AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 2/27/26

Advisor CRM, the only all-in-one AI-native CRM platform built exclusively for advisors, announced today that it has launched Trove, the wealth management industry’s first-of-its-kind AI-native opportunity discovery software platform. Trove’s proprietary technology helps producer-led financial advisory teams uncover growth opportunities in their firm. Built on Advisor CRM’s AI-native platform, Trove safely monitors client data across multiple systems and proactively surfaces opportunities without requiring advisors to change workflows, learn complicated new technology, or replace apps in their existing tech stack. 

Designed for RIAs, hybrid insurance-advisory firms, broker-dealers, and producer-led teams, Trove reviews client relationships across CRMs, custodians, email, meeting notes, insurance policies, and more. The platform automatically identifies time-sensitive, high-impact opportunities, such as CD maturities, annuity surrender dates, life event signals, concentrated positions, and other key moments that often slip through the cracks. In development for over a year, Trove is currently in a closed beta with 10 firms managing a collective $6 billion in assets under management.  

Unlike traditional analytics tools that require complex implementation or behavioral changes, Trove operates quietly in the background and integrates naturally into existing workflows. Firms can continue using their current tech stack while Trove connects to key data sources and highlights opportunities in real time. Once an opportunity is identified, Trove helps advisors and their teams turn those signals into outreach actions. Trove never acts without human approval, ensuring advisors maintain full control over every client interaction. 

Alorica Inc., a global customer experience (CX) leader, today announced at SFVegas, a new partnership with PayNearMe, integrating the PayXM™ platform into Alorica Financial’s Systems & Services Technologies (SST) ecosystem. The partnership enhances Alorica’s end-to-end loan servicing and collections business by enabling more payment options through seamlessly connected experiences directly within servicing workflows. Backed by Alorica’s 25+ years of experience, SST manages $70 billion in primary and backup portfolio servicing with a 96% client retention rate, and a global infrastructure built to deliver customer‑centric service at scale. 

Supported by 600+ loan servicing specialists and 32,000 financial professionals across three continents, SST combines advanced automation, omnichannel customer engagement, and one of the industry’s most robust compliance frameworks so that lenders could deploy modern servicing experiences with speed and confidence. The partnership strengthens the payments component of the offering, giving lenders greater flexibility and convenience at every borrower touchpoint. Powered by the PayXM™ platform, SST now supports debit, credit, ACH, cash and leading digital wallets including Apple Pay, Cash App Pay, Venmo, PayPal and Google Pay, while preserving continuity across IVR, digital and live agent environments. The result is a smoother and more resilient payment process that reduces friction, safeguards portfolio performance and adapts as payment behaviors evolve. 

Alorica selected PayNearMe as its strategic partner to further deliver operational and financial impact, leveraging the company’s Payment Experience Management approach to strengthen payment performance and servicing resilience. This gives lenders greater visibility and control across channels and tender types, enabling active management of the full payment experience. Seamless, connected payment experiences supported by intelligent routing and enterprise-grade safeguards will help ensure continuity, drive efficiency and lower total cost of acceptance. 

Apex Fintech Solutions Inc. (“Apex”), an innovation launchpad for the global investing ecosystem, today announced its collaboration with Coinbase, through Coinbase Capital Markets Corp., to power the stock trading capabilities of their groundbreaking “Everything Exchange” platform. Through Apex’s comprehensive clearing, custody, and execution services for equities, Coinbase users can now trade leading stocks and ETFs alongside their cryptocurrency holdings, all in a single, unified experience. 

This collaboration exemplifies Apex’s mission to help fintech innovators expand their platforms to include a broad array of asset classes with the digital, cloud-native investing experiences that crypto customers expect. With Apex’s advanced infrastructure, Coinbase now offers equities, ETFs, and other traditional securities alongside digital assets. 

The integration leverages Apex’s cloud-native AscendOS™ platform, designed to handle the demands of modern investors who cut their teeth on crypto. The platform’s intelligent automations, straight-through processing, and flexible APIs enable Coinbase to deliver the real-time, seamless experience their users expect when expanding beyond digital assets. A key feature of this integration allows users to leverage the value of their entire Coinbase relationship—including dollars, crypto, and other assets—to purchase securities in real-time, eliminating the traditional waiting periods for fund transfers. 

Armanino, one of the 20 largest accounting and consulting firms in the U.S., announced today that it has selected Inflo as a strategic technology partner as part of its broader vision to build a next-generation, AI-enabled audit platform. The integration of Inflo into Armanino’s Audit Ally and Armanino Access ecosystem will enhance transparency, unlock deeper business insights, and streamline the audit experience for clients. 

The Inflo addition represents another milestone in Armanino’s ongoing investment in technology that builds a world-class, AI-enabled audit process with continuous insight, transparency, and collaboration. This is in line with the firm’s commitment to build solutions that prioritize client experience and business impact. 

Armanino clients will have real-time visibility into the status of their audit and advisory engagements, including testing progress and information requests, along with access to deeper business performance insights such as financial ratios and trend analysis benchmarked against peer companies. The platform incorporates AI capabilities designed specifically for audit environments, including intelligent risk identification, anomaly detection across full data populations, automated documentation support, and AI-guided workflow recommendations, all while keeping professional judgment and governance at the center of the engagement. 

Armanino, one of the nation’s largest accounting and consulting firms, today announced it has entered into a strategic partnership with Accrual to deploy its AI-native accounting platform across the firm. Accrual is designed to embed intelligent, agentic AI directly into core accounting workflows, enabling professionals to deliver deeper analysis, more proactive insights, and higher-quality recommendations to clients. This partnership reinforces Armanino’s strategy to lead the profession in AI-driven innovation by building intelligent, end-to-end workflows that elevate the role of its professionals and deliver transformational business outcomes for clients. 

Through the partnership, Armanino will gain early and expanded access to Accrual’s augmented intelligence platform, beginning with support for individual tax returns (1040s), including AI-enhanced preparation, intelligent review, and proactive tax planning designed to surface opportunities and deliver more strategic guidance to clients. As an early strategic partner, Armanino will provide ongoing feedback and domain expertise to help shape Accrual’s product roadmap as the platform scales, working closely with Accrual to pilot and co-develop multiple new product lines launching in partnership over the coming year. 

Initially, Accrual will be deployed within Armanino’s tax and business management practices, in a phased rollout. Over time, the firms plan to expand agentic AI capabilities into additional areas, including audit, advisory, and firm operations, beginning in 2026 and beyond. 

Avantos, an artificial intelligence (“AI”)-native operating system built to reimagine how financial institutions onboard and service clients, today announced it has completed a $25 million Series A funding round led by preeminent technology and software investment firm Bessemer Venture Partners (“Bessemer”). The round also attracted new strategic investors, including The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America® (“Guardian”), SEI® and Vanguard. This capital builds on the company’s $10 million seed round, which closed in September 2024 and was led by MIT-affiliated E14 Fund. The seed round also included M13, Mercer Advisors and Blue Collective. 

Avantos intends to leverage the funding to support continued investment in its platform, including expanded AI agents as well as deeper integrations with custodians, CRMs, portfolio management tools, underwriting systems and policy administration platforms. 

Avantos originated from a fundamental insight shaped by cofounders Bassam Chaptini and Rabih Ramadi’s extensive financial services experience. Many firms have clear strategic ambitions to manage and deepen client relationships, yet the fragmented platforms and functions they rely on today are not built to support that vision, hindering consistent execution across the client lifecycle. 

The future of finance is intelligent, and Basware, the global leader in Invoice Lifecycle Management is delivering it today. The pioneer and leader in accounts payable unveiled new AI agents in its market-leading Invoice Lifecycle Management Platform that unleash the power of Agentic AI to transform invoice processing and make autonomous accounts payable a reality.  

And the time has never been better. Pressure is mounting on finance to figure out how to use AI to drive efficiencies and savings across the business and deliver ROI. According to a global survey conducted by FT Longitude on behalf of Basware, 61% of 200 finance leaders across the US, UK, France and Germany polled say their organizations have rolled out AI agents largely as an experiment, simply to see what the technology could do. And one in four admit they still don’t fully understand what an AI agent looks like in practice. But the time for experimenting with AI is done. The C-Suite wants results.  

With Basware, finance leaders can leverage an intelligent platform embedded with AI to drive a modern process for managing the invoice process from end-end that delivers immediate ROI and long-term efficiency and growth. And they can do it today.  

Compound Planning, a leading digital family office committed to reimagining wealth management for the next generation, today announced strategic hires to strengthen key operational areas, in addition to adding new advisors to support continued client growth after surpassing $4 billion in assets under management in 2025. 

The firm’s latest additions include Akin Adekeye as General Counsel, who brings more than two decades of technology-focused legal expertise from companies like Microsoft, Wolters Kluwer and Quickbase. True to Compound’s dedication to offering the combined value of high-touch advisory services and modern technology, Adekeye brings a background in software engineering to the role, adding both technical fluency and a practical, business-forward approach. 

Jessica Faaborg has also joined the firm as Chief Compliance Officer, bringing deep investment-adviser regulatory expertise from compliance leadership roles at Facet and EQIS Capital Management. Known for her innovative approach to compliance, and embrace of AI, Jessica has a proven track record of developing robust, modern programs that align regulatory integrity with business growth. She has been an active member of the National Society of Compliance Professionals (NSCP) and the Investment Adviser Association (IAA), and has completed extensive IACCP coursework. 

Convr®, the leading provider of artificial intelligence solutions for commercial insurance, announces a new partnership with Ohio Mutual Insurance Group (OMIG) to offer an advanced underwriting workbench solution that streamlines underwriting decisions. The partnership reflects a strong alignment in values and a shared approach to execution. 

Ohio Mutual turned to Convr to move beyond legacy, siloed tools—embracing what they describe as the most advanced and visionary platform available today. One of the biggest appeals to OMIG was Convr’s centralized repository that could accommodate their unique underwriting needs and align with their vision for the future of underwriting. 

Cushman & Wakefield (NYSE: CWK) today announced the launch of its AI Impact Barometer, by Cushman & Wakefield, a trailblazing data-driven tool designed to help investors, occupiers and developers understand how artificial intelligence is changing the global economy and what that means for the built environment. By developing the first tool of its kind in the commercial real estate industry, Cushman & Wakefield is using data to help clients find consensus towards action. 

The AI Impact Barometer brings together a wide range of economic, capital markets and property indicators to track how AI adoption is moving from experimentation to core business infrastructure, and how that shift is influencing demand for space across sectors, including data centers, industrial and office. 

Rather than focusing on a single metric, the tool groups indicators into clear themes, such as AI adoption, capital investment, labor market shifts and infrastructure demand, and translates them into easy-to-interpret “AI momentum scores.” These scores are intended to show both the direction and the intensity of AI’s impact on different parts of the economy and the built environment. 

Wealth management firms are operating in one of the most demanding regulatory environments in the industry’s history. Compliance obligations are multiplying. Technology costs are compressing margins. And artificial intelligence is beginning to transform how firms supervise risk, rewarding those with deep, structured data and exposing the limits of fragmented point solutions. Today, Docupace takes a decisive step toward solving all three challenges at once. 

Docupace, a leading provider of AI-enabled back-office and compliance software for wealth management firms, today announced the acquisition of InvestEdge, the trusted provider of regulatory compliance software for bank trust departments, broker-dealers, and registered investment advisors (RIAs). To lead the expanded organization into its next era, Docupace has appointed Brian Filanowski as Chief Executive Officer, effective today. 

The strategic acquisition of InvestEdge and the ComplianceEdge platform significantly expands Docupace’s compliance solution portfolio and strengthens the company’s position as the industry’s most experienced provider of wealth management operations and compliance technology. Docupace will now offer one of the industry’s most comprehensive technology platforms to serve financial institutions across the full spectrum of mission-critical requirements — spanning back-office automation, advisor workflows, client onboarding, and enterprise-grade compliance delivered through a growing portfolio of complementary capabilities. 

Docusign (Nasdaq: DOCU), the leader in AI-powered contract management, today announced that its Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform is available as part of Anthropic’s Cowork. By connecting to Docusign in Cowork, businesses can securely create, review, send, and manage agreements from start to finish — all through natural language prompts in Cowork. 

This integration transforms how teams work with agreements, moving from passive summarization to active execution like drafting agreements, routing them for review, and triggering downstream actions across legal, sales, procurement, HR, and beyond. 

The Docusign connector, built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), brings enterprise-grade security to every agreement workflow in Cowork. Businesses must be authenticated by the platform, access is permission-based, and agreement data remains private and under the customer’s control. 

Envestnet, the leading Adaptive WealthTech company, today announced the appointment of Rich Friedberg as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). The appointment reinforces Envestnet’s continued investment in enterprise resilience, secure-by-design innovation, and disciplined cyber governance across its $7.4 trillion platform. 

Friedberg joins Envestnet with more than 25 years of cybersecurity leadership experience across financial services, SaaS, and national security sectors. He is widely recognized for modernizing complex financial and data platforms through transformation initiatives that embed cybersecurity into enterprise strategy, risk management, and product development from the outset. 

Most recently, Friedberg served as Chief Information Security Officer at Live Oak Bank, where he embedded cybersecurity into governance, strategic planning, and digital product development while modernizing capabilities through AI-enabled and automation-driven approaches to enhance regulatory confidence, operational efficiency, and enterprise resilience. He previously held senior security leadership roles at Blackbaud and Capital One, serving as Vice President of Information Security and CISO for Capital One’s Card business. 

Three payment industry leaders have joined forces to create an AI-powered compliance verification tool for Visa’s Commercial Enhanced Data Program (CEDP). Developed by Fee Navigator, Optimized Payments and Verisave, the free tool gives B2B merchants an instant assessment of their compliance status under CEDP’s rules and identifies potential savings opportunities. 

Visa’s CEDP, which took full effect Oct. 17, 2025, overhauled how merchants qualify for reduced interchange rates on commercial card transactions. Under the new program, Visa uses AI-powered validation to verify the accuracy and completeness of enhanced transaction data. Merchants that fail to meet the new standards lose access to Level 2 and Level 3 interchange discounts. 

Since CEDP enforcement began, there have been widespread compliance failures among B2B merchants, with some clients experiencing cost increases exceeding $500,000 in a matter of weeks. Many companies that previously qualified for Level 2 and Level 3 discounts have been reclassified as non-verified by Visa after the program’s AI audits detected placeholder or auto-filled data that no longer meets the new standards. 

Gradient AI, a prominent enterprise software provider of artificial intelligence solutions for the insurance industry, is launching ClaimVector™ for Workers’ Compensation (WC), an AI-powered solution allowing brokers to transform limited claims information into actionable insights. The result is clear, verifiable metrics that brokers can utilize to concisely compare performance, identify risk drivers, improve outcomes, and support confident advisory conversations with current and potential customers. 

A data-driven departure from abstract market averages, ClaimVector™ applies deep WC expertise to real broker workflows, turning experience into practical decision support and delivering transparent, explainable benchmarks brokers can confidently stand behind. The solution is designed for efficient, repeatable broker workflows rather than labor-intensive, siloed competitor analyses and progress assessments. 

As Workers’ Comp and other insurance segments continue to benefit from integrated artificial intelligence solutions, Gradient AI has emerged as a top-tier provider whose platforms help brokers, carriers and other key industry players make more thoroughly informed decisions. Laterally synchronized for deeper data sets, Gradient AI’s solutions have been recognized for predicting underwriting and claim risks with greater accuracy – resulting in improved loss ratios and profitability while reducing quote turnaround times and claim expenses. 

Graphene Platforms Limited, Europe’s leading wealth management solution, today announced the launch of Alpha Investment Office’s new regulated investment platform, delivered through Graphene’s authorised infrastructure. 

Alpha Investment Office now benefits from Graphene’s Wealth Gateway, a technology-enabled investment infrastructure designed to support seamless securities execution, integrated custody connectivity, and streamlined investment administration through a unified digital environment. At the core of the platform is a secure Private Data Cloud enabling real-time data management, automated reporting, and full lifecycle visibility across investment operations. 

Graphene’s platform integrates directly into Alpha’s operating model, orchestrating transaction flows, connecting custody and execution counterparties, and enabling efficient, digitally driven investment operations. This architecture allows Alpha to focus on client strategy, adviser enablement, and growth, while investment activity is delivered through scalable, secure, institutional-grade infrastructure. 

GReminders, a leading end-to-end meeting and automation management platform for financial advisors, today announced a major expansion of its long-standing integration with Orion’s Redtail CRM. The enhanced integration brings GReminders AI-powered meeting assistant technology directly inside the Redtail platform, embedding notetaking, pre-meeting intelligence and scheduling natively within advisors’ primary CRM workflow. 

Redtail is GReminders’ most widely used CRM integration, with more than 2,500 active advisors. The enhancement represents a significant evolution of the existing partnership. By integrating directly into Redtail, advisors can manage the entire meeting lifecycle—from preparation to follow‑up—without ever leaving the Redtail interface. Together, GReminders and Redtail are providing a complete meeting lifecycle solution within a single platform for financial advisors. 

As advisor technology stacks continue to expand, GReminders’ native Redtail experience helps advisors adopt AI without adding operational complexity. The integration further reduces administrative burden while delivering a more consistent, modern client experience. 

Hamachi.ai (“Hamachi”), a regulatory-first, AI-powered Wealth Intelligence Platform built for investment advisors and asset managers, today announced that United Planners, a nationally recognized hybrid broker-dealer and registered investment advisor (RIA) known for its innovation in advisor technology, has selected the firm as its first enterprise generative AI partner. United Planners is the first broker-dealer to formally adopt Hamachi at the enterprise level, delivering compliant, advisor-ready AI at scale across the firm. 

Under the agreement, United Planners has begun a phased introduction of Hamachi’s platform with advisors as part of a structured testing and feedback program. The initiative supports compliant email drafting, governed AI-assisted client communication, and an advisor chatbot built specifically for regulated wealth management workflows. As adoption expands, Hamachi will serve as the firm’s approved AI environment, and advisors seeking to use OpenAI or other external AI tools for business purposes will be required to do so through Hamachi’s compliant framework. Broader availability and additional integrations are planned for 2026. 

As advisor interest in generative AI accelerates, many firms have struggled to deploy these tools compliantly. General-purpose AI platforms often present unacceptable risks related to client data exposure, supervision and regulatory compliance, limiting their viability in advisory firm use cases. 

Hamachi.ai (“Hamachi”), a regulatory-first, AI-powered Wealth Intelligence Platform built for investment advisors and asset managers, today announced a new integration with Orion’s Redtail Technology (“Redtail”). The integration helps financial advisors safely turn CRM data into actionable insights and compliant client communications within their existing workflows. 

Through the integration, advisors using Redtail gain access to Hamachi’s centralized intelligence hub that transforms CRM data into artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted email drafting, household briefs, daily summaries and workflow intelligence informed by household, contact, activity, event and financial account data stored in the CRM. Redtail remains the system of record, while Hamachi applies firm-specific policies, permissions and controls to ensure outputs align with SEC and FINRA requirements and protect personally identifiable information (PII). 

As regulatory expectations increase and personalization becomes more central to the advisor-client relationship, firms are seeking AI solutions that enhance productivity without introducing additional steps or compliance risk. Unlike traditional AI tools that rely on unstructured prompts or manual data entry, Hamachi uses Redtail data as structured context rather than raw prompt input. This approach allows advisors to benefit from AI-driven efficiency while preserving supervision, audit readiness and firm-defined guardrails around data use. 

HES FinTech launched HES Collection Agent, an AI-driven platform designed for banks, digital lenders, BNPL providers, fintech institutions, and collection agencies seeking to modernize debt recovery through intelligent decisioning and automated execution across the full collection lifecycle. 

At its core is a proprietary machine learning engine built specifically for debtor scoring and collection decisioning. The platform analyzes historical, transactional, and behavioral data to assess repayment probability once a client enters delinquency. Where permitted by business policies and local regulations, internal datasets can be enriched with verified third-party data to improve portfolio visibility and strengthen decision accuracy. 

Based on this scoring foundation, the system dynamically classifies accounts and determines appropriate recovery actions using adaptive, rule-based logic aligned with internal risk frameworks and regulatory requirements. 

Hexure, the leader in AI-powered sales automation solutions for the insurance and financial services industry, today announced the release of NIGO Resubmission, the first fully digital, end-to-end workflow designed to eliminate Not-In-Good-Order (NIGO) applications, one of the industry’s most persistent operational challenges. 

NIGO applications have long stalled business, driven up costs, and created frustration for advisors and clients. While digital solutions have evolved, NIGO correction has remained stuck in manual, outdated processes. Hexure’s new solution replaces that burden with a transformational, fully digital workflow that eliminates friction, accelerates case movement, and gives real-time visibility at every step. 

Hexure’s NIGO Resubmission sets a new standard for NIGO resolution by giving carriers a precise, streamlined workflow to annotate issues, unlock only the fields that require changes, request missing items, and provide advisors with clear, actionable guidance within Hexure’s FireLight platform. The workflow delivers real-time status tracking, audit trails, and field level validations, and integrates seamlessly with carrier operations. It also provides insights that strengthen compliance and improve long-term In‑Good‑Order (IGO) rates. 

Hypercore, a loan management platform for private credit funds, today announced $13.5 million in Series A funding led by global software investor Insight Partners. The investment will fuel the launch of Hypercore’s AI Admin Agent – a new category of loan servicing that combines the company’s proven loan management technology with AI agents to deliver end-to-end operational infrastructure for private credit funds. 

Private credit has grown into a $3 trillion market, with funds facing mounting pressure to scale operations while managing increasingly complex portfolios. Traditional third-party admin agents can be highly manual and error-prone, with slow turnaround times and limited transparency. 

Hypercore’s platform already manages over $20 billion in assets under management across more than 10,000 loans. In 2025, the company grew CARR 3.5x year-over-year as demand for modern loan infrastructure accelerated. 

Intellebox.ai, the cutting-edge AI-powered platform revolutionizing wealth management, today proudly announced the appointment of four industry luminaries to its Advisory Board: Michael Gervais, Ph.D., Jonathan Zhukovsky, Matt Falk, and Lawrence McDonald. This powerhouse group brings unparalleled expertise in high-performance psychology, institutional technology architecture, advanced AI and quantitative systems, and macro risk analysis—positioning Intellebox.ai to accelerate innovation and dominate the next era of intelligent advisory solutions. 

As Intellebox.ai surges ahead with its commercial rollout—already live with leading firms and rapidly gaining momentum across wealth managers, RIAs, hedge funds, research organizations, and broker-dealers—these strategic additions couldn’t come at a more pivotal moment. The platform is transforming how advisory firms operate by supercharging client engagement, streamlining internal workflows, and elevating compliance oversight through agentic AI that delivers real-time, personalized insights without sacrificing the human touch. 

The Advisory Board will play a crucial role in shaping Intellebox.ai’s product strategy, technical architecture, and market positioning, ensuring the platform remains at the forefront of AI-driven wealth management. 

Jump, a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for financial advisors and other financial services providers, today announced the close of an $80 million Series B funding round led by global software investor Insight Partners. The round includes participation from new investors F-Prime, Allianz Life Ventures (the venture capital arm of Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America), TIAA Ventures and Peterson Partners, with additional investment from existing investors, Battery Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Pelion Venture Partners and Citi Ventures, as well as angel investors Hans Tung, Ryan Anderson and Aaron Skonnard. This financing brings Jump’s total capital raised to $105 million, following its $20 million Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures last year. 

Founded by repeat fintech entrepreneurs, Jump has rapidly become the fastest-growing wealthtech software application in industry history, scaling from zero to 27,000 advisors in less than two years since launch – and now adding more than 2,000 new advisors each month. Nearly one in ten U.S. financial advisors now uses Jump, making it a core platform across the industry – from independent advisors and enterprise Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) such as Focus Financial Partners, Integrated Partners and Merit Financial Advisors, to independent broker-dealers including LPL Financial, Osaic and Cetera, as well as financial institutions like Allianz Life and Manulife. Jump’s seven-time award-winning AI-native technology has processed a cumulative 183 continuous years’ worth of client meetings, completing millions of tasks for advisory, insurance and other financial services firms managing an estimated $12 trillion in assets for their clients. 

The new capital will fuel Jump’s next phase of growth, building on the success of its category-defining AI meeting assistant for advisors and expanding into a comprehensive intelligence and AI orchestration layer tailored for modern advisory firms. Jump is widely recognized for its intuitive workflows, extensive integrations, ease of adoption by advisors and full compliance and configurability – making it ideal for enterprise deployment with robust compliance and data controls. 

Jump, a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for financial advisors and other financial services providers, today announced a strategic partnership with Focus Financial Partners (‘Focus’), an interdependent partnership of wealth management, business management and related financial services firms that collectively advise more than $500 billion in assets. The collaboration empowers Focus’s business divisions to streamline meeting workflows, turn client conversations into actionable insights and accelerate their use of AI-driven productivity tools. 

The partnership delivers immediate, high-impact value to Focus’s advisory teams by reducing administrative burden and freeing up more time for meaningful client work. Jump’s ability to integrate directly with CRM and other wealth tech tools should reduce meeting prep time, improve data quality and support more automated workflows. 

This announcement follows a year of significant momentum for Jump, including surpassing 20,000 advisors on its platform and securing notable partnerships with Osaic, LPL Financial, Cetera, eMoney, RightCapital and others—further advancing its mission to shape the future of advisor intelligence. 

MarketAxess Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: MKTX), the operator of a leading electronic trading platform for fixed income securities, today announced that William Quan will join MarketAxess as Chief Technology Officer. 

In this role, Mr. Quan will lead the company’s global Technology organization with a mandate to advance innovation, support ongoing technology modernization, and strengthen execution across the enterprise. He will focus on building modern, resilient, and scalable platforms, setting high engineering standards and implementing AI and advanced data capabilities across MarketAxess. 

Mr. Quan brings more than two decades of global experience leading technology, AI, and digital transformation across financial services and platform businesses. Most recently, he served as Chief Technology Officer of Fleete Group, a Macquarie Asset Management portfolio company, where he led the development of an AI-enabled SaaS platform and a global engineering organization. Previously, he held senior technology leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, advising global financial institutions on cloud-native and AI-driven platforms. Prior to that, he spent over a decade at J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank leading electronic trading, AI, and digital platform initiatives across global markets. 

Today, Modern Life introduced its integrated AI platform, reinventing life insurance distribution from the ground up. Built for the structural complexity of life insurance, Modern Life embeds AI across every stage of the sales journey. Advisors move faster, gain clarity, and eliminate manual handoffs. 

For decades, life insurance distribution has relied on disjointed legacy systems. Critical insights sit across inboxes, PDFs, spreadsheets, and institutional memory. Modern Life’s AI-driven platform synthesizes those data points into structured insights while completing workflows in real time. 

Life insurance requires nuanced underwriting judgment, financial optimization, and long-term planning. Surface-level AI tools that operate outside the workflow add more steps and context switching to already complex processes. Modern Life built its AI on deep in-house expertise and applies it directly to the workflows where the complexity lives. 

Morningstar, Inc. (Nasdaq: MORN), a leading provider of independent investing insights, has appointed Scott Brown as President, Direct Platform, effective March 2, 2026. Brown will lead Morningstar’s largest business segment and a core growth engine, with flagship products such as Morningstar Direct, Morningstar Data, and Direct Advisory Suite (the latest evolution of Advisor Workstation) and capabilities such as manager research and ratings embedded within it. 

Brown brings more than two decades of experience building and scaling data platforms, modernizing legacy systems, and delivering technology-led and AI‑enabled products that support growth and operational excellence. He joins Morningstar from Experian, where he led a multi-billion-dollar portfolio across the Financial Services & Data and Marketing Services divisions, delivering technology-enabled growth. 

While at Experian, Brown advanced the Ascend platform with AI product innovation, including the launch of Ascend Ops, an AI model deployment capability that was quickly adopted by over 50 institutions. He also oversaw the introduction of the Credit + Cashflow Score, the first combined credit score using consumer-permissioned banking data. Earlier in his career at Nielsen, he modernized its flagship audience measurement product line and spearheaded its cloud transformation. 

Nitrogen, the AI-connected suite of advisor products designed to showcase the value of advice in every client meeting, today introduced Nucleus, an agentic AI engine embedded directly into its advisor platform, positioning the tool as a workflow solution rather than a standalone chatbot. Nitrogen also unveiled upgrades to its AI-powered tax planning product, including client-ready PDF report generation. The announcements were made during the company’s Winter 2026 product release keynote at the Fearless Investing Summit. 

Nucleus is designed to change what happens before, during, and after a client meeting. Instead of toggling between tools, manually entering data, or prepping reports late at night, advisors can now task Nucleus with real work inside Nitrogen. Setting risk targets, sending risk questionnaires, converting statements into portfolios, generating retirement income maps, drafting proposals, and preparing meeting talking points — all from within a single client profile. 

Unlike standalone AI assistants, Nucleus operates inside Nitrogen’s structured data environment. Advisors remain in control, approving actions before they’re executed. The system is backed by SOC 2 and ISO-42001 compliance and more than a decade of data security investment. 

Nitrogen, the connected suite of advisor products designed to showcase the value of advice in every client meeting, and Betterment Advisor Solutions, an all-in-one custodial platform for modern RIAs, today announced a strategic partnership to provide financial advisors with an automated custodial data integration. This joint initiative enables advisors to sync client account data from Betterment directly into Nitrogen, powering more informed client meetings on portfolio risk, tax planning and retirement income planning. 

This partnership addresses a primary hurdle for advisors: turning fragmented client data into simplified financial advice that clients can understand. For advisors who opt in, Betterment will share custodial account and position data with Nitrogen on an ongoing basis, allowing advisors to link client accounts directly to the Nitrogen product suite, where they can apply the Risk Number® and guide conversations fueled by custodial updates. 

The integration is available today at no incremental cost to all mutual Nitrogen and Betterment Advisor Solutions customers. Advisors can activate the feed by following the setup process within their Nitrogen dashboard. 

Onshore (formerly SPRX), the AI-powered tax platform now operating under a new corporate name, today announced a $31 million Series B led by FPV Ventures, with participation from Vertex Ventures, ADP Ventures, Y Combinator, and Restive Ventures. The round brings the company’s total funding to $46 million and will support expansion into additional U.S. tax and accounting domains. 

The company will continue operating with the same leadership team, customers, and legal entity, now doing business as Onshore. 

Every year, more than $200 billion in tax incentives go unclaimed or misfiled. Not because the tax code is broken, but because the system built around it is. Traditional providers rely on manual reviews, inconsistent documentation standards, and outdated interpretations of IRS guidance, leading to long timelines and incomplete credit identification. Onshore is rebuilding that system to work for businesses, not billable hours. 

Orion announced today it is expanding its ongoing collaboration with Anthropic following Anthropic’s introduction of new financial services plug-ins for the wealth management industry. 

Orion has been working with Anthropic’s platform as part of its broader AI strategy, and the companies are collaborating on how these newly announced capabilities will be incorporated into future Orion innovation to deliver even more value to advisors. 

Orion’s approach is advisor-first: AI that’s ready-made for advisors, enhances an advisor’s expertise, and helps strengthen client relationships through more personalized insights—while keeping governance, security, and trust at the center. Orion has built a secure, holistic, enterprise-grade data environment and is developing agents designed specifically for the realities of an advisor’s practice—helping advisors move faster, communicate more clearly, and focus more time on clients. 

Quinn, the AI platform for fiduciary-grade financial planning and advice, today announced continued expansion of its team and product capabilities as demand accelerates across banks, fintech platforms, publishers, and wealth management firms. 

As part of this expansion, Quinn appointed Lindsay Davis as Chief Marketing Officer. Davis brings more than a decade of experience building go-to-market teams and strategies for fintech and financial infrastructure companies serving regulated markets. She has held senior leadership roles at Tabapay and Atomic, where she led category positioning, organizational scale, and ecosystem partnerships during periods of rapid growth. 

For decades, comprehensive financial planning spanning debt, savings, investing, retirement, and long-term goals,= has remained inaccessible to most consumers because traditional advisory models rely on manual, one-to-one labor that does not scale. The result is a persistent guidance gap affecting an estimated 170 million Americans, even as financial institutions face growing pressure to meet rising customer expectations within strict regulatory requirements and finite advisor capacity. 

Sherpas today announced the close of its $3.2 million seed funding round, led by 1248, the family office of Mariner Wealth Advisors Founder & CEO Marty Bicknell, with major participation from AUA Private Equity Capital, GoHub Ventures, as well as strategic investors and advisory firms from across the wealth management industry. The round comes as advisory firms increasingly adopt AI to modernize how financial advice is analyzed, produced, and delivered. 

Wealth management is entering a structural shift. Client expectations are rising, planning complexity continues to grow, and advisors face mounting pressure to deliver faster, more personalized recommendations. Yet much of the industry still relies on manual analysis, numerous fragmented tools and point solutions, and time-intensive plan preparation. Sherpas was built to change that operating model. 

Rather than functioning as another planning application layered onto legacy systems, Sherpas serves as an AI-native operating layer for financial advice. From initial investor intake through scenario modeling and recommendation drafting, the platform automates the analytical burden, producing structured, explainable insights in minutes rather than days. 

The Financial Planning Association® (FPA®), the leading membership organization and trade association for CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professionals, today announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Snappy Kraken, to rebuild and relaunch FPA PlannerSearch as a measurable, high-trust new client lead engine. For over 20 years, FPA PlannerSearch has helped consumers connect with CFP® professionals. With this new partnership, it evolves from a directory into a data-driven platform that matches consumers with financial planners based on their needs, expertise, and shared values. 

Snappy Kraken will power lead capture, scoring, routing, and automated nurturing, converting search activity into structured client acquisition workflows. It will also integrate new FPA PlannerSearch features into FPA member websites, including planner-published thought leadership and educational content designed to increase AI visibility in search and improve website lead-capture metrics. 

As part of this multi-year partnership, Snappy Kraken will serve as a Feature Partner of FPA and integrate into the Association’s broader ecosystem, including national events and member programs, and will provide exclusive discounts and enhanced services to FPA members. Development is already underway, with a go-to-market launch planned for late summer, and all current FPA PlannerSearch members will transition automatically to the new platform once it goes live. Together, FPA and Snappy Kraken aim to redefine how consumers discover financial planners in an AI-driven world, anchoring the experience in trust, data integrity, and measurable results. 

The Travelers Companies, Inc. (NYSE: TRV) today announced the launch of AI Claim Assistant, an industry-leading solution developed using OpenAI model capabilities and APIs. The fully agentic intelligent voice service uses advanced language and speech recognition technologies to handle customer claim calls. This capability is initially being used with customers who are calling to file an auto damage claim and will expand to additional lines of business and a broader set of claim interactions over time. The launch reflects Travelers’ commitment to disciplined innovation and its strategy of combining advanced analytics, AI and human expertise to deliver superior customer outcomes through a more efficient process. 

OpenAI stood out for its rigor, reliability and enterprise-grade security. Travelers selected OpenAI’s models and Realtime API after extensive testing and benchmarking to ensure the strongest possible technology at scale. 

Travelers’ AI Claim Assistant provides the same natural, friendly and comprehensive service customers expect from a live agent – guiding them from consultation through claim submission. The assistant can provide relevant policy information, answer related questions and help customers make an informed decision about filing a claim. The assistant also customizes notifications to keep customers updated throughout the process, then seamlessly transitions them to a digital experience where they can upload photos, initiate appraisals, schedule repairs, reserve rental cars and manage other essential tasks. 

TruTrade, a Scottsdale-based trading technology company specializing in next-generation automated trading software and AI-driven portfolio management solutions, is highlighting the growing importance of multi-system automation as financial markets continue to experience elevated volatility. 

As global markets face rapid directional shifts and persistent macroeconomic uncertainty, the company emphasizes the value of structured, rule-based infrastructure designed to operate across varying market regimes. Rather than relying on a single strategy or directional bias, TruTrade integrates multiple systematic trading models within a unified framework engineered to function synergistically in both rising and declining environments. 

Founded with the mission of expanding access to institutional-grade trading infrastructure, TruTrade focuses on structured automation, disciplined risk controls, and capital efficiency through clearly defined governance models. Its systems are built to reduce emotional bias, improve execution consistency, and strengthen AI-driven performance across shifting market conditions. 

Upstart Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, today announced a forward-flow commitment from funds managed by Wafra, a New York-based global alternative investment manager focused on strategic partnerships, real estate and real assets. Wafra has agreed to purchase up to $200 million of assets originated through the Upstart auto finance platform. 

The agreement consists of a 12-month forward flow arrangement and is the first such agreement between Upstart and Wafra. The arrangement supports Upstart’s ability to deliver a consistent auto funding platform across its growing auto product vertical business and over a variety of economic environments. 

Upstart Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, today announced the previous sale of a $333 million aggregate portfolio of Upstart Auto assets to affiliates of Bayview Asset Management, LLC. 

The auto portfolio sale is the first major transaction between Upstart and Bayview. It demonstrates growing interest in Upstart’s scaling auto platforms as well as strategic funding to optimize balance sheet usage for its newer products. 

Uptiq 

Uptiq, the AI platform purpose-built for credit unions, today announced a strategic investment from Curql, a strategic investment fund backed by over 160 credit unions, as part of Uptiq’s recently completed $25 million Series B financing. 

The strategic investment reflects Curql’s conviction in Uptiq’s ability to deliver production-ready AI solutions for credit unions and to help scale adoption of AI across lending, member servicing, compliance, and operational workflows. Uptiq’s platform is designed to integrate with existing core systems and meet enterprise-grade security, governance, and regulatory requirements. 

As part of the Series B, Uptiq will expand access to Qore, its AI orchestration platform, enabling credit union innovation teams and developers to build and deploy AI-driven financial workflows more efficiently. 

WealthFeed, an AI-powered prospecting platform that enables financial advisors to grow their book of business, increase client retention, and expand wallet share, today announced a partnership with Steward Partners, one of the industry’s fastest-growing investment advisory firms with more than 300 advisors across the U.S. overseeing nearly $50 billion in client assets. 

Steward Partners is a full-service, employee-owned firm offering comprehensive wealth planning, private banking, institutional consulting, and business solutions to investors, multi-generational families, and businesses. Among other achievements, it was ranked 9th on the 2025 Barron’s Top 100 RIA Firms list and named one of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies by Inc. for a fifth time. 

Through an enterprise-level agreement, Steward is purchasing a 12-month subscription on behalf of 50 lead advisors, the first step in a broader rollout plan to help its advisors generate higher levels of organic growth and scale their practices.