AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 12/12/25

ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), an original innovator in global payments technology, today announced that LLP Exotic Auto Finance (LLP), a leading automotive leasing company specializing in top-of-the-line luxury and exotic cars, has partnered with ACI Speedpay to drive strategic business growth, increase operational efficiencies and deliver exceptional customer experiences through its modern, intuitive and flexible payment solutions. Through this implementation, LLP aims to streamline payment reconciliation, freeing up resources to deliver a truly tailored luxury experience while easing compliance burdens, such as PCI and NACHA requirements, and ensuring adherence to industry standards. 

Founded in 2016, LLP offers an alternative to traditional financing for high-line and exotic vehicles, partnering with over 300 dealers nationwide that specialize in brands such as Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Rolls-Royce. Prior to implementing ACI Speedpay, LLP relied on disparate systems to manage payments from its customers, resulting in manual reconciliations that created operational bottlenecks. With plans to rapidly increase new customer acquisitions over the next two years, LLP required a system that could scale seamlessly to support its accelerated trajectory. LLP aims to not only reduce variation in internal processes, but offer its customers online and mobile payment experiences that exceed expectations. In under 90 days, LLP went live with the ACI Speedpay bill payment platform, demonstrating the power of partnership, precision, and speed in execution. 

ACI Speedpay is a leader in enabling payments for billers, helping them maximize growth, operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction through a modern, scalable, highly efficient payment platform backed by three tiers of resiliency and 50 years of expertise serving more than 3,000 biller customers. Digital payments and mobile wallet solutions are essential to unlocking growth and driving operational efficiencies across organizations like LLP Exotic Auto Finance.  

Airwallex, a leading global financial platform for modern businesses, raised $330 million in a Series G funding round, led by Addition and with participation from T. Rowe Price, Activant, Lingotto, Robinhood Ventures and TIAA Ventures. The financing values Airwallex at $8 billion, a ~30% increase since its Series F six months ago. The investment will fuel Airwallex’s continued growth in the U.S. and key markets worldwide, while driving expanded AI hiring and product development. Underscoring its strong momentum and deep commitment to the U.S. market, Airwallex has established a second global headquarters in San Francisco and will deploy more than $1 billion from 2026-2029 to scale its U.S. operations, attract top talent, and expand its physical and brand footprint. 

In conjunction with the fundraise, Airwallex also announced a second global headquarters in San Francisco to position core product, engineering, strategic partnerships and go-to-market teams at the epicenter of global AI innovation and talent. 

The U.S. market is a key focus within Airwallex’s global strategy – the company plans to double its U.S. headcount to more than 400 employees over the next 12 months and is doubling its San Francisco office space to support this growth. 

Conquest Planning Inc. (“Conquest”), a technology platform modernizing financial planning with customized and convenient advice, today implemented its CEO succession plan, naming Chief Revenue Officer Brad Joudrie as CEO, while founding CEO Dr. Mark Evans transitions to an executive chair position. Effective January 1, 2026, Joudrie will become CEO and join the company’s board of directors, with Evans continuing to serve as a board member focused on strategic product vision. 

Since joining Conquest as Chief Revenue Officer in 2019, when the company was pre-revenue, Joudrie has been instrumental in driving its rapid expansion across geographies. Conquest now serves over 60% of the Canadian financial advisor market and has established a growing presence in the U.S. and U.K. The platform supports more than 60,000 advisors across over 1,000 financial institutions—including BMO, BNY Pershing, Manulife, Raymond James and RBC—and has exceeded 2 million financial plans created on its platform.  

Evans, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, has spent over 35 years developing advisor technology. In 1990, he founded NaviPlan, where he helped architect some of the industry’s leading financial planning software before exiting in 2011. He returned to the space in 2018 with Conquest, an artificial intelligence (“AI”)-powered platform designed to make financial plans more accessible, dynamic and tailored to each individual or family. Together with his co-founders, Evans built Conquest to help advisors improve efficiency, interoperability and scale, offering adaptable plans to investors across the wealth spectrum. 

Crunchbase, a predictive intelligence solution that forecasts private market movements using the unique combination of proprietary private company data, AI, and live market activity from 80M+ users, today announced a partnership with Fusion by J.P. Morgan that embeds its proprietary data and predictive intelligence directly into Fusion’s private market data solutions. Fusion is J.P. Morgan’s cloud-native data technology solution that provides institutional investors with end-to-end data management, analytics, and reporting across both public and private markets. 

With Crunchbase’s Fundamentals, Insights, and Predictions integrated into Fusion, J.P. Morgan investors can guide smarter, faster strategies, and secure high-ROI opportunities before the competition. 

Duck Creek Technologies, the global intelligent solutions provider defining the future of property & casualty (P&C) and general insurance, today announced that Indigo Insurance has selected Duck Creek OnDemand and Duck Creek Clarity to modernize its core systems and create a unified, scalable technology foundation to support the organization’s long-term strategic growth. 

Indigo Insurance operates a rapidly expanding, digital-first insurance platform across the Caribbean, delivering customer-centric auto and general insurance solutions through its flagship online portal 247indigo.com. 

As part of its growth strategy, Indigo Insurance will transition to Duck Creek OnDemand to modernize systems, consolidate operations, and enable data-driven decision-making across the enterprise. The organization will also leverage Duck Creek Clarity for advanced analytics, streamlined reporting, and improved visibility across underwriting, policy administration, and customer experience. 

Fifth Third Bank (NASDAQ: FITB), a pioneer in financial innovation known for improving the lives of its customers, and Brex, the intelligent finance platform, today announced a multi-year partnership that unlocks $5.6 billion in annual commercial card payment volume. Built on Brex Embedded, Brex’s proprietary API-driven payments infrastructure, the Fifth Third Commercial Card powered by Brex will become the default commercial card solution for Fifth Third Bank’s Commercial Banking clients. 

The partnership will enable Brex to bring modern, AI-native finance to Fifth Third’s Commercial Banking businesses. Through the Fifth Third Commercial Card powered by Brex, the bank’s Commercial clients will gain access to Brex’s intelligent finance software platform where they can issue corporate cards, automate expense management and make secure, real-time payments. They will also benefit from Brex’s AI agents that automate complex workflows end-to-end to close the books faster, reduce manual review and control spend. 

For decades, commercial businesses have faced the same persistent challenges as finance teams everywhere: limited visibility into company spend, rigid systems that fail to scale and countless hours lost to manual processes. Without modern AI-powered infrastructure, teams have been forced to track expenses and reconcile budgets by hand—an inefficient, error-prone approach that slows growth and increases risk. 

Focal, the AI-powered productivity platform and meeting assistant purpose-built for financial advisors, today announces that it has selected the Microsoft Azure Canada Central data centre in Toronto to host all data for Canadian advisors on its platform. This move reinforces Focal’s commitment to security, privacy and compliance by ensuring that client data remains securely housed within Canadian borders. 

As AI note-taking and workflow automation platforms become more widely adopted, the need for secure, compliant technology has never been more critical for advisors. In selecting the Microsoft Azure Canada Central data centre, Focal combines local data residency with Microsoft Azure’s enterprise-grade security and performance. This supports improved advisor workflows while providing peace of mind that client data is safeguarded in compliance with Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) guidance and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). 

Focal combines meeting assistant AI, performance coaching and workflow automation with intelligent systems that securely connect and manage processes across any advisor tool or platform, with or without an API. In expanding its platform, Focal has introduced functionality that specifically addresses the needs of Canadian-based advisors. Focal now supports more than 99 languages, including English and French, recognizing and transcribing local financial terminology and helping advisors serve clients across all provinces efficiently and accurately. 

FutureVault Inc. (“FutureVault”), the category-defining leader in AI-powered Digital Vaults and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solutions, and pioneers of the Client Life Management Vault™, officially announce that enterprise B2B sales veteran, Steve Livingstone, has joined the company’s leadership team as the Executive Vice President of Global Sales. This executive hire represents a significant inflection point for the company as it accelerates its enterprise expansion across wealth management, financial services, and broader global enterprise markets. 

With more than 25 years of proven leadership in enterprise sales, digital transformation, and large-scale client engagement, Steve joins FutureVault following his tenure as Senior Vice President, Digital at DCM (Data Communications Management)—an enterprise-grade organization with deep, long-standing relationships across Canada’s top financial institutions and multi-sector corporations. At DCM, Steve consistently led enterprise-level growth initiatives, full-funnel digital solution strategies, and institutional account relationships. 

As Executive Vice President of Global Sales, Steve will play a pivotal role leading FutureVault’s enterprise growth strategy. 

Guidewire (NYSE: GWRE) today announced Olos, its latest release, designed to help P&C insurers modernize their pricing strategies, accelerate rate changes, optimize underwriting processes, and strengthen workers’ compensation performance. 

Guidewire PricingCenter unifies the entire pricing and rating lifecycle, eliminating manual handoffs across actuarial, pricing, and IT teams. The platform supports dynamic price modeling and impact analysis, AI-assisted pricing insights, as well as seamless integration with other Guidewire applications and services, enabling faster rate changes and greater agility. 

With the Olos release, Underwriting Assistant*—the first core agentic AI capabilit of Guidewire UnderwritingCenter—is available to automate intake, triage, and data enrichment, helping underwriters deliver faster, more confident decisions. Guidewire UnderwritingCenter, currently in development, is an end-to-end, intelligent underwriting solution that will combine GenAI-powered assistants with smart workflow automation, allowing underwriters to better manage submissions and optimize risk selection. 

Heritage Insurance Company (Heritage), a super-regional property and casualty insurance provider, and Guidewire (NYSE: GWRE) announced that Heritage successfully deployed Guidewire PolicyCenter and Guidewire BillingCenter as its new systems for policy administration, underwriting, and billing management. The company has implemented the products on Guidewire Cloud Platform for its homeowners and dwelling fire lines of business in 13 states where it operates. Having previously implemented Guidewire ClaimCenter in 2023, Heritage is now a full Guidewire InsuranceSuite customer in production on Guidewire Cloud Platform. Guidewire PartnerConnect Consulting Global Strategic member PwC led the implementation project. 

Guidewire (NYSE: GWRE) announced that it’s worked with The Cincinnati Insurance Company to successfully deploy Guidewire ClaimCenter to power claims management for Cincinnati’s insurance operations, simplify claims IT operations, and adapt more quickly to changing market demands. The company deployed ClaimCenter on Guidewire Cloud Platform to its workers’ compensation line of business and is currently implementing the product for the rest of its commercial, excess and surplus, and personal lines of business. 

Jopari Solutions and J.P. Morgan today announced a collaboration that enhances electronic claim payment capabilities across the healthcare and property & casualty (P&C) industries. 

Building on Jopari’s new payments platform, the initiative combines the financial infrastructure from J.P. Morgan Payments, the firm’s payments business unit, and the healthcare payments expertise from InstaMed, part of J.P. Morgan’s Healthcare Payments business, to simplify how payers issue and providers receive electronic claim payments. The collaboration also leverages J.P. Morgan’s Commercial Banking relationship with Jopari, along with its account and entity validations services, to enhance payment accuracy, strengthen security, and streamline disbursements through Jopari’s integrated platform. The combined solution is now available to clients. 

Within Jopari’s integrated eBill and straight-through electronic processing ecosystem, payers can seamlessly issue digital disbursements, while providers gain a single, secure portal to view electronic medical billing, remittance, and payment information. This unified approach improves visibility, security, and efficiency across the entire claim lifecycle. 

Klarna, the global digital bank and payments provider, today launched its AI for Climate Resilience Program, a pioneering initiative using artificial intelligence to strengthen climate adaptation and community resilience across some of the world’s most affected regions. 

The AI for Climate Resilience Program is a global initiative by Klarna to accelerate the use of AI in tackling the local effects of climate change. It identifies and supports innovators developing practical AI solutions for communities most exposed to climate risks, turning pilot ideas into scalable tools for adaptation and resilience. 

Klarna will provide each organization with tailored mentoring, technical, and strategic support over 18 months, in addition to funding, to help scale their solutions responsibly, allowing participants to leverage Klarna’s deep expertise in applying AI and responsible technology. 

Advisors have more data than ever and less time to use it. Milemarker Navigator changes that equation—securely. 

Milemarker today launched Navigator, a natural language AI platform that lets wealth managers query portfolio data, market intelligence, and client information using plain English. Instead of navigating multiple systems or waiting on analysts, advisors can simply ask: “Which clients have concentrated stock positions that need attention before year-end?” and get actionable answers immediately. 

Navigator builds on Milemarker’s core advantage—a unified data layer connecting the fragmented wealth-tech stack. While other AI tools query siloed systems, Navigator draws from everything Milemarker already connects: custodial data, portfolio analytics, alternatives, compliance records, and third-party research. 

Operation HOPE, a national nonprofit dedicated to helping low- and moderate-income Americans thrive in an ever-changing economy, today announced a historic partnership with a coalition of the nation’s most trusted and influential nonprofit organizations to launch HOPE AI™, a groundbreaking national strategy to bring both financial literacy and artificial intelligence literacy to every community in America. The announcement was marked by a powerful moment on the main stage at this year’s Annual Meeting of the Hope Global Forums in Atlanta, where the leaders of these organizations stood together with Operation HOPE Founder, Chairman and CEO John Hope Bryant for a historic signing ceremony affirming their shared commitment to this national effort. 

Developed in coordination with the AI Ethics Council (AIEC), HOPE AI™ is designed to ensure that every community in America has a fair shot at participating in—and benefiting from—the AI economy. First, through HOPE Inside AI™, the initiative will activate trained AI coaches at more than 1,500 locations nationwide—embedded in banks, schools, churches, employers, and workforce centers—where individuals and families can access no-cost, in-person or virtual coaching on using AI responsibly for everyday productivity, financial planning, budgeting, and credit-building. Second, through Community AI™, HOPE AI™ will equip schools, nonprofits, and cities with curated AI tools, templates, and safe-use onboarding and training to help organizations improve their daily operations responsibly and effectively. And third, HOPE AI™ will track national progress through the HOPE AI Equity Index™, the nation’s first measure of inclusive AI readiness, ensuring that communities are not left behind as AI capabilities continue to expand. 

Personetics, the global leader in AI-powered Cognitive Banking, announced today that it collaborated with Meridian Credit Union on Meridian’s new advice experience, OnYourWay, which is designed to help Members feel more confident about their money. With AI-supported features from the Personetics platform, the mobile banking app is elevated to a source of intelligent financial guidance and support. Now live, the new experience empowers Members with a modern, intuitive user interface designed for effective financial management. 

As Ontario’s largest credit union—and one of Canada’s largest—Meridian continues to redefine what it means to be a trusted financial partner. This is more important than ever, as research shows that 84% of consumers would consider switching banks to access personalized financial tools, underscoring the demand for these advanced capabilities. With this rollout, Meridian expands its commitment to help navigate financial uncertainty through enriched financial data, actionable insights, personalized offers, and proactive money management tools. 

Meridian is among the first financial institutions to deploy Personetics’ next-generation UI/UX framework, which is built for mobile and desktop access for a unified experience across channels. 

Plynk®, the app designed to simplify the investing process and empower users with intuitive tools, is celebrating a successful year of expanded features that enhance investors’ experiences. 

Plynk’s AI-powered news feature, provided by Pebble, a fintech focused on turning complexity into clarity, scans, summarizes, and delivers current insights tailored to a user’s stock portfolio and watchlist so they can stay informed without sifting through endless headlines. Instead, by providing concise summaries, it can help investors make informed investment decisions and better understand why stocks in their portfolio might be moving. Using innovative AI technology, the feature solely aggregates verified news from MT Newswires. 

Plynk is also embracing technological innovation in the continued advancements of its Plynk Spatial application for Apple Vision Pro. Users can now trade, manage accounts, and explore markets entirely within Apple’s spatial environment, offering a next generation investing experience. 

Practifi today introduced Practifi Intelligence, a suite of AI-powered capabilities built directly into its CRM to support advisory teams with continuous, wealth-focused intelligence. Available for clients to add to their Practifi Platform beginning today, Practifi Intelligence delivers smart conversation summaries, automated workflows, and intelligent follow-up generation inside familiar workflows. It strengthens how teams work without forcing them to adopt new vendors, replace systems, or manage the disruption tied to major technology changes. 

Unlike tools that add isolated AI features onto existing software or require firms to adopt stand-alone systems, Practifi Intelligence applies an AI-first framework across an already powerful CRM that some of the nation’s top advisory teams rely on every day. The result is an experience that pervades the entire platform, giving firms AI-driven capabilities that function like an always-available layer of support while preserving the stability of their current tech stack. 

Practifi Intelligence includes three complementary sets of capabilities: Relationship Intelligence, Meeting Intelligence, and Admin Intelligence, each designed to support a different part of the advisor workflow while operating in the same connected environment. 

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company, and Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, today announced a significant expansion of their strategic partnership. The multi-year, $200 million agreement will not only make Anthropic’s Claude models available in the Snowflake platform to more than 12,600 global customers across all three major clouds, but also establishes a joint global go-to-market (GTM) initiative focused on deploying AI agents across the world’s largest enterprises. Claude will also serve as a key model powering Snowflake’s enterprise intelligence agent, Snowflake Intelligence, to transform the nature of work by delivering all an organization’s knowledge through one trusted agent that sparks curiosity, encourages exploration, and accelerates innovation. 

This expanded partnership builds on Snowflake and Anthropic’s existing work together, where thousands of Snowflake customers are already processing trillions of Claude tokens per month through Snowflake Cortex AI. This next phase of collaboration is focused on deploying state-of-the-art AI agents on Snowflake capable of handling multi-step analysis, powered by Claude’s advanced reasoning capabilities and ability to securely handle sensitive data. This enables understanding extensive context across financial, operational, and customer data, among others, reasoning through it carefully, and showing their work rather than just retrieving an answer. By combining Claude’s reasoning with Snowflake’s governed data and AI environment, customers in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and life sciences can move from pilots to production with confidence. 

For example, a wealth management firm can use Snowflake Intelligence, powered by Claude, to create an agent that synthesizes client holdings with relevant market data and compliance rules to generate personalized portfolio recommendations — all within the security and governance perimeter of Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. 

Treasury Prime, the first AI-native embedded finance platform, today announced the launch of its AI Marketplace, a first-of-its-kind platform built on artificial intelligence that reshapes how banks and fintechs connect and collaborate. The AI Marketplace leverages large language model (LLM)-powered insights to help banks identify, evaluate, and partner with fintechs that align with their strategic goals and risk profiles. 

This launch marks a major step forward in Treasury Prime’s growth as the first AI-native embedded finance platform built to help financial institutions succeed in an increasingly automated financial world. Through the AI Marketplace, banks can tap into a curated network of more than 3,600 fintechs looking for partnerships. The platform uses machine learning algorithms and LLMs to highlight fintech opportunities that match custom criteria such as industry, funding stage, location, and risk appetite. This lets banks focus on partners that best support their goals, whether that means driving deposit growth, boosting fee income, or diversifying into new markets. 

The AI Marketplace lets banks choose from 13 distinct industry verticals, encompassing B2B payments, real estate, healthcare, investment companies, high risk industries, and more. This structure provides a focused way to pursue strategic growth within sectors that match each institution’s expertise and compliance appetite. 

PeopleReady, a TrueBlue (NYSE: TBI) company, today announced a new AI-enabled bill rate feature within its JobStack staffing app. Built on JobStack’s established intelligence capabilities, the feature provides customers with personalized, data-driven bill rates in seconds to help businesses make staffing decisions that are faster, more accurate, and more reliable. 

JobStack provides instant, personalized bill rates that factor in job details, location, current market pay conditions, and historical fill performance. This new pricing feature brings that intelligence directly into the customer experience—providing fast, data-informed guidance to support businesses in making more confident staffing decisions. 

JobStack also continues to leverage PeopleReady’s AI-powered ReadyMatch™ technology to identify a pool of best-fit workers for each request. ReadyMatch™ evaluates millions of data points across worker experience, availability, and reliability to strengthen talent alignment and reduce time-to-fill. PeopleReady’s local staffing teams are central to deployment—ensuring businesses receive the right talent with responsive, reliable service across all 50 states. 

vWise today launched WiseGuide, an enterprise AI chatbot designed to help financial services and benefits providers maximize the value of their workplace benefits relationships. WiseGuide provides seamless, scalable participant support across retirement plans, IRAs, health insurance, life insurance, disability, and voluntary benefits, while identifying engagement opportunities that convert employee inquiries into transactions. 

For carriers managing complex, multi-product portfolios, WiseGuide solves a critical challenge: how to deliver coordinated, personalized engagement across product silos while capturing the full lifetime value of each employee relationship. By integrating with participant communication channels including Slack, Microsoft Teams, and web portals, WiseGuide provides a single, intelligent interface that answers questions, promotes product awareness, and drives adoption across the entire benefits ecosystem. 

Providers invest heavily in winning employer accounts, but capturing wallet share across product lines remains difficult. Employees interact with retirement plans, health benefits, and insurance products separately. This dynamic misses natural opportunities for education, enrollment, and conversion. WiseGuide enhances these interactions by creating a unified engagement layer that works across all lines of business simultaneously. 

Zocks, the privacy-first AI assistant for financial services, today announced the launch of Document Intelligence, a new capability that automatically processes client documents and populates that data in CRM and financial planning systems. Now available as a new feature within Zocks’ integration with eMoney Advisor, a leading provider of financial planning software, Document Intelligence can automatically populate eMoney financial plans with extracted document data. 

Zocks Document Intelligence addresses one of the biggest bottlenecks in financial planning: manual document review and data entry. Advisors typically spend hours reading through account statements, insurance policies, and estate plans, then manually enter that information to intake clients, or build and update financial plans.  

Advisors can now upload client documents to Zocks, which uses AI to automatically read, summarize, and structure the data, then sync it directly into the appropriate fields in eMoney. What previously took hours now takes minutes, allowing advisors to onboard new clients faster and deliver advice sooner.