AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 2/20/26

ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ:ACIW), an original innovator in global payments technology, today announced a major step forward in the UK’s payments modernization journey as a leading UK retail bank chooses ACI Connetic — the industry’s first unified, cloud-native platform — for deployment. Powered by Microsoft’s cloud capabilities, this milestone demonstrates strong industry confidence in ACI’s next-generation platform and its ability to empower financial institutions to modernize, innovate and unlock new growth. 

The first ACI Connetic deployment in the UK is a pivotal milestone as the country prepares for the next wave of payments transformation. For the first time, UK banks can bring SWIFT, CHAPS, and Faster Payments together on one cloud-native SaaS platform, eliminating the fragmentation that has long driven operational cost, risk, and complexity. 

ACI Connetic is the industry’s first platform to bring together account-to-account (A2A) payments, card payments, and AI-driven fraud prevention within one cloud-native SaaS environment. Its modular design, cloud-native architecture, and open APIs streamline integration, shorten implementation timelines, and deliver faster time to value. Designed for institutions of all sizes, ACI Connetic enables rapid modernization without compromising enterprise-grade resilience or regulatory readiness. 

Altruist, the tech-forward wealth platform for independent advisors, today announced the launch of a new tax planning offering within Hazel, its transformative AI platform. The new capability helps advisors create fully personalized tax strategies for clients by reading and interpreting their 1040s, paystubs, account statements, meeting notes, emails, and custodial and CRM data, and applying deep tax logic to the analysis. All of this is done within minutes. 

Hazel also delivers interactive scenario modeling, allowing advisors to explore “what-if” questions, such as the impact of a bonus, home sale, retirement transition, or family lifestyle changes, and see projected tax outcomes updated in real time. Advisors can export polished reports or walk clients through findings live, creating a more engaging and transparent planning experience. 

Like all Hazel features, tax planning is governed by zero data retention agreements with Hazel’s AI model providers, meaning they are prohibited from retaining any data from Altruist or its customers. And this data is not used to train AI models. Hazel also operates on the same secure infrastructure as Altruist. 

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. 

ARTDAI announced the launch of its Collection Data Management System (CDMS) designed specifically for family offices, private collectors and collection managers. This platform eliminates the persistent operational challenge of collection documentation: multiple file types scattered across digital and physical archives, often spanning multiple properties and decades of acquisitions. 

ARTDAI’s CDMS platform automatically ingests collection records from any format: appraisals, insurance schedules, purchase invoices, Excel files, PDFs, scanned paper records, photographs, and more. Proprietary AI technology identifies objects, structures data, flags duplicates, and builds a comprehensive, searchable database without manual data entry. Every subsequent transaction — purchases, updated appraisals, restoration work, loans to museums, relocations between properties — tracks automatically in one interface with complete audit trails. 

The platform generates carrier-ready insurance schedules, estate planning reports for trustees and beneficiaries, cost basis documentation for tax attorneys, portfolio concentration analysis, geographic exposure reports, and loan collateral documentation on demand. Family offices gain immediate visibility into where high-value works are concentrated across properties, complete provenance tracking for multi-generational transitions, and the ability to respond to requests same-day rather than spending weeks reconstructing information. 

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. 

BridgeWise, the global leader in AI for wealth, today announced the acquisition of Chicago-based Context Analytics, the top AI-powered alternative data processing company, used by tier-one financial firms including S&P Global Market Intelligence. 

By merging BridgeWise’s institutional-grade investment intelligence platform – already embedded in financial institutions across Asia, Europe, and South America – with Context Analytics’ expertise in unstructured financial data processing, the consolidated company now provides a level of asset analysis completeness that stands alone in the industry, setting the stage for the next evolution of AI for financial services. The combined offering delivers a complete solution, from data processing to analytics and engagement, in a single integrated system, establishing the world’s first vertically integrated, wealth-native intelligence infrastructure. 

BridgeWise has long set the standard for compliant, multilingual AI recommendations and analysis across more than 70,000 global assets. By integrating Context Analytics, which uses proprietary technology to transform news, social media, and thousands of pages of complex filings into numeric, machine-readable data and timely sentiment scores, BridgeWise is now uniquely capable of decoding the full spectrum of market information, providing a holistic solution for banks, brokers, investment managers, and financial service providers in the capital markets. 

Claro Advisors, a wealth management firm with approximately $1.5 billion in assets under management1, today announced the launch of its new AI-native wealth management platform to help financial advisors use technology to become more efficient and better serve clients. 

The platform utilizes technology from NDVR, a wealth management technology company that Claro Advisors acquired in November 2025. With the acquisition of NDVR and its technology, Claro Advisors now offers a suite of proprietary AI tools designed to help financial advisors with CRM and practice management, portfolio management, and tools to manage day-to-day tasks – all through a single integrated system under one roof. 

Claro Advisors was founded in 2012 by Belanger, a former financial advisor at Morgan Stanley. NDVR was founded in 2019 by Michael Simon, the former Chairman and CEO of LogMeIn, who led the company during its 2009 IPO on the Nasdaq. As part of Claro Advisors’ acquisition of NDVR, Simon joins Claro Advisors as Executive Chairman and Founder. 

Convr AI®, the leading artificial intelligence (AI) company serving commercial insurance organizations with its underwriting workbench is pleased to announce the hiring of Eli O’Donohue as Head of Data and AI Underwriting Solutions.

In this role, O’Donohue will lead business solutions, employing technical sales resources to further strengthen the bridge between Convr’s cutting-edge AI technology and customer requirements for the Convr AI Underwriting Workbench.

With extensive experience in extracting business value from data deposits across commercial P&C enterprises, O’Donohue has a proven track record of customer success driving accelerated time-to-value for a broad array of customers. Most recently, he headed Data Strategy for PCMI in Chicago, Ill. There he supported product strategy, user experience refinement, and data ecosystem growth through strategic data partners. 

Drake Software® today announced significant enhancements to Drake Portals®, further strengthening its position as a secure, award-winning solution designed to streamline collaboration between tax professionals and their clients. The latest improvements include intelligent document classification, enhanced client checklists, and new integration with Drake Workflow™, all focused on reducing friction, saving time, and improving the end-to-end taxpayer experience. 

The newest enhancement — document classification — automatically identifies and organizes client-uploaded IRS forms and documents, helping tax professionals spend less time sorting files and more time serving their clients. By reducing manual review and improving document accuracy, Drake Portals continues to simplify one of the most time-consuming parts of the tax preparation process. 

In addition to document classification, Drake Portals now offers improved client checklists, making it easier for taxpayers to understand exactly what documents are needed and track their progress throughout the filing process. This clarity helps reduce back-and-forth communication and creates a more confident, guided experience for clients. 

Today, FinLink, the leading networking and growth platform for financial professionals, announced a strategic partnership with Rafa.ai, the leading AI transformation partner in Fintech, to rebuild its platform as an AI-native marketplace. This transformation is designed to generate measurable economic outcomes for every user on the network. 

Most professional networks in financial services have become graveyards. Thousands of profiles, but almost zero transactions. Advisors sign up, scroll, and leave because the platform never delivers a single dollar of new business or valuable relationships. 

The financial services networking category has followed a pattern that Andreessen Horowitz recently documented in its research on AI-era marketplaces: platforms acquire users but fail to generate sufficient value to retain them. Customer acquisition costs run high. Lifetime value stays low. The marketplace stalls. 

FiscalNote Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: NOTE), a global leader in AI-driven policy and regulatory intelligence, today announced a major expansion into the rapidly growing political prediction market, a category attracting increased attention as interest in outcome-based forecasting accelerates. The Company has introduced a preview experience at PoliticalPredictions.com, highlighting its plans to establish a presence across multiple layers of the political prediction ecosystem, leveraging the Company’s distinctive portfolio of relevant datasets, advanced AI capabilities, policy-focused customers, and deep domain expertise. 

The addressable opportunity for political prediction markets is expanding rapidly as market-based forecasting gains mainstream attention and adoption. Growth across prediction markets more broadly has been driven by rising consumer interest in outcome-based insights, with monthly trading volumes in the billions of dollars and surging participation around major events — including record activity tied to the Super Bowl — highlighting the rapid expansion of event-driven forecasting markets. As prediction-based engagement extends beyond traditional domains such as sports into political and policy outcomes, regulatory frameworks are beginning to provide clearer pathways for lawful innovation, creating opportunity for added scale across an expanding set of use cases. These dynamics create a timely opportunity to bring credible, policy-informed insight to an emerging category that is increasingly shaping how outcomes are anticipated and understood. 

To further strengthen its position as it enters this market, FiscalNote has engaged leading experts in prediction markets, regulation, and market design. FiscalNote has appointed Dr. Laila Mintas, an authority in the design, regulation and commercialization of prediction markets, as a Strategic Advisor for this initiative. Dr. Mintas brings more than two decades of hands-on experience building and advising regulated betting and prediction platforms, with a track record spanning sports, iGaming, and digital markets. Her background includes global senior executive and advisory roles, including leadership roles at Sportradar (SRAD), FIFA, and CONCACAF. With Dr. Mintas’s extensive experience in market design, regulatory engagement, and platform launch and scale, she will advise FiscalNote on market credibility, regulatory considerations, and go-to-market strategy as it develops its political prediction offerings. 

Infosys (NSE: INFY) (BSE: INFY) (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, today announced a strategic collaboration with Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, to develop and deliver advanced enterprise AI solutions to companies across telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, and software development. The collaboration will begin in telecommunications with a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence to build and deploy AI agents tailored to industry-specific operations. The collaboration will further expand across industries, including financial services, manufacturing, and software development. 

At its core, the collaboration integrates Anthropic’s Claude models, including Claude Code, with Infosys Topaz AI offerings to help enterprises automate complex workflows, accelerate software delivery, and adopt AI with the governance and transparency that regulated industries require. In financial services, AI agents will help firms detect and assess risk faster, automate compliance reporting, and deliver more personalized customer interactions – such as tailoring financial advice based on a client’s full account history and market conditions. 

The collaboration reflects a shared commitment to ensuring AI drives real transformational value, not just efficiency gains. Together, Infosys and Anthropic aim to help clients reimagine the enterprise operating model by combining deep industry expertise, frontier AI, and engineering scale into one unified approach. 

Jump, a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for financial advisors and other financial services providers, today announced a strategic partnership with Wealth.com, the industry’s leading estate and tax planning platform. The integration allows advisors who use both platforms to seamlessly pull estate planning data from Wealth.com into Jump’s pre-meeting preparation experience and, over time, push structured estate-related updates from Jump back into Wealth.com. 

The integration brings Wealth.com estate planning households, roles and document status into Jump’s pre-meeting experience alongside meeting history and other connected data. This gives advisors a more complete view of each client and makes it easier to identify gaps, missing roles or outdated documents. By reducing manual work around estate planning and meeting preparation, the integration builds on Jump’s mission to help advisors reclaim time for higher-value work – time that more than 90 percent of Jump users report allocating toward revenue-producing activities – and enables advisors to focus their client conversations where they matter most. 

Jump’s Insights Report, released earlier this year, reveals that estate planning is discussed in roughly 45 percent of advisor-client meetings and is highly correlated with positive client sentiment. By making this information readily available during meeting preparation, the integration helps advisors engage more confidently in these conversations and deliver a stronger client experience. 

Kestra Holdings, a leading wealth management company serving independent financial professionals and firms nationwide, today announced the development of a new client portal experience for its affiliated advisors. Called the Kestra Investor Solution, the new performance reporting and client portal experience will come with elevated levels of technology and service support for advisors and their end-investor clients. 

The Kestra Investor Solution is powered by Addepar, a global data and AI platform. The solution will build upon Addepar’s data aggregation, portfolio intelligence, and performance reporting expertise to achieve unparalleled integration with Kestra’s ecosystem. 

The Kestra Investor Solution is currently in pilot with select Kestra-affiliated firms and is planned for a phased rollout across Kestra Financial, Kestra Private Wealth Services, and Bluespring Wealth Partners beginning in the fall of this year. 

Switzerland has marked a new milestone in how AI is governed and deployed in financial services. In a first-of-its-kind joint initiative, Swiss-based companies LatticeFlow AI and Unique AI have delivered a FINMA-aligned technical blueprint that translates the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) principles into concrete technical assessments, providing banks with audit-ready evidence to evaluate, deploy and continuously oversee AI systems across banking-specific use cases, such as Know Your Customer (KYC), chatbot assistants, and Anti-Money Laundering (AML). 

The assessment, available on this page, was conducted by LatticeFlow AI on the Investment Insights Agent, an agentic AI solution developed by Swiss-founded fintech Unique AI. The solution is designed to personalize investment recommendations and overall investment rationales for relationship managers and client advisors, enabling faster, more informed decision-making. 

By mapping FINMA’s guidance (FINMA guidance 08/2024) to measurable technical controls (including testing, monitoring, explainability, and model robustness), the blueprint shows how banks can move from policy and abstract principles to audit-ready evidence. 

Lendbuzz, an AI-based fintech company that helps consumers obtain better access to credit when purchasing a vehicle, announced today that it has closed its first transaction of 2026, a $246 million securitization (“LBZZ 2026-1”) collateralized by a pool of auto loans made to obligors and secured by new and used automobiles, light duty trucks, and vans. 

LBZZ 2026-1 issued five classes of notes: Class A-1, Class A-2, Class B, Class C, Class D. The LBZZ 2026-1 notes have been rated by Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA) as K1+, AAA, AA, A and BBB-. 

Maestro AI, a vertical artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform built for mortgage origination, today announced it has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by New Stack Ventures, with participation from Family VC, ZFO, Roark’s Drift, and a group of local angel investors. The capital will accelerate go-to-market efforts, expand platform capabilities, and scale adoption across the mortgage industry. 

Maestro AI was founded and is led by mortgage industry veteran and serial founder David Rogove, who previously built and sold mortgage fintech company Wemlo to RE/MAX Holdings, Inc.. The leadership team includes Chief Technology Officer Sugi Venugeethan, who brings deep expertise in AI agent frameworks, Chief Operating Officer Chelsea Balak, who previously worked alongside Rogove at Wemlo, and Joe Roos, a local angel investor and family office CIO at ZFO, who provides strategic finance support. 

Maestro AI delivers an agentic AI operating system that orchestrates mortgage workflows across teams and systems, enabling lenders to automate critical processes without replacing their existing loan origination technology stack. The solution addresses an industry that remains highly manual and fragmented, where disconnected systems and human-intensive workflows drive cost and slow loan production. 

Model ML today announced the acquisition of Captide, the leading financial data layer that turns complex global corporate filings and disclosures into LLM-ready documents and data for AI agents. 

The acquisition, just weeks after the fintech raised $75m in funding from leading US and UK investors, expands Model ML’s AI workflow builder, enabling its AI agents to reliably retrieve, reason over, and cite global filings. Earlier in 2025, Model ML bought Flippr which added automated PowerPoint generation and verification agents to the platform. 

Founded in 2024 by Maurits Brinkman and Miquel Trafí Ruiz, Captide’s API takes SEC filings, earnings calls and more and structures them in a way AI models can easily and accurately understand at scale. Its platform already spans 2.5 million+ documents and supports 1 billion embeddings. 

Options Technology (Options), the leading provider of institutional-grade infrastructure, normalised market data and managed services for global financial markets, today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the Crossvale business, a US and EU-based leader in application and platform modernization. 

The proposed acquisition significantly strengthens Options’ ability to help financial services institutions modernize legacy environments, reduce technology debt, and accelerate adoption of private cloud and AI, all within a secure, compliant operating model purpose-built for regulated markets. 

The acquisition also reflects strong market tailwinds, including a growing wave of public cloud repatriation programs across the sector, as firms seek greater cost predictability, operational control, and regulatory assurance. By combining Options’ secure private cloud with Crossvale’s modernization expertise, clients can modernize at pace while maintaining full control over data, workloads, and risk. 

Pramata, the leader in contract intelligence and commercial relationship context, today announced the launch of its contract intelligence extension that is compatible with the Claude Cowork Legal plugin that is currently available in research preview, bringing unprecedented contract intelligence capabilities to Pramata’s enterprise users. This extension enables legal, finance, and operations teams to access comprehensive commercial relationship context directly within Claude’s AI-powered interface, transforming how organizations negotiate, review, and leverage their contract portfolios. 

Unlike traditional contract management solutions that treat agreements as isolated documents, Pramata provides a unified view of commercial relationships across entire contract portfolios, encompassing master agreements, amendments, orders, negotiation histories, and playbook standards. When used in conjunction with the Claude Cowork Legal plugin, Pramata’s platform enables users to make informed decisions based on the full scope of their historical data and business relationships. 

Pramata’s extension addresses a critical gap in enterprise AI adoption: While AI platforms become increasingly sophisticated, they lack access to the proprietary commercial relationship data that enterprises need to make accurate, context-aware decisions. Pramata’s solution provides this missing layer by connecting an enterprise organization’s structured contract intelligence to AI-enabled workflows that leverage the Claude Cowork Legal plugin. 

Sphinx, the company building browser-native compliance agents for financial institutions, today announced it has raised a $7.1 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital. The funding will be used to scale Sphinx’s agentic compliance workforce as banks and fintechs increasingly rely on it for core AML, KYC, and KYB operations. 

Unlike traditional RegTech software, Sphinx does not ask teams to adopt another system. Its agents work directly inside the tools institutions already use, including case management systems, third-party portals, PDFs, email, and internal dashboards, to perform the work of a human compliance analyst. Agents review alerts, conduct AML and KYB checks, gather supporting research, draft RFIs, and capture their reasoning in a complete, regulator-ready audit trail. Teams typically go live in days, without integrations or system replacements. 

Sphinx’s browser-native architecture has allowed it to operate globally from day one, adapting to different workflows and regulatory requirements across more than a dozen regions. Customers include banks, public companies, and fast-growing fintechs that use Sphinx to eliminate manual review work, reduce backlogs, and scale operations without hiring additional analysts. 

Tavant, a leading platform-powered AI transformation specialist for lenders, today launched TOUCHLESS® Servicing Portal, expanding its TOUCHLESS platform beyond origination into post-close servicing. The unified origination and servicing experience enables borrowers to manage their mortgage journey – from application through servicing – all in one place. The servicing portal currently supports more than 400,000 borrowers nationwide. 

TaxRock today announced the launch of TaxRock 2.0, introducing an AI-powered approach to managing IRS exposure that moves organizations beyond reactive monitoring. 

Most teams managing IRS exposure aren’t failing to do the work — they’re operating within systems built around periodic transcript retrievals, filing events, and IRS notices that often arrive long after an underlying issue begins to develop. This creates extended periods of increasing risk with limited visibility. 

TaxRock 2.0 builds on a prior generation of the platform that operates inside live production environments. Over time, hundreds of businesses and professionals used the system, stress-tested its capabilities, and identified improvements. 

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. 

Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, today announced Cash Line, a breakthrough revolving line of credit that gives consumers ongoing access to money as needed. 

Cash Line leapfrogs the unreliable and often predatory short-term options currently available. While traditional cash advance apps promise high limits, they often approve consumers for far less, layer on hidden fees, and provide unpredictable access, leaving millions of Americans without affordable options when they need it most. 

Uptiq, the AI platform purpose-built for financial services, today announced it has raised $25 million in Series B funding from a group of leading strategic and financial investors across banking, fintech, and enterprise software. The round was led by Curql, with participation from Silverton Partners, 645 Ventures, Broadridge, Green Visor Capital, Live Oak Ventures, First Capital, Epic Ventures, Tau Ventures, and Evolution VC. 

While financial institutions are eager to adopt AI, most struggle to move beyond pilots due to regulatory complexity, fragmented systems, and the lack of domain-ready solutions. Uptiq was built to solve this problem. Unlike horizontal AI platforms, Uptiq delivers pre-packaged, production-ready AI applications and digital workers designed specifically for financial services. These solutions deploy quickly, integrate with existing core systems, and meet enterprise-grade compliance requirements from day one. 

All Uptiq solutions are powered by Qore, the company’s AI orchestration platform that combines document intelligence, a deep library of financial skills, multi-agent workflows, and secure integrations into a single system. With Qore, developers can build financial AI applications using natural language prompts and pre-built financial capabilities, without assembling fragmented AI stacks or rebuilding compliance layers from scratch. Qore handles document processing, financial reasoning, permissions, auditability, and integration with core systems out of the box.