AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 1/9/26

Manulife announced today that it has chosen Adaptive ML to provide model fine-tuning technology as part of its enterprise AI platform. Adaptive ML, a New York-based private AI software company, provides a reinforcement‑learning‑powered engine to fine‑tune, evaluate, and deploy open‑source small language models (SLMs) for enterprise applications. 

These capabilities will enable Manulife to adjust and deliver AI solutions that will ultimately drive value and improve customer experience. The Adaptive ML system continuously learns and adjusts AI models in real-time from new data and user feedback. The Adaptive Engine uses reinforcement learning (RL) to fine-tune models for specific business goals, making them more accurate and efficient over time. 

The multi-year agreement with Adaptive ML will continue to explore new practical applications such as automating underwriting quotes, executing complex processes, and advising sales professionals. These initial use cases will be the first to be brought on to the platform, enabling broader scale and speed to deployment.\ 

Alliant Insurance Services, the nation’s leading specialty broker, has hired Adam Johnson as Executive Vice President within Alliant Specialty. Johnson brings extensive expertise to the M&A specialty vertical in the critical disciplines of venture capital and artificial intelligence. 

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Johnson has built deep relationships across the venture capital ecosystem, advising funds and their portfolio companies on complex risk strategies. He is widely recognized as a pioneer in insuring AI and frontier technology companies, having been a trusted advisor to frontier model labs and AI infrastructure companies navigating an evolving regulatory and liability landscape. 

Johnson brings to Alliant industry-leading experience in insuring venture capital and private equity funds, along with their portfolio companies. He develops strategic risk solutions that leverage management liability, directors and officers (D&O) liability, technology errors and omissions (E&O), cyber liability, and M&A and transactional risk coverages. 

Blend Labs, Inc. (NYSE: BLND) today announced that Matt Thomson has joined the company as Head of Revenue. Matt brings over 25 years of fintech sales leadership, including scaling go-to-market organizations. 

As Head of Revenue, Matt Thomson will lead Blend’s sales organization and revenue strategy, overseeing efforts to expand the company’s presence across financial institutions. He joins Blend following roles at Alkami Technology and ACI Worldwide, where he built sales teams and grew customer bases across community banks, credit unions, and regional institutions. 

Matt spent over a decade at Alkami Technology, where he led the sales organization from fewer than 10 to more than 300 financial institutions as customers. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at P&H Solutions and ACI Worldwide, working with some of the largest U.S. banks on their digital payment platforms. 

Charted, a leading accounts payable automation software and ERP services provider, today announced the official launch of its UK office, to support users in the UK and EMEA. This follows the launch of International Payments and an official rebrand in 2025, continuing the forward path of growth and expansion to assist accounts payable (AP) teams in streamlining their processes with advanced automation and deep AI capabilities. 

Charted began a decade ago as a consulting firm implementing ERPs for some of the world’s most complex organizations. After years of solving recurring accounts payable challenges for customers, Charted evolved that expertise into an ERP-native SaaS platform that streamlines end-to-end AP processes for multi-entity, multi-currency businesses. 

With a strong presence across North America and international customers in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, the launch of an official expansion to the UK signals a deepening commitment to supporting the region and its partners with dedicated resources and investment in additional internationally-focused products. 

Convr AI®, the leading modularized artificial intelligence (AI) underwriting, data, and intelligent document automation workbench company serving commercial insurance organizations, is enabling Zurich North America to better serve its customers through the power of Convr’s AI-powered underwriting workbench. Zurich is expanding its relationship with Convr for underwriting efficiency after first collaborating in 2017. 

Zurich’s underwriting operations will continue leveraging machine learning and computer-vision technology with our Intake AI product to more efficiently and accurately process ACORD forms, loss runs and other documents. Through this integration and Convr’s data cleansing and enrichment capabilities, Zurich improves efficiency across several business units. 

Now, Convr technology is empowering underwriting teams across North America to focus more on the human side of underwriting. By automatically extracting submission data from a wide range of document types—and enriching incomplete or invalid information with trusted, robust data sources—Convr is significantly automating routine tasks. The result? Underwriters have more time to build relationships, make informed decisions, and drive better outcomes for their organizations. 

FINNY AI Inc. (“FINNY”), the AI-powered prospecting and marketing platform built specifically for financial advisors, today announced that it has raised $17 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Venrock, with participation from new investors including former Vanguard chairman and CEO William McNabb, Activant and Altruist’s Jason Wenk, as well as continued support from existing investors Y Combinator, Maple VC and Crossbeam Ventures. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) engineers Eden Ovadia, Victoria Toli and Theo Janson launched FINNY in March 2024 to solve a long-standing challenge in the advisory industry: unlocking organic growth amid limited time and resources. Cerulli research shows that 83% of registered investment advisors (RIAs) cite advisor time constraints and insufficient support as significant barriers, even as the industry’s focus shifts back toward organic growth efforts following a decade of M&A-driven expansion. FINNY addresses these constraints directly by automating the prospecting process — from identifying and prioritizing leads to managing outreach and follow-up — enabling advisors to reallocate time toward client relationships. 

FINNY will use the new capital to expand its engineering and product teams, accelerate product development and strengthen go-to-market efforts as advisory firms seek scalable, data-driven growth infrastructure. A core priority is attracting top technical talent to advance the platform’s AI capabilities and build additional tools for both inbound and outbound growth. FINNY’s platform leverages advanced data intelligence and automation to identify, prioritize and engage high-intent prospects — driven by its proprietary “F-Score” matching engine, which analyzes thousands of data points such as liquidity events, career changes and other money-in-motion signals. With this latest funding, FINNY will continue innovating its end-to-end prospecting workflow and deliver deeper automation across email, LinkedIn, voicemail and other engagement channels. 

Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV) today announced a strategic collaboration with Visa (NYSE: V) to enable Visa Intelligent Commerce and deploy Trusted Agent Protocol across Fiserv’s interoperable agentic ecosystem. This will empower merchants to participate in the rapidly evolving world of Agentic Commerce, where artificial intelligence-driven agents act on behalf of consumers to discover, compare, and purchase products. By combining Visa’s authentication and agentic commerce capabilities with Fiserv’s extensive merchant network, the two companies are delivering the infrastructure and trust needed for merchants to thrive as commerce becomes increasingly automated. 

As part of this collaboration, Fiserv and Visa are working together to deploy Trusted Agent Protocol across Fiserv’s acceptance ecosystem to authenticate, retrieve, accept, and process agentic transactions. The Trusted Agent Protocol establishes a secure framework that distinguishes trusted agents from malicious bots, ensures every interaction is authorized by a consumer with verified intent, and validates that payment information used at checkout remains unaltered. With the Trusted Agent Protocol available within Fiserv’s existing products and services, merchants and their customers can engage confidently in automated commerce experiences knowing that every transaction is protected by robust identity and transaction safeguards. 

Fiserv and Visa are also looking beyond solely supporting agentic acceptance to enable the full potential of intelligent commerce. Fiserv and Visa deliver the foundational capabilities that make agent-driven experiences possible. This includes providing merchants, ISVs, and ISOs with the infrastructure, tools, and integration frameworks needed to embed AI-driven agentic experiences seamlessly into their workflows without disrupting existing operations. 

Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV) and Mastercard (NYSE: MA) are extending their partnership to advance agentic commerce for merchants. Fiserv will be one of the first major payment processors to leverage Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework at scale, raising the bar for secure, intelligent and interoperable agentic commerce and empowering merchants to confidently embrace the era of AI-driven payments. 

As commerce becomes increasingly digital and autonomous, merchants need trusted solutions that balance innovation with security and transparency. With this expanded partnership, Fiserv is integrating with Mastercard’s Secure Card on File solution to act as a network token requestor on behalf of merchants and partners. This capability leverages Mastercard’s robust tokenization technology to deliver secure, seamless transactions across the ecosystem. 

Fiserv will also adopt the Mastercard Agent Pay Acceptance Framework, which establishes a secure, scalable framework for enabling AI agents to transact on behalf of customers with tokenization, strong authentication, fraud prevention, and governance. The partnership will also simplify merchant participation in the agentic commerce era by providing them with the tools and insights to maintain control of their customer relationships while unlocking new revenue streams. 

UK Credit Union today announced a partnership with Glia, the leading AI platform for intelligent banking interactions, to simplify support and financial wellness for its 111,000 members. Under the new partnership, UK Credit Union will strengthen member service and boost frontline agent satisfaction with Glia’s award-winning AI technology, enabling savings it can reinvest into the community. 

As part of UK Credit Union’s ongoing efforts to simultaneously provide best-in-class member service with cutting-edge digital innovation, the credit union sought a solution that could replicate the personalized, high-touch experience members get when they visit a UK Credit Union branch. As UK Credit Union’s member base expands beyond its central Kentucky roots, the Glia AI-powered Interactions platform will support the credit union’s dedication to convenient, secure and equitable service flows consistently across both digital and voice channels. 

Glia’s AI platform, purpose-built for banks and credit unions, automates interactions, elevates frontline agent performance and transforms reporting and insights for leaders. With Glia, UK Credit Union will offer an intentional blend of human and AI member support through online chat and phone calls, giving frontline agents more time to focus on complex requests. 

HRSoft, Inc., a provider of enterprise compensation management software, today announced it has joined the Workday Partner Program and has launched the HRSoft: Compensation Platform Marketplace App, a Workday Designed Approved integration. The partnership expands the Workday ecosystem with solutions that help financial-services organizations manage complex compensation programs with precision, transparency, and scale. HRSoft’s compensation lifecycle platform integrates with Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) to simplify incentive design, deferral management, and global pay governance. 

Financial institutions face unique challenges managing carried interest, long-term incentive deferrals (LTIM), performance-linked bonus pools, and global variable pay structures. HRSoft’s integration with Workday HCM enables these organizations to automate complex calculations, streamline workflows, and maintain audit-ready governance—helping them align compensation decisions with performance and regulatory requirements. 

Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) is a unified system that enables organizations to make faster decisions, gain operational visibility, prepare for talent shifts, and build effective teams. 

Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU), the global financial technology platform that makes Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, today announced it has signed a multi-year, strategic partnership with Circle Internet Group, Inc. (NYSE: CRCL) (“Circle”)1, one of the world’s leading internet financial platform companies, to accelerate next-generation financial services powered by stablecoin technology. The agreement establishes a framework for Intuit to leverage Circle’s comprehensive stablecoin infrastructure and USDC across the Intuit platform. 

Intuit has a long track record as an innovative global financial technology company, helping consumers and businesses navigate taxes, credit, and cash flow at scale. Stablecoins are the next logical step; they give Intuit a programmable, 24/7, low-friction money rail that can be embedded across the Intuit platform to unlock new experiences in refunds, remittances, savings, and payments that simply weren’t possible on legacy rails. 

Building on decades of customer trust and deep domain expertise, Intuit is the global technology leader that fuels financial success. The company’s platform uses data along with artificial intelligence and human intelligence to power prosperity for consumers, businesses, and accountants. Intuit is uniquely positioned to deliver superior financial outcomes by synthesizing tax, credit, banking, invoice, and payroll data to understand its customers’ full financial situation. As a scaled tax player, Intuit participates in one of its customers’ most significant annual financial events and provides exceptionally fast access to tax refunds, which can be customers’ largest paycheck of the year. This expertise allows Intuit to operate in a market with more than $100 billion in annual tax refunds. 

Jopari Solutions, a leader in straight-through electronic claims processing for Property & Casualty (P&C), Commercial and Government healthcare, today announced the addition of two new product offerings – Jopari AttachInsights and Jopari RiskReview – to its established portfolio of electronic billing, attachment and payment solutions. 

Claims organizations face growing pressure to manage rising complexity, higher volumes, and increased cost scrutiny. Jopari’s new solutions add structured, actionable intelligence to the early stages of the claims lifecycle—supporting more consistent, informed decision-making from intake through adjudication. 

To accomplish this, Jopari is applying artificial intelligence with the introduction of Jopari AttachInsights – an automated clinical data extraction and normalization solution — and Jopari RiskReview, a predictive claim severity scoring tool designed to identify high-risk claims earlier in the lifecycle. Together, these solutions help claims organizations prioritize work, reduce manual clinical review effort, and accelerate resolution of complex claims. 

Morningstar, Inc. (Nasdaq: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment insights, and PitchBook, a Morningstar company and a leading private capital market intelligence provider, today announced the launch of new apps in ChatGPT by OpenAI. These MCP app integrations allow entitled or licensed Morningstar and PitchBook users—investors, advisors, and financial professionals—to access Morningstar and PitchBook data, research, and ratings via natural language prompts directly within apps available on the popular AI platform. 

Morningstar’s goal is bold: become the indispensable intelligence layer for investing—the grounding source investors need for analyst-backed, precise, and comprehensive ratings and insights. This latest app integration moves Morningstar closer, building on recent Morningstar and PitchBook integrations with Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity Finance, Microsoft Foundry, and Microsoft Copilot Studio. PitchBook has launched additional integrations with large-language models (LLMs) and AI-powered tools Rogo, Hebbia, Finster AI, Model ML, and Farsight. PitchBook also recently debuted PitchBook Navigator, an in-platform generative AI tool designed to accelerate deal sourcing and financial research with natural language search within its industry-leading platform. 

Outmarket, the #1 AI platform for insurance, today announced the launch of Outmarket Proposal Builder. This all-new workflow is engineered to drastically reduce the time and effort commercial insurance brokers spend developing lengthy, customized proposals, transforming a multi-hour process into one that takes mere minutes. 

Outmarket is the fastest growing insurance AI platform because it empowers agencies to scale their business rather than their headcount, while delivering excellence in client service. Proposal Builder is a force multiplier on the ROI of the Outmarket platform, as it radically revises the way brokers and agents generate proposals for their clients — one of the most time-consuming, tedious and redundant workflows in insurance. By eliminating the need to copy and paste coverages from carriers, manually alter limits, or spend hours formatting and reformatting agency templates, Proposal Builder unlocks extraordinary efficiencies. 

The Proposal Builder workflow is dead simple. Brokers upload the policy documents, and Proposal Builder turns them into a custom, modular proposal using brand styling and layouts of the broker’s choosing. From there, Proposal Builder works with the broker to edit text, visuals, layouts and more. The technology is designed to generate comprehensive, fully-branded commercial insurance proposals instantly, integrating necessary modular sections and pre-approved content. 

For years, banks and credit unions have relied on rigid automation that follows rules instead of reasoning. Today, Posh AI, the leader in conversational and agentic AI for financial institutions, announced Operating Procedures, a breakthrough system that transforms banking automation by combining intelligence, compliance, and control, powered by Posh’s upgraded reasoning engine, REALM™ 2.0. 

Operating Procedures mark a shift from rule-based automation to agentic AI intelligence. They give AI assistants the ability to think, act, and adhere to policy, delivering the speed and accuracy of a trained employee with the reliability of institutional policy. 

Despite years of AI headlines, most financial institutions still rely on static call trees and brittle scripts that automate without adapting. These systems break the moment a customer veers off the predefined flow – the “happy path” – unable to interpret how people actually phrase questions or shift topics mid-conversation. The result is rigid automation that demands constant upkeep, struggles to stay compliant, and fails to deliver the intuitive, humanlike experiences customers now expect. 

Prove, the leader in digital identity, today announced the launch of ProveX, a new digital trust exchange that enables enterprises to instantly access verified data and credentials from partners, while preserving trust through every interaction. Built on Prove’s tokenized identity framework, ProveX turns verified identity into a durable foundation for growth, allowing businesses to create personalized, seamless, and intelligent customer experiences previously out of reach. 

Today, businesses are forced to repeatedly reverify customers, often multiple times within a single journey, because trust breaks between touchpoints. ProveX addresses this challenge by enabling trust to travel as customers move through channels and interactions. Once a customer’s identity is confirmed, ProveX allows enterprises to instantly access verified data and credentials from trusted partners. Whether retrieving payment credentials for instant checkout, accessing creditworthiness signals to power tailored offers, or pulling compliance credentials to streamline onboarding, ProveX enables companies to orchestrate trust-driven customer experiences without restarting identity at each step. 

Launch partners including Checkr Trust, Nova Credit, Skipify, Trinsic, and Wyzia are among the first to distribute services through ProveX, giving Prove customers immediate access to a growing network of trusted providers shaping the future of how digital identity is created, recognized, and reused. 

Quility, an award-winning insurtech company transforming insurance distribution through technology and innovation, announced today the appointment of Eric Brickman as Chief Product Officer. Brickman will lead Quility’s product vision, strategy and execution as the company accelerates its investment in scalable, intelligent platforms that empower agents and drive distribution growth. 

Brickman brings more than 30 years of experience building and scaling technology-enabled financial services and insurance solutions. He joins Quility from a nationally recognized TPA in the workplace retirement market, where he served as Chief Operating Officer, leading global operations, technology and business transformation, positioning the company as a leader in the workplace retirement plan marketplace. 

Previously, Brickman was Chief Operating Officer at Candidly, where he scaled AI-powered debt management, savings and financial wellness solutions, helped drive record year-over-year growth, including a 10x increase in revenue, and established strategic partnerships with major financial institutions such as Vanguard, Empower, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, UBS, Lincoln Financial and TIAA, extending the company’s reach to more than 35 million Americans. 

Realbotix Corp. (TSX-V: XBOT) (Frankfurt: 76M0.F) (OTC: XBOTF) (“Realbotix” or the “Company”), a leader in AI-powered humanoid robots, today announced a strategic partnership with The FUTR Corporation (TSXV: FTRC)(OTCQB: FTRCF)(Frankfurt: QA20; WKN: A4165Y; ISIN: CA3609521057), (“FUTR” or the “Company”), a pioneer in high-fidelity AI and next-generation payment infrastructure that helps consumers unlock financial value from their data, effective January 2, 2026, to bring FUTR’s AI agents into physical, interactive form. 

The partnership will integrate FUTR’s AI Agent platform with Realbotix’s robotics technology to create a human-like interface, enabling users to interact with their personal AI Agent in a physical environment. FUTR’s AI Agents are designed to help consumers securely manage personal data, automate financial and lifestyle tasks, and earn value from verified information through FUTR’s privacy-first, token-enabled platform. Realbotix’s robotics technology provides a physical interface intended to support more natural interaction through voice, expression, and movement. 

The initial robotic AI Agent pilot is expected to commence in the first half of 2026. Following the pilot, the parties intend to evaluate the results and assess broader commercial opportunities. Under the terms of the partnership, the parties plan to collaborate. 

Stephano Slack LLC, a leader in the accounting and financial services sector, and Seekr today announced a strategic collaboration to deploy secure, explainable AI agents across core advisory and audit workflows, beginning with advanced 401(k) plan auditing and financial data extraction. Seekr’s trusted generative AI platform, SeekrFlow™, enables Stephano Slack to automate the ingestion, validation, and structuring of complex financial documents—reducing manual extraction and reconciliation work from approximately 50 hours to as little as 2 hours while ensuring the highest degree of accuracy, audit coverage, and governance. 

According to the Investment Company Institute, as of Q2 2025, Americans held $9.3 trillion in 401(k) plans within $13.0 trillion in employer-based defined contribution retirement assets. With Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) required audits each year, the 401(k) audit market is critical to protecting U.S. household financial assets. Seekr’s AI agents not only accelerate the extraction and automated population of Excel-based workpapers and reports but also enable auditors to sample beyond minimum regulatory thresholds, ensuring the highest degree of accuracy and confidence in the auditing process.  

This initiative positions both firms at the forefront of AI-powered advisory and financial services, demonstrating immediate ROI for customers while laying the foundation for a complete suite of AI agents capable of scaling forensic analysis, compliance, and financial assurance across the middle market. 

Skyfire today announced a fully functional prototype of an AI agent securely completing consumer purchases end-to-end, enabled by verified agent identity and agentic payment infrastructure in a controlled environment. The demo illustrates an AI agent autonomously researching and purchasing a consumer product online using Skyfire’s Know Your Agent (KYAPay) protocol and Visa’s Intelligent Commerce suite and Trusted Agent Protocol, signaling an important step toward frictionless, trusted agentic commerce. 

In the demonstration, a consumer dispatches an AI agent to identify the best headphones at the best price. The agent independently evaluates available options with Skyfire partner Consumer Reports, and completes a purchase directly on verified merchant, Bose.com. Skyfire’s KYAPay protocol verifies to both the consumer and the merchant that the AI agent is acting on behalf of a real, authorized user, enabling merchants to confidently accept actions initiated by non-human actors. 

Once authenticated, Skyfire enables the transaction by providing secure access to a Visa credential, allowing the AI agent to complete checkout without exposing sensitive consumer credentials. The consumer receives immediate confirmation that the purchase has been completed, with shipping details and a confirmation email delivered automatically; the ability for a consumer to empower an agent to research, shop, and purchase on their behalf is now finally available to a user and “as simple as pushing a button.” 

TransAI today announced it will debut TransAI Note, the world’s first on-device AI meeting notetaker hardware. 

Designed as a standalone AI notetaker device for the meeting room, TransAI Note runs the entire AI workflow directly on a compact device. It records conversations, transcribes speech in real time with speaker identification, captures visual content such as whiteboards and projected content, and generates structured summaries and action items. All processing is handled locally, ensuring that confidential meeting recordings are never sent to the cloud. 

At the core of TransAI Note is NoteBrain™, TransAI’s proprietary on-device AI model, trained specifically for meeting notes. NoteBrain integrates audio capture, visual input, and language understanding to process meetings as a complete context, rather than isolated speech segments. By analyzing who is speaking, what is being discussed, and how conversations evolve, NoteBrain generates structured meeting notes that include summaries, key points, and action items—fully on device. 

Tech CU, a nearly $5 billion Bay Area credit union serving more than 177,000 members throughout the United States, has partnered with Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, to offer personal loans and auto refinance loans to more consumers. 

Tech CU started lending as a partner on the Upstart Referral Network for personal loans in September 2025, with plans to expand into auto refinance loans in early 2026. As part of the Upstart Referral Network, qualified personal loan applicants on Upstart.com who meet Tech CU’s credit policies receive tailored offers as they seamlessly transition into a Tech CU-branded experience to complete the online member application and closing process. 

Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) today announced a major milestone in the evolution of AI-powered commerce: hundreds of secure, agent-initiated transactions have now been successfully completed in collaboration with partners across the ecosystem. This breakthrough signals that 2025 will be the final year consumers shop and checkout alone, as AI agent-driven payments rapidly transition from experimentation to mainstream adoption. 

New Visa research indicates that nearly half of U.S. shoppers (47 percent)1 now use AI tools for at least one shopping task—from price comparisons to personalized recommendations—reflecting a profound shift in how consumers discover and evaluate products. With AI-generated traffic surging across retail websites, Visa predicts that millions of consumers will use AI agents to complete purchases by the 2026 holiday season. 

This acceleration builds on Visa’s launch earlier this year of Visa Intelligent Commerce, a global initiative grounded in three decades of Visa’s AI leadership in secure payments. Visa remains on track to deliver secure, personalized AI-enabled commerce to consumers by early 2026. 

WNSTN, a global provider of AI powered financial intelligence, today announced a strategic partnership with Meritz Securities, one of South Korea’s leading retail trading and investment platforms. Meritz will integrate WNSTN’s AI technology into its next-generation digital investment platform to enhance client engagement, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance. 

Meritz Securities, one of the top financial institutions in Korea for U.S. equities trading, is building a new AI driven platform designed to enhance investor experience while meeting the evolving standards of financial consumer protection. By adopting WNSTN’s solution, Meritz gains access to a fully compliant financial AI system capable of supporting real-time client inquiries, investment knowledge, and regulatory aligned interactions across multiple channels. 

Through this partnership, Meritz will be the first major Korean financial institution to deploy WNSTN’s infrastructure grade AI capabilities. The companies are collaborating closely on tailoring the system to Korean regulatory requirements and Meritz’s long term product vision.