platform leverages its Knowledge Base of 4,000+ unique data feeds to power advanced experiences and AI for financial automation, communication and management. Founded on decades of maturity in serving the world’s largest financial institutions, Communify Fincentric delivers scalable and secure solutions that help firms achieve operational efficiency and better serve their clients.
4. EY
The EY organization today announces an alliance between Regnology, a leader in regulatory reporting, and EY ifb to give clients access to regulatory and supervisory technologies and solutions to help ensure streamlined compliance and drive large-scale transformations.
With regulators and tax authorities asking for increasingly granular real-time data and continuous compliance, the EY–Regnology Alliance helps provide clients with new modules covering the full span of regulatory reporting and supervision processes in detail. It will also provide innovative cloud-native and artificial intelligence-supported offerings that address the specific regulatory requirements of different jurisdictions and adapt to future regulatory changes.
Through the Alliance, EY ifb leverages Regnology’s experience, serving both regulators and the regulated entities with leading-edge technology facilitating seamless communication and collaboration. This will help grow customer groups and develop integrated service offerings addressing banking and tax reporting requirements from the perspective of both supervised and supervising bodies.
5. Intuit
Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU), the global financial technology platform that makes Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, today announced the launch of Intuit Assist for QuickBooks, a generative AI (GenAI)-powered financial assistant that transforms how businesses run and grow their business.
Available to QuickBooks Online customers in the U.S.*, Intuit Assist is delivering seamless, connected ‘done-for-you’ experiences, enabled by AI with access to AI-powered human experts. Intuit’s AI-driven expert platform is embedded in the company’s products, including QuickBooks, TurboTax, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp.
Intuit Assist is bringing these experiences to life by delivering personalized, intelligent recommendations and streamlined tools to help small and mid-market businesses generate estimates, invoices, bills, and payment reminders at the click of a button. These accounting transactions are done for them, all without the need to manually enter data or do the work. These features, coupled with powerful and actionable insights, allow business owners to stay in control while reducing the amount of work needed to get paid and convert prospects, giving them the confidence to make smart financial decisions to grow their business, all on one platform.
6. Numerated
Numerated, a leading AI-driven commercial lending platform, today announced a strategic partnership with GoDocs, a leader in digital lending documentation, to streamline the commercial loan documentation process for financial institutions. This collaboration adds GoDocs’s document automation solutions to Numerated’s platform, enabling faster, more secure document preparation and execution for lenders.
GoDocs’s advanced digital document solutions complement Numerated’s ecosystem of partners, including Moody’s, FIS, and Alloy, further positioning Numerated as a comprehensive solution for modern commercial lending.
7. OneChronos
OneChronos, the technology company leveraging advances in auction theory and computer science to optimize financial markets, today announced $32 million in expansion capital, as it bolsters its foothold in core business segments and grows into new markets. Addition led the financing.
OneChronos operates Smart Markets that optimizes for institutional measures of trade quality through sophisticated matching technology. Its first market, OneChronos ATS, the fastest-growing off-exchange U.S. equities trading venue, has facilitated an average of more than $4.5 billion in daily trading volume for the month of November. That success reflects OneChronos’ strong execution performance, including its ability to operate at the speed and scale the most demanding electronic capital markets require.
The fresh funding will accelerate OneChronos’ growth in existing markets and expansion into new ones, where current trading mechanisms leave significant value untapped. Building on its proven technology in equities, the company plans to launch new Smart Markets for other asset classes and geographies, while also exploring opportunities beyond traditional capital markets where its matching technology can drive new efficiencies.
8. Options Technology
Options Technology, a trailblazer in capital markets infrastructure, today announced the deployment of the industry’s first low latency tickerplant in Bergamo.
Options has deployed localized feed handlers at the Aruba IT3 facility in the Bergamo data center to consume, translate, and broadcast normalized AtlasFeed tick data with ultra-low latency for co-located clients. This deployment ensures seamless, high-speed access to multi-asset class market data, delivered through the Atlas suite. Powered by AtlasFabric, a high-performance, fully resilient network, this solution provides industry-leading speed and reliability for comprehensive market data access across asset classes.
Options is also provisioning access within its IT3 colocation facility and facilitating connections to this prominent fixed-income market for clients worldwide, utilizing the AtlasFabric network to achieve optimal low-latency performance.
9. PivotalEdge Capital
PivotalEdge Capital, an innovative asset management firm, is set to disrupt the financial industry with its unique, non-discretionary, AI trading algorithms. Pioneered by visionary founder and CEO Sid Ghatak, the firm is at the forefront of combining cutting-edge artificial intelligence with deep financial expertise to deliver superior accuracy.
Unlike traditional trading firms, PivotalEdge Capital employs a fully systematic, AI-driven approach to trading. This is a departure from discretionary funds that rely on human decisions and quantitative systematic funds that attempt to find patterns.
PivotalEdge codifies domain expertise directly into the AI algorithms and data to develop a fundamentally different approach to predicting prices—one that cannot be replicated by existing technology solutions. The firm’s non-discretionary trading infrastructure ensures that decisions are based on high-quality, data-backed models. These tiny models are a version of “small AI,” a method that allows for less data and energy consumption while simultaneously being more accurate and transparent.
10. Q2 Holdings
Q2 Holdings Inc., a leading provider of digital transformation solutions for financial services, today announced that it has executed a strategic reseller partnership with Larky. Larky offers consumer engagement technology, empowering financial institutions to proactively connect with their audience to drive meaningful results and engagement. This strategic partnership will enable financial institutions to communicate with account holders using uniquely tailored push notifications that seamlessly incorporate geolocation capabilities to ensure timely and relevant outreach.
Larky’s nudge® solution, which has been integrated into the Q2 Mobile Banking Platform, delivers turnkey deep-linked mobile push notifications, sending account holders directly to the corresponding location within their mobile banking app or to a website URL. Financial institutions can select popular campaigns from the nudge® library or create their own campaigns with the help of AI-powered nudge® Assist. The expanded partnership between Larky and Q2 will help deliver a stronger collaboration between all parties.
Larky allows for proactive communication by bringing account holders into the mobile banking experience without waiting for them to open the app. They also offer tailored engagement, location-based offerings, data-driven insights, scalable solutions, and support.
11. S&P Global
S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) announced today the launch of a new solution in open beta that enables customers to access several high-priority S&P Global datasets for generative AI (GenAI) use cases. Kensho LLM-ready API integrates seamlessly with large language models (LLMs) like GPT, Gemini, or Claude, allowing customers to use natural language to query S&P Global’s tabular datasets. The API will help engineering, product, and business teams across financial services save significant time and resources by making company information, financial statements, historic market data, and global securities data a question away.
Traditionally, incorporating complex financial data into GenAI applications requires financial institutions to conduct arduous, time-consuming, and expensive data preprocessing, integration, and monitoring. As a result, many firms do not have the resources to start or maintain this process, which means they have not been able to fully take advantage of GenAI for their use cases. With the Kensho LLM-ready API, S&P Global has done this work already, so customers can add S&P Global’s rich, tabular data seamlessly and reliably into their LLM-enabled applications. Business users, such as analysts and traders, can write their queries into their institution’s chosen LLM and receive a trusted, timely answer. The solution draws on S&P Global’s financial domain expertise, which includes a sophisticated knowledge of the needs, use cases, and shorthand preferred by financial professionals. To support traceability and give customer confidence in the accuracy of the response, the solution provides the function calls or generated code as an audit trail.
Asking natural language questions of complex structured data has historically been very difficult, due to high complexity of business and finance datasets, including a reliance on tabular data. As a result, without readily consumable data formats, financial institutions that want to harness GenAI are seeing delayed time to value. Kensho LLM-ready API, which has been used by a select group of customers in beta since April 2024, has already helped institutions speed up their GenAI adoption and workflows. The solution provides access to S&P Capital IQ Financials, Compustat® Financials, and Market Data, and partial access to Key Developments and GICRS, with plans to make additional datasets available throughout 2025.
12. Socure
Socure, the leading provider of artificial intelligence for digital identity verification, sanction screening, and fraud prevention today announced the launch of Graph Intelligence, an innovative addition to its Sigma Identity Fraud suite. This new module provides fraud, compliance, and data science teams exclusive access to unique, deterministic signals that reveal how identity attributes connect and evolve across Socure’s vast Network Identity Graph.
Graph Intelligence enables organizations to gain direct access to and visualize the intricate web of 1.5 billion personal identifiable information (PII) connections in Socure’s network of over 2,700 customers across industries including financial services, online gaming, marketplaces, healthcare, insurance, telecom and more. This breakthrough in transparency allows fraud, compliance, and data science teams to better understand, evaluate, and act on potential risks, particularly in cases of sophisticated fraud rings, as well as synthetic, first-party, and third-party fraud schemes. It enables customers to quickly refine decision logic, adjust thresholds, prioritize high-risk behaviors, and refine strategies to better align with an organization’s specific fraud landscape and adapt to emerging threats.
The power of Graph Intelligence lies in its comprehensive feature set and its expansive coverage of consumer interactions across thousands of organizations and industries that rely on Socure’s products. Available as both an API and an interactive visual experience, Graph Intelligence enables fraud teams to quickly spot patterns in PII connections that may indicate synthetic or compromised identities. Included advanced analytics tools support teams in identifying and adapting to emerging fraud patterns in real-time, and offer detailed insights to support model governance requirements and help explain risk decisions to stakeholders and regulators across a user base.
13. Upstart
Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, today announced that DR Bank, an FDIC-insured member bank, is using Upstart’s small-dollar loan product to support customers with short-term financial needs.
These small relief loans are available in amounts between $250-$2,500, for periods of time between three to 18 months—at or below 36% APR. The loans are fast, simple, and far more affordable than many higher-cost credit options traditionally available to consumers facing urgent financial challenges.
Banks and credit unions in recent years have increased their issuance of small-dollar loans, though economic and regulatory constraints have made it difficult to run these programs profitably and at scale. Upstart offers a product that helps lenders serve the millions of consumers in need of small-dollar loans.
14. Vespa.ai
Vespa.ai, a leading platform for AI-driven applications has been chosen by RavenPack, a global leader in financial data analytics, to power billion-scale vector search for their new service offering, Bigdata.com. The platform combines RavenPack’s proprietary RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) technology with Vespa.ai’s search capabilities to process billions of financial documents with unprecedented speed and accuracy.
Bigdata.com represents a major leap forward in financial research technology, offering professionals a powerful API and real-time research assistant that enables direct conversation with billions of financial documents. The platform’s sophisticated architecture allows users to perform custom research, automate complex tasks, and access real-time data through both desktop and mobile interfaces. Every response is supported by transparent source attribution, ensuring complete verifiability of information.
To support the immense scale of Bigdata.com, RavenPack selected Vespa.ai as its vector search and retrieval platform. Vespa’s sophisticated search technology, implemented with SPANN (Space Partition ANN), enables fast and efficient billion-scale searches by dividing data into smaller regions and locating approximate matches, providing both speed and accuracy critical to RavenPack’s expanding data operations.
