AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 3/21/25

Ascent Technologies Inc. today announced its strategic evolution to AscentAI, featuring its breakthrough Regulatory Lifecycle Management (RLM) Platform that empowers financial services firms to navigate the complex and dynamic world of regulatory compliance more quickly, efficiently, and confidently. 

The regulatory landscape continues to expand and evolve at an inhuman pace. AscentAI’s Regulatory Lifecycle Management (RLM) Platform enables customers to confidently and accurately manage their regulatory compliance operations, with purpose-built automation combined with global regulatory coverage and deep expertise. 

The rebrand to AscentAI underscores the company’s dedication to delivering innovative AI-powered solutions that meet the mission-critical needs of modern legal, risk, and compliance teams. By combining a purpose-built approach with advanced AI technology, AscentAI sets a new industry standard and empowers customers to confidently control their regulatory lifecycle. 

BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), a part of BlackRock, Microsoft, and MGX today announced that NVIDIA and xAI will join the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, now named the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), further strengthening the partnership’s technology leadership as the platform seeks to invest in new and expanded AI infrastructure. NVIDIA will also continue in its role as a technical advisor to AIP, leveraging its expertise in accelerated computing and AI factories to inform the deployment of next-generation AI data center infrastructure. 

Additionally, GE Vernova and NextEra Energy have agreed to collaborate with AIP to accelerate the scaling of critical and diverse energy solutions for AI data centers. GE Vernova will also work with AIP and its partners on supply chain planning and in delivering innovative and high efficiency energy solutions. 

AIP has attracted significant capital and partner interest since its inception in September 2024, highlighting the growing demand for AI-ready data centers and power solutions. The partnership will initially seek to unlock $30 billion in capital from investors, asset owners, and corporations, which in turn will mobilize up to $100 billion in total investment potential when including debt financing. 

Today, Block, Inc. (NYSE: XYZ) announced it will be the first company in North America to deploy the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX GB200 systems. Upon deployment at an Equinix data center, this new infrastructure will be used in the research and training of open source generative AI models with novel capabilities in underexplored areas. 

Block’s AI research has previously worked on deepfake detection, and attracted widespread attention for one of the first examples in the world of hyper-realistic generated audio. 

The Grace Blackwell-powered NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD is purpose-built for state-of-the-art generative AI models, bringing advanced capabilities for training and inference. These systems address key AI challenges, enabling larger and more advanced models to be trained, with faster innovation and greater capabilities for AI as a result. 

Bloxley, the innovative fintech and digital finance app, committed to making money management beautifully simple, has chosen Mbanq, a global leader in financial technology and embedded finance, to power its upcoming launch. With Mbanq’s advanced embedded banking platform and comprehensive compliance solutions, Bloxley is set to deliver financial services that combine style, convenience, and an unmatched user experience. 

Bloxley’s partnership with Mbanq ensures consumers will enjoy a seamless and secure financial ecosystem, to send money, manage expenses, and create customized experiences in ways that are effortless, personal and fun. The platform will offer a suite of features that go beyond the expected, to create an utterly user-centric financial experience that puts consumers first. 

Bloxley includes MoneyPenny AI, a large language model that acts as a financial concierge. It enables users to send payments, manage budgets, receive predictive financial insights, and access instant customer support through text or voice commands. 

C3 AI (NYSE: AI), the leading Enterprise AI application software company, today announced a strategic alliance with PwC, a global leader in professional services, to deploy AI-powered business transformation at enterprise-scale across critical industries. 

The alliance combines C3 AI’s industry-leading Enterprise AI application software solutions with PwC’s deep domain expertise and advisory services in change management and organizational transformation. 

Together, the alliance will accelerate enterprise-scale business transformation efforts across industries with rapid time-to-value. With an initial focus on joint customers in banking and financial services, industrial manufacturing and utilities, the strategic alliance will deliver industry-specific solutions to joint customers. 

Capco, the global management and technology consultancy, today announced a collaboration with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT and frontier AI models such as GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, OpenAI o1 and o3 mini, to accelerate AI’s transformative impact at the world’s top financial institutions. 

This collaboration combines OpenAI’s cutting-edge innovations with Capco’s financial services domain and GenAI expertise to deliver powerful solutions that help clients achieve transformative results. 

As part of its GenAI Infused strategy, Capco is leading by example in the adoption and application of GenAI tools and solutions across the financial services industry. Through this collaboration with OpenAI, Capco is further scaling the adoption of ChatGPT across its workforce and pioneering these GenAI tools to accelerate client delivery and execution at scale in real world use cases that are making a difference for our clients. 

DataStax, a leading AI platform that helps enterprises and developers build accurate AI applications at scale, today announced that Bud Financial is leveraging the DataStax AI Platform, built with NVIDIA AI, including NVIDIA NeMo Retriever, NVIDIA NIM microservices, and NVIDIA AI Enterprise, to enhance customer experiences for organizations such as ANZ while increasing speed 10x. 

DataStax and NVIDIA AI drive both internal and external efficiency, reduce costs, and improve accuracy across Bud’s financial data services. By integrating NVIDIA Triton Inference Server and DCGM Exporter, Bud Financial has supercharged its real-time financial data classification and enrichment service, significantly lowering latency and costs compared to CPU-based solutions. 

Additionally, Bud Financial plans to incorporate NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails, NVIDIA NeMo Retriever reranking, and NeMo Evaluator microservices into its Drive Copilot, a conversational interface for Bud’s no-code transactional data analysis and customer segmentation tool. This enhancement will enable Bud’s customers to instantly understand their account holders, build high-impact segments, track campaign performance, accelerate research, manage risk, and more—with greater accuracy and reliability. 

Delfi, a machine-learning risk management platform for financial institutions, announced the launch of Delfi Essentials, a new free service designed to give all U.S. financial institutions easily accessible balance sheet and risk management decision-making technology historically available only to the largest banks. 

Delfi Essentials delivers value through enabling rapid decision-making for balance sheet composition and management. Essentials’ speed and no-cost of entry provides a riskless engagement point with banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions. With accurate input from users, Delfi Essentials also offers compliance, equivalent to well-known industry-leading products, satisfying bankers’ sensitivity reporting requirement needs. As a free service, Delfi Essentials puts cutting-edge technology in the hands of financial institutions large or small. 

Delfi Essentials provides the greatest possible value from its leading risk decision-making analytics and management through a simple three-step process which can be finished within a single afternoon. First, Delfi Essentials gives banks standardized assessments of their overall balance sheet health from data in a matter of two to five minutes, as opposed to the days it often takes. Secondly, Delfi Essentials allows users to build custom scenarios beyond the typical interest rate shock projections as simply as drawing a sketch on a graph. Delfi Essentials easily encompass possibilities like recessions or rate hikes to give banks and credit unions a more comprehensive and intuitive look at their situation. Finally, Delfi Essentials presents all results through an accessible and easy-to-use dashboard, allowing users to easily share results or generate PDF reports. 

The EY organization announced today its artificial intelligence (AI) EY.ai Agentic Platform, created in collaboration with NVIDIA. Built on the full NVIDIA AI stack – including NVIDIA AI Enterprise and the new NVIDIA AI-Q Blueprint, AI-Q – the groundbreaking platform will integrate private, domain-specific NVIDIA AI reasoning models with human knowledge to enhance operational excellence through the productivity of AI agents. Deployment will start with core business areas and will continue expansion into sector-specific enterprise AI agent solutions across life sciences, manufacturing, financial services and more. 

The EY organization, which provides professional services to 82% of the Fortune 100, will leverage the EY.ai Agentic Platform to apply more than 100 years of deep experience and curated data sets. By adopting NVIDIA AI and NVIDIA reasoning models, EY will provide seamless AI agent solutions to its clients, ensuring a consistent and efficient deployment model that can respond to real-time events, adapt to regulatory changes and drive smarter financial and risk decisions across global operations. 

This expansion builds upon earlier EY and NVIDIA collaborations, including the recently announced agentic solutions for telecommunication providers. Through the AI-powered solution, EY.ai telecom agents are refactoring contract reviews and will rapidly expand to other sectors and domains.  

FINNY AI Inc. (“FINNY”), the AI-powered prospecting and marketing platform built specifically for financial advisors, today announced that “Downtown” Josh Brown, chief executive officer (CEO) of Ritholtz Wealth Management, has personally invested in the company and joined its advisory board. In this capacity, Brown will provide insights that help steer FINNY’s product roadmap, supporting continuous improvements to meet the evolving prospecting and marketing needs of financial advisors. 

Brown joins an advisory board that includes industry heavyweights such as Arun Anur, chief operating officer at wealthtech juggernaut Orion. Known for his unfiltered, straight-talking approach to financial advice and industry trends, Brown has built one of the most recognizable personal brands in wealth management, leveraging his TV appearances, podcasts, books and digital platforms to connect with advisors and investors alike. His insights will be instrumental in guiding FINNY’s continued innovation, cementing the platform’s position as the go-to solution for organic advisor growth. 

This latest announcement comes on the heels of FINNY’s recently announced $4.3 million seed round, co-led by Maple VC and HNVR, with participation from investors such as Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor and Deel COO Dan Westgarth. The funding has fueled further product innovation and adoption, reinforcing FINNY’s position as one of the fastest-growing AI-driven platforms in wealth management. By automating and optimizing the entire prospecting process, FINNY enables advisors to identify high-intent leads based on thousands of data points, including liquidity events, career changes and other money-in-motion signals. Its proprietary “F-Score” matching engine helps ensure that advisors only engage with the most relevant prospects, drastically improving conversion rates. The platform recently rolled out Personalized Feeds and Campaigns, two major innovations that redefine outbound engagement: 

FlexTecs, a leader in recovery audit, contract compliance and payment accuracy solutions announces the expansion of FlexTrap, an AI and machine learning software solution designed to detect, prevent and reconcile payment discrepancies. Initially introduced with a focus on payment error prevention, FlexTrap has now evolved into a fully extensible platform, introducing supplier statement reconciliation to further reduce financial leakage and improve financial operations. 

FlexTrap is already making an impact on the market, with global enterprises across industries leveraging the solution to strengthen their financial operations. The platform’s new statement reconciliation feature enables organizations to automate transaction validation with suppliers, saving time and driving efficiency. 

With the launch of a revamped website and updated FlexTrap platform, FlexTecs continues its mission to deliver innovative solutions that minimize financial leakage and improve financial efficiency and accuracy for enterprises worldwide. 

Fractional AI, which builds bespoke generative AI solutions to transform businesses, today announced the launch of its generative artificial intelligence diligence service, a specialized offering designed to help private equity firms and enterprises evaluate generative AI risks, opportunities, and strategic impact during M&A transactions. 

The launch of generative AI diligence is a natural evolution of Fractional AI’s expertise, providing investors with the technical and strategic insights needed to evaluate generative AI’s impact on business performance. With a strong track record of building applied generative AI solutions for enterprises, Fractional AI has helped companies unlock efficiencies through automation and launch new revenue streams with generative AI products. As generative AI continues to transform industries, investors must evaluate how it influences a target company’s value, competitive edge, and long-term sustainability. 

Generative AI diligence is a structured, expert-led approach for private equity firms and corporate development teams evaluating generative AI within their deal processes – whether assessing a company’s existing capabilities, uncovering opportunities for generative AI-driven value creation, or determining the risk that generative AI poses to a business’s competitive moat. Traditional IT due diligence typically centers around infrastructure, security, and software architecture, but misses critical generative AI-specific considerations that can lead to overlooked opportunities and hidden risks. With generative AI now a key driver of both cost efficiencies and revenue growth, generative AI diligence gives investors a clearer understanding of how generative AI impacts a business, helping them make more informed, forward-looking investment decisions in an increasingly generative AI-powered economy. 

Frankenmuth Insurance (Frankenmuth), a super-regional property and casualty (P&C) insurer, and Guidewire (NYSE: GWRE) announced that Frankenmuth selected Guidewire InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud to power its core systems and simplify its IT operations. A Guidewire customer since 2014, the company will migrate InsuranceSuite from an on-premises environment to Guidewire Cloud simultaneously for all of its lines of business and states where it operates. Guidewire PartnerConnect Consulting Global Strategic member PwC has been selected to lead the migration project. 

Fraud has challenged businesses for decades, costing billions each year, but it no longer has to be an unavoidable cost. Instnt’s first-of-its-kind solution combines insurance-backed protection and AI-led verification to provide a path to recovery, growth, and lasting resilience. Backed by global AM Best A-rated insurers, including Accredited, Howden and others, Instnt’s Fraud Loss Insurance empowers businesses to reduce fraud exposure, approve legitimate customers confidently, and recover quickly when losses occur. 

Fraud cost businesses a staggering $485.6 billion globally in 2023 (Nasdaq, 2024). Underwriting fraud loss risk has been a persistent challenge due to the complexity of fraud, variability of losses, layered strategies, and fragmented tools businesses rely on to manage inevitable risks. Fraud Loss Insurance transforms this landscape by allowing businesses to transfer fraud risk to trusted insurers while leveraging AI-driven risk assessment to mitigate financial exposure. 

Fraud Loss Insurance delivers unmatched value by integrating AI technology and insurance-backed recovery into a single solution. Fraud Loss Insurance addresses a long-standing gap in the market by offering a comprehensive solution tailored to the digital economy. Traditional models struggle with the complexity of fraud risk, forcing businesses to juggle siloed verification tools and limited insurance coverage. Instnt’s innovative approach unifies these capabilities, providing organizations with a holistic solution. 

As part of a broader AI strategy to drive efficiency and innovation for wealth advisors, Dynamic Advisor Solutions dba Dynamic Wealth Advisors (Dynamic) has partnered with Jump, a leading provider of AI solutions for financial advisors and other financial services providers, to enhance its Wealth360™ platform. This integration alleviates cumbersome administrative tasks —such as meeting preparation, note-taking, compliance documentation, CRM updates and client follow-ups — allowing advisors to dedicate more time to their clients and business growth. 

Wealth360 is Dynamic’s fully integrated tech stack, providing advisors with a premier platform featuring a best-in-class fintech suite accessible via a single sign-on. With the addition of Jump, advisors can leverage AI-driven efficiency to enhance productivity, ensure compliance and elevate client engagement. 

Jump became available to Dynamic advisors on the Wealth360 platform in January, following beta testing with network-affiliated advisors in Q4 2024. Marina Hernandez, CFP®, EA, of Dynamic Wealth Advisors dba Swiss American Wealth Advisors in Merion Station, Penn., worked closely with the Dynamic IT Support team as a Jump beta tester to provide feedback and further customize the tool. 

OneVest, a leader in wealth management technology, is proud to announce the launch of ‘Next Best Action’, the first feature in its AI-Enhanced Suite—bringing transformative, AI-powered intelligence to wealth management technology. 

This innovative feature is designed to elevate client engagement and streamline advisory workflows. Leveraging advanced AI, OneVest’s ‘Next Best Action’ analyzes comprehensive client data to deliver intelligent, real-time recommendations—helping advisors create more timely and personalized interactions. 

In today’s fast-evolving landscape, advisors face increasing demands to provide tailored insights while managing complex portfolios. The ‘Next Best Action’ addresses this challenge by offering timely and data-driven recommendations that help advisors anticipate client needs, optimize decision-making, and strengthen relationships. Whether it’s identifying opportunities to refine financial planning strategies, streamlining compliance updates, or enhancing client communication, this new feature transforms how advisors interact with their clients every day. 

Options Technology (Options), the leading global provider of cloud-enabled managed services for the financial sector, today announced a strategic partnership with Data Intellect, a specialist in advanced data analytics and software development. This collaboration will combine Data Intellect’s deep expertise in data science, software engineering, and bespoke technology solutions with Options’ world-class infrastructure, cloud services, and market data solutions, delivering enhanced capabilities for clients across capital markets and financial services. 

Through this partnership, clients will gain access to Options’ high-performance private cloud platform, offering a secure, scalable environment for mission-critical applications, AI/ML workloads, and advanced analytics. By integrating Data Intellect’s cutting-edge analytics tools with Options’ global technology ecosystem, the two firms will empower financial institutions and technology-driven organizations to accelerate digital transformation, enhance operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge in the market. 

A key pillar of the collaboration is the synergy between Data Intellect’s data analytics expertise and Options’ market data solutions. Through Options’ industry-leading market data offering, Data Intellect can enhance its analytics capabilities with low-latency, real-time financial data, ensuring clients can rapidly process large-scale streaming information, derive actionable insights, and tailor data ingestion to meet evolving regulatory and business demands. 

R1, an industry leader in revenue cycle management (“RCM”) with over 20 years of experience, and Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR), a leader in artificial intelligence systems, have partnered to launch R37, an advanced AI lab dedicated to revolutionizing healthcare financial performance. By combining R1’s deep category expertise in payer-provider dynamics and proprietary technology capabilities with Palantir’s cutting-edge AI tools, the lab will develop intelligent automation solutions to address the most pressing challenges in healthcare reimbursement at an impressive speed and scale. 

Administrative costs now account for more than 40% of U.S. hospital expenses, with over $160 billion spent annually on RCM. As providers face escalating economic pressures and complex payer relationships, AI-native solutions have become a necessity. R37 will drive comprehensive automation in revenue cycle operations, reengineering labor-intensive processes such as coding, billing, and denials management to significantly improve efficiency, accuracy, and cash flow for healthcare organizations. 

R1’s extensive reach—serving 94 of the top 100 U.S. health systems—uniquely positions it to transform RCM. R1 has been supporting automated revenue cycle workflows at scale across the largest repository of proprietary RCM structured and unstructured data. The repository includes: 180 million+ annual payer transactions, 550 million annual patient encounters, 20,000 proprietary payment algorithms, and 1.2 billion annual workflow actions. By integrating Palantir’s AI tools and capabilities with R1’s existing technology and domain expertise, R37 can unlock faster, more precise scalable reimbursement outcomes. 

RFG Advisory (“RFG”), an innovator in the wealth management industry committed to serving independent financial Advisors and their clients, today announced several strategic partnerships and enhancements to its integrated technology stack. These additions support the firm’s mission to empower Independent Advisors to build their business without compromise. 

During its annual Advisor Growth Retreat, RFG announced multiple new tech enhancements to its existing modern platform. One new enhancement is a strategic partnership with industry-leading estate planning platform wealth.com, further strengthening its comprehensive suite of tools designed to support growth-focused Advisors with a cutting-edge estate planning solution. This integration reinforces RFG’s commitment to providing Independent Advisors with tools that streamline workflows and enhance client engagement. End clients benefit from an intuitive, secure solution for creating, updating and storing estate plans. 

RFG Advisors also benefit from a new partnership with Zocks, a privacy-first, client intelligence platform specifically designed for financial services clients. This AI-powered tool assists with automated meeting preparation, note-taking, and follow-ups while directly integrating them into Salesforce; removing the need to manually enter tasks and subsequent workflows or follow-up items. 

For decades, SEC filings research has been an expensive, time-consuming nightmare. Professionals have been forced to choose between EDGAR’s clunky interface and overpriced, complex third-party tools that demand enterprise contracts. That ends today. 

Talk to EDGAR, the latest AI-powered research platform from Versance.ai, is here to eliminate the cost, complexity, and frustration of SEC research. 

With instant answers, AI-driven document comparisons, and multi-user collaboration, Talk to EDGAR delivers everything analysts, investors, and corporate professionals need to research SEC filings faster, easier, and without paying tens of thousands for access. 

The cryptocurrency market continues to evolve at lightning speed, and Vantagepoint A.I. remains at the forefront of market forecasting. As the first company in the world to bring the power of artificial intelligence to independent traders’ home computers in 1991, Vantagepoint A.I. has also been strategically training its neural networks to recognize patterns and market correlations in cryptocurrencies long before they became mainstream financial assets. 

VantagePoint’s renowned predictive forecasting technology now includes ten additional cryptocurrencies: Avalanche (AVAX), Binance (BNB), Cosmos\Cronos (CRO), Filecoin (FIL), Internet Computer (ICP), Leo (LEO), Near Protocol (NEAR), OKB (OKB), Shiba Inu (SHIB), and Tron (TRX). These join the software’s existing lineup of major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), in addition to 48 cryptocurrency cross pairs. 

The VantagePoint software predictive forecasts provide crucial technical analysis in the notoriously volatile cryptocurrency market. VantagePoint helps more than 47,000 traders across 160 countries make more informed decisions with greater confidence.