It’s a holiday week AI & Finance and we still have plenty of news to cover, so we’re scrapping tentative plans to revisit some of our old AI Education topics to make sure we’re on top of the news that you need to know about the rise of artificial intelligence in the financial services sector.
Typically, when editors set out to write these holiday week columns—particularly during Thanksgiving week—they gravitate towards a few familiar topics: helping the less fortunate. What they’re thankful for. American football. Eating too much and awkward family gatherings.
I’m sure this week you’re as full from those less-than-original articles are you are from turkey, dressing and pie, but I’ll go ahead and cop to at least thinking about writing a thankfulness/gratitude piece. On a personal note, thankfulness and gratitude are emotional and cognitive ideas I’ve been gravitating towards over the past few years as I am among those convinced that there’s a direct link between being grateful and thankful and being happy, and, despite a constant stream of setbacks in my life, I feel immensely lucky and grateful to be who I am, where I am, doing what I do.
Are you in the AI/ML sector touching on finserv and interested in getting your brand in front of the readers of this column? Contact DWN publisher Cindy Taylor for details!
But I hit a bit of a roadblock trying to relate the topic to artificial intelligence, and especially AI in finance. What, specifically, do we have to be thankful for in AI this year? That AI didn’t negatively impact our elections? That AI hasn’t made all of us knowledge workers unemployed—yet? Not exactly great material for a column.
So, I’m going to dip into a familiar well. The big wealthtech news I wrote about this week for Digital Wealth News was the acquisition of RIA custodian and tech firm TradePMR by Robinhood, which rose to prominence operating a commission-free, DIY trading application. In Advisor Tech Talk, I discussed possible synergies between Robinhood’s younger, tech-savvy, DIY users who are accumulating wealth, and TradePMR’s RIA clients.
What is Robinhood thinking? Do they really want a b2b play where they funnel their best clients towards RIAs? And do Robinhood clients, many of whom shun traditional finance in the name of being do-it-yourselfers, really want to be fed into an RIA referral network? Why not try to develop some sort of DIY wealth management service, using their investment technology and artificial intelligence?
It’s hard to imagine that a fintech as big as Robinhood, with designs on the wealth management space, and its dedication to serving do-it-yourselfers, hasn’t at least conceived of some sort of autonomous AI wealth manager for its clients. Maybe the technology isn’t quite ready for such an application—which is hard to imagine given the advances from AI-oriented fintechs (see the below item from Range for a good example), we’re almost to the point where personalized, full-service wealth management will no longer require any human intervention.
Robinhood’s users almost certainly are ready for the advent of such a service—and since they’re accustomed to paying nothing to trade stocks and ETFs, most of them will look for wealth management at the lowest possible price point—an AI-oriented, autonomous service offering wealth management for pennies will outcompete advisors charging AUM fees every time with this cohort, and should also easily outcompete monthly or annual retainers or hourly rates that some advisors have adopted in recent years. Whatever human advisors are doing to make their services more accessible and affordable to next-generation clients cannot possibly be enough to keep up.
After this deal, however, and from a traditional wealth management perspective, it’s hard to see Robinhood itself proceeding with a tech-oriented, DIY wealth management offering.
Companies like Schwab, BNY Mellon Pershing and Fidelity have already dealt with controversies over the way their technology offerings and direct discount brokerage services for do-it-yourself investors end up competing with RIA custody clients. Maybe Robinhood is willing to risk some of its coming relationships with TradePMR-affiliated RIAs to push more DIY services to investors. Or maybe this is a sign that Robinhood is pivoting from its roots serving self-directed investors towards becoming more of a traditional financial services firm.
In the coming months and years, it will be interesting to find out this new combination evolves.
Let’s get to some AI & Finance headlines.
1. Babel Street
Babel Street, a leader in advanced AI, data, and analytics for global information intelligence, and IMTF, a leading global provider of anti-financial crime compliance solutions, have announced a strategic partnership to introduce enhanced multi-lingual name screening capabilities within IMTF’s Siron®One platform. This collaboration addresses the growing demand for accurate, efficient name matching across diverse languages and scripts, helping financial institutions and businesses meet increasingly complex international Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations.
As financial institutions increasingly leverage global digital channels, precise identity verification is essential for regulatory compliance and financial crime prevention. Babel Street Match technology, combined with the Siron®One end-to-end compliance platform, enables precise, efficient, and explainable name matching across over 24 languages and scripts, including regions like the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. This comprehensive solution strengthens verification processes, provides transparency, reduces false positives, and streamlines workflows, empowering institutions to better detect and prevent financial crime while ensuring compliance with international regulations.
The partnership comes at a critical time as financial institutions face mounting pressures to strengthen their compliance practices and demonstrate the efficacy of their regulatory adherence. With rising regulatory expectations, institutions must balance rigorous oversight with operational efficiency – a balance this partnership is designed to deliver.
2. Boosted.ai
Boosted.ai, a cutting edge generative artificial intelligence company that works with some of the world’s leading investment managers to streamline and automate their financial analysis and workflows today announced the closing of a $15 million financing round.
The financing included certain fund(s) managed by Fidelity Investments Canada ULC and all of Boosted.ai’s existing institutional shareholders. The certain fund(s) managed by Fidelity Investments Canada ULC will join existing partners Ten Coves Capital, Spark Capital, Portage Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and HarbourVest Partners in the round. Many of Boosted.ai’s investors are active and enthusiastic users of Alfa. Inclusive of seed capital, Boosted.ai’s total funding now stands at $61 million.
The investment is focused on the growth of Boosted.ai’s agentic AI platform – Alfa. Agentic AI is essentially an AI coworker that users can train to think like them and consistently monitor and update for anything that matters to their portfolios. By using Boosted.ai and its agentic assistant Alfa, users across the finance spectrum, including asset managers, wealth managers, family offices and hedge funds, can automate their workflows reducing what typically takes 40 hours of analyst work to approximately 20 minutes. Capital will also be used to invest in additional systems and team members to handle increased product demand and the need for onboarding and training new users.
3. Broadridge
LTX, an AI-powered fixed income trading platform backed by global Fintech leader, Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc. (NYSE:BR), today announced its strategic partnership with TransFICC, a leading provider of e-trading technology for fixed income markets. This collaboration enables dealers to more quickly and efficiently onboard and connect to LTX, via TransFICC’s One API for eTrading platform.
Venue onboarding can be a complex and time-consuming task exacerbated by limited technical resources for the fixed income sector. TransFICC’s high-performance and reliable technology tackles the challenges of fragmentation, complex workflows, data throughput, and regulation associated with fixed income trading. Corporate bond dealers specializing in U.S. Investment Grade, High Yield, and Emerging Market credit products can leverage TransFICC’s One API for eTrading solution for direct integration with LTX, simplifying workflows, reducing complexities, and enabling faster access to LTX’s AI-powered corporate bond e-trading platform.
This integration is designed to assist dealers and other market participants in more quickly onboarding to LTX, joining the 40+ dealers and 90+ asset managers already on the platform. By simplifying connectivity and improving integration efficiency, TransFICC’s technology allows market participants to seamlessly join LTX’s ecosystem of liquidity providers.
4. Communify Fincentric
Communify Fincentric, the leader in unifying market and client data through best-in-class digital experiences, today announces the appointment of Jennie Wang as Chief Client Solutions Officer, effective immediately.
Wang, a seasoned technology and product leader, brings a wealth of experience in delivering complex data solutions and transforming them into scalable products. Most recently, she served as Chief Experience Officer at InvestCloud, where she led key initiatives in product delivery, client engagement, and operational transformation. At InvestCloud, Wang played a critical role in scaling the platform to manage over $6 trillion in assets, driving personalized client experiences and enabling large-scale implementations for wealth managers. Prior to that, she managed the end-to-end development of data-intensive financial products tailored to meet the demands of top-tier fund administrators.
At Communify Fincentric, Wang will focus on streamlining the delivery of next-generation client portals, advisor portals, and market portals with integrated market and client data. Her role will also include building a delivery hub in St. Petersburg, Florida, which will serve as a cornerstone for Communify’s client solution offsites and a hub for innovative product execution.
5. Deloitte Digital
Deloitte Digital today launched Agentforce accelerators, developed in collaboration with Salesforce and Anthropic, to help enterprises in highly regulated industries, including wealth management, retail banking, life sciences and healthcare, meet compliance needs for the deployment of Generative AI (GenAI).
The creation of Agentforce accelerators is a major milestone in deploying GenAI into highly regulated industries. These solutions are powered by Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, Anthropic’s leading Large Language Model (LLM) and Amazon Bedrock’s fully-managed service that allows customers to build and scale GenAI applications in a secure environment. Agentforce enables the development of powerful autonomous agents that can be customized for industry-specific use cases, while Amazon Bedrock allows customers in highly regulated industries to deploy Agentforce using cutting-edge Anthropic LLMs in a secure and compliant Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Deloitte is applying its insight into industry-specific use cases to combine these capabilities with its Trustworthy AI™ for CRM framework designed to meet each sector’s unique requirements. Deloitte Digital’s wealth management accelerator is a key example of its efforts to integrate Agentforce accelerators as part of its $2 billion IndustryAdvantage™ initiative, aimed at co-innovating with clients and alliances to scale industry-focused tech at speed.
A global wealth management firm is using Agentforce accelerators to supercharge client success while keeping tight control over data access, usage and storage.
6. EY
The EY organization announces today the appointment of Joe Depa as the new EY Global Chief Innovation Officer, effective immediately. Within this role, he will spearhead applied innovation to help improve service delivery and guide EY teams to address and solve business challenges.
Depa joins the EY organization at a pivotal moment, as a range of emerging technologies are reshaping businesses and industries, creating a multitude of new challenges and opportunities. To keep pace, the EY organization is continuing to make significant investments in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and blockchain, and most recently formed the EY.ai Global AI Advisory Council.
In his new role, Depa will be leading the organization’s global innovation strategy. This will include overseeing efforts to successfully implement emerging technologies for tangible business applications, both internally and across work of EY member firms with clients.
7. Fourcore Capital
Fourcore Capital (“Fourcore” or the “Company”), an emerging leader in AI-powered, global asset and wealth management, today announced that it has acquired the ownership interest of Global Blockchain Sponsor, LLC (“Global Blockchain”) in Global Blockchain Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: GBBK). Through this transaction, Fourcore becomes the sponsor of the publicly listed investment vehicle. The leadership team and Board of GBBK will remain intact, and Allen “Al” Weiss will be appointed to the Fourcore Board of Directors as a part of this transaction. Additionally, Fourcore has appointed Robert “Rob” Sargent, Fourcore’s Vice Chairman, to Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”) of the Company’s wealth management business.
Fourcore received $44 million of sponsor equity in GBBK through this transaction. Total consideration for this position was transferred to Global Blockchain in Fourcore Promissory Notes. These notes were offered through the Company’s previously announced private markets capital raise.
This sponsor equity represents an anchor investment in Fourcore’s latest fundraising round, bringing the total capital committed to $69 million.
8. Luminary AI
Advisors often face the challenge of navigating vast amounts of complex and fragmented information when seeking to understand and analyze a clients’ estate structure. The disparate nature of information not only slows down the planning process, but also increases the risk of human error, misinterpretation, and the formation of data silos, making it difficult to gain a cohesive and comprehensive view of the client’s estate. Traditional methods of managing multiple excel and powerpoint files make it challenging to analyze and visualize data efficiently, hampering an advisor’s ability to provide timely insights and customized recommendations.
With Luminary’s new AI onboarding, advisors can instantly transform disconnected information into cohesive digital records, ready for analysis. Luminary has developed a proprietary AI solution with specialized expertise in understanding and analyzing Trust & Estate documents. Designed to process multiple complex documents simultaneously – from Trusts and Wills to Operating Agreements and Tax Returns – Luminary AI extracts and organizes active and testamentary entities, individuals, and organizations, within Luminary as a digital source of truth.
This structured data can then be harnessed within Luminary’s visualization and analysis tools, including mapping estate waterfalls and conducting hypothetical ‘what-if’ analysis on current estate plans, to create personalized client deliverables in minutes. This streamlined approach significantly reduces administrative time, and enables advisors to focus on higher-value tasks, such as strategic planning and client relationship management.
9. NICE
NICE Actimize, a NICE (NASDAQ: NICE) business, today announced that TF Bank, Sweden, has chosen NICE Actimize AML Essentials, a cloud-based offering of end-to-end anti-money laundering (AML) solutions, to elevate the digital bank’s financial crime prevention program. The AI-driven AML solutions include Transaction Monitoring, Customer Due Diligence, and Screening. TF Bank is a digital bank offering consumer banking services and e-commerce solutions through a proprietary IT platform with a high degree of automation.
NICE Actimize’s AML Essentials offers rapid deployment and reduces overhead to support compliance at a lower total cost of ownership. Citing several objectives for its financial crime prevention and anti-money laundering program, TF Bank noted that it was seeking to effectively address global regulations and bring efficiencies to its digital banking initiatives. NICE Actimize solutions were also chosen to accelerate the automation of manual work.
NICE Actimize’s entity-centric approach effectively monitors money laundering risks across the customer lifecycle. The Transaction Monitoring functionality optimizes monitoring and detection to improve effectiveness and route high-risk alerts to the right team at the right time. Suspicious Activity Monitoring (SAM) provides AML-tailored analytics for flexible and comprehensive coverage of money laundering red flags.
10. Range
Range, the all-in-one AI WealthTech platform, raised $28 million in Series B funding, led by Cathay Innovation and joined by Gradient Ventures and other investors. This round brings the company’s total funding to $40 million.
Traditional financial advisors have offered the same types of wealth management services to consumers for decades. Range is overhauling the sector with a new AI engine they created named: Rai. As a result, they are able to provide superior advice 10-20x faster and save their members 75-90 percent more in fees than traditional wealth advisors.
In less than two years, Range attracted more than 1,000 high-net-worth members and now advises them on nearly $3 billion in assets. The new capital will fuel Range’s ambitious expansion plans, accelerating product development and scaling its engineering teams to enhance its AI-powered platform. This investment comes at a time when Range is seeing unprecedented demand for its comprehensive wealth management solutions, which seamlessly integrate investment services, tax planning, estate planning, retirement planning, and insurance needs.
11. Red Matter Capital
Red Matter Capital (RMC), a leading technology innovator specializing in artificial intelligence solutions, is excited to announce the launch of its cutting-edge AI tailored for financial advisors, investors, and asset managers. OpenAI Finance is designed to revolutionize financial decision-making, by providing real-time insights, personalized investment strategies, and enhanced operational efficiency.
In today’s rapidly evolving financial landscape, the integration of AI is becoming indispensable. Recognizing this, RMC developed a specialized language model that leverages advanced machine learning algorithms, an artificial neural network and vast datasets to empower financial professionals with tools that enhance outcomes and streamline operations.
The development of OpenAI for Finance aligns with industry trends where major financial institutions are looking to adopt and integrate AI into their services. RMC’s white-label platform allows institutions to customize and scale the technology to meet specific needs, ensuring seamless adaptation and growth.
12. TIFIN
TIFIN Give, the modern philanthropic planning platform, today announced the launch of a new feature designed to enhance donor-advised funds (DAFs) for wealth enterprises, including RIAs, broker-dealers, and wirehouses.
This novel feature allows donors to create personalized public campaigns to encourage friends, families, and communities to join them in supporting causes they care about. This capability transforms individual giving into a collaborative effort, enabling donors to amplify their philanthropic influence while engaging their networks in meaningful contributions.
This community giving feature has already been deployed with clients of TIFIN Give and has been widely adopted by financial advisors and their clients across the wealth management industry. The release builds upon existing multi-generational capabilities, which allows donors to bring their family into the giving experience, compare giving history, and cultivate a legacy of generosity.
13. TIFIN
Alera Group, a leading independent national insurance and financial services firm, announced today the selection and deployment of the TIFIN @Work AI-powered workplace benefits and wealth management platform. Alera Group’s Retirement Plan Services practice has integrated TIFIN @Work with its FinWell Connect financial wellness program. Together, these platforms offer comprehensive financial support to employees and create growth opportunities for advisors.
The Alera Group-TIFIN partnership underscores TIFIN @Work’s role in addressing evolving retirement plan needs while fueling advisor growth. Insights from Franklin Templeton’s Voice of the Field Survey confirmed the rising demand for actionable, workplace-based financial solutions, positioning TIFIN @Work as an optimal bridge between retirement benefits and wealth management.
Through TIFIN @Work’s AI-driven platform, Alera Group’s retirement plan participants will receive personalized, tailored guidance, seamlessly connecting them with financial experts. The platform dynamically serves up the appropriate Alera Group solution—across insurance, benefits, or wealth management—at the moment participants need it.
