AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 3/6/26

ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ:ACIW), an original innovator in global payments technology, today announced the launch of ACI Connetic for Cards, a next generation, fully integrated, modernized card payments suite within ACI Connetic, the industry’s first unified cloud-native payments hub, bringing together account-to-account (A2A), card payments and AI-driven fraud prevention on one platform. 

With ACI’s market‑leading Acquiring, Issuing and ATM and Self-Service Banking solutions processing more than 300 billion card transactions annually, ACI Connetic for Cards advances this proven capability – unifying ACI’s global strengths and capabilities onto one next-generation, unified, cloud-native platform. The enterprise grade modular suite supports the full transaction lifecycle of every payment – capturing and authenticating data across all channels, intelligently routing transactions to the appropriate hosts or networks, and securely authorizing and clearing to support settlement of payments between institutions. By unifying these mission-critical functions, ACI Connetic for Cards provides the scale, resiliency and advanced functionality needed to modernize card payment processing operations, drive new customer experiences and business growth. 

Despite the rise of real-time payments, cards continue to dominate globally. Fueled by contactless adoption, e-commerce growth and B2B digitization, global card transactions totaled 776 billion in 2024 and are projected to reach 1.1 trillion annually in 2029, a 43 percent increase over 2024. * 

Addepar, a global data and AI platform empowering investment professionals to turn complex financial information into actionable intelligence, today announced the launch of Addison, its new native AI experience embedded within the platform. The release marks a pivotal step in Addepar’s strategy to deploy native AI, intelligent agents, and intuitive workflows across the investment lifecycle, enabling clients to achieve new levels of operating leverage and deliver more consistent, trusted outcomes at scale. 

Addison is built on Addepar’s unified data foundation, proven by serving the world’s most sophisticated firms globally over more than 15 years. It amplifies Addepar’s core capabilities that help investment professionals cut through complexity across portfolios, data and workflows. With permission-aware access and traceable outputs grounded in real portfolio context, Addison delivers insights that fulfill the trust, transparency and accountability demands of financial services. Using natural language, firms that opt-in can quickly analyze key portfolio information including performance drivers, exposures and liquidity to turn complex questions into clear, contextual answers. 

Addepar has built the future of intelligent investment management, with Addison at the core of the platform experience. Addepar’s continued investment in Addison will add further capabilities including proactive insight delivery enriched with market-aware context and cited sources, as well as agentic workflows—built with humans in the loop—to streamline data operations, client intelligence and client management workflows, from data remediation to analytics, forecasting and reporting. 

ADP® today announced the launch of a new destination within ADP Marketplace, the world’s largest digital HR storefront, designed to help organizations discover and deploy AI agents that seamlessly integrate with ADP and accelerate work across the entire employee lifecycle. This growing ecosystem of AI solutions empowers HR teams, managers, and employees with simple solutions that make work easier. 

AI agents can orchestrate workflows, which helps organizations streamline operations and focus on higher value work. The new agents go beyond traditional AI-enabled tools by planning, taking action, and completing multistep tasks. 

Partners offering Agents and AI features in the ADP Marketplace as part of their solution must agree to comply with ADP Marketplace’s AI principles regarding human oversight, monitoring, explainability and mitigating bias. These principles are based on the same AI principles ADP follows when developing its own products. 

Altruist, the tech-forward wealth platform for independent advisors, announced that Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management (Gerber Kawasaki), a Santa Monica-based registered investment advisor managing more than $4 billion in client assets, has selected Altruist as a custodial partner. 

Gerber Kawasaki chose Altruist for its enterprise-ready infrastructure, self-clearing custodial model, fractional share trading capabilities, and unified platform for account opening, trading, portfolio management, billing, and reporting. 

Gerber Kawasaki will also use Hazel, Altruist’s AI platform, to deliver high-impact services, such as tax planning, to more clients. 

Sowell Management (Sowell), a leading Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) serving financial advisors and their clients nationwide, today announced that it has partnered with Altruist to offer custodial services and support to the firm’s advisors. Through the new enterprise partnership, Sowell’s advisors will also have access to Hazel, Altruist’s AI platform that was built to help advisors expand their businesses while deepening client relationships and seeking better overall outcomes.  

Altruist is a tech-forward wealth management platform focused on delivering better results for independent registered investment advisors (RIAs). Hazel is the AI platform built by Altruist to help unify and automate a firm’s knowledge from conversations, emails, documents, CRM data and calendars, with market, regulatory and custodial insights. Hazel can help create personalized tax plans, capture and summarize discussions, draft follow-ups, answer questions instantly, and prioritize tasks. 

Partnering with Altruist is the latest step Sowell is taking to enhance its technology offering and continue integrating AI responsibly into the firm’s tech stack. Leveraging advanced capabilities will benefit the entire firm and enable small- to mid-sized advisors throughout Sowell to compete on a level playing field with larger practices. 

april, the embedded, AI tax platform, today announced the launch of a new integrated tax platform built specifically for high-integrity wealth management and advisory firms. The first-of-its-kind platform gives financial advisors a real-time view into client tax workflows, documents and insights while enabling a more efficient filing process—turning tax planning and filing into a consistent source of growth opportunities across the firm. 

The new offering is built to provide advisor visibility and practice management capabilities year-round, alongside tax preparation during filing season. 

The integrated tax platform is built atop april’s nationwide tax coverage and trusted AI-powered tax engine, and originally created to help financial advisors stay in the loop while offering clients a fully managed, hands-off tax filing experience in which april’s U.S.-based, credentialed tax professionals prepare and file the return. 

Arch, a modern platform for automating private markets workflows with AI, and Bipsync, an AI-powered investment workspace purpose-built for institutional investors, today announced an integration that automates the categorization and delivery of private investment documents from Arch directly into Bipsync. As a result, institutional investors including endowments, foundations and large family offices can identify and consolidate previously siloed private markets data, eliminating manual data uploads and reconciliation while improving efficiency and accuracy. Once in Bipsync, this data becomes part of a firm’s institutional knowledge, where it can be analyzed alongside proprietary research, investment memos, meeting notes, market data and other critical contexts. 

Through the integration, key private investment documents—including quarterly reports, financial statements, capital calls, distributions and investor communications—are automatically collected then transferred from Arch into Bipsync. Documents are classified by fund, manager, asset class and effective date, allowing investment teams to quickly search, filter and reference materials within Bipsync’s centralized system-of-record. By ensuring documents are consistently delivered, accurately categorized and readily discoverable, the integration helps operations and investment teams reduce administrative burden, minimize human error and strengthen cross-team collaboration. Teams using Bipsync can incorporate Arch-sourced data into their proprietary research contexts related to specific funds, managers and contacts, and trigger downstream investment processes. For many shared clients, the integration replaces hours of manual tagging each week with an automated, set-once workflow. 

Bipsync’s AI-powered investment workspace empowers institutional investors to capture, structure and leverage collective intelligence across the full investment lifecycle, from diligence and pipeline management to ongoing monitoring and reporting. Trusted by the world’s largest asset owners and fund managers representing over $4 trillion in combined AUM, Bipsync supports customizable AI-powered workflows tailored to unique investment processes. By embedding data from Arch directly into this structured research and diligence environment, teams can move seamlessly from document ingestion to analysis and decision-making. 

Avalara, Inc., the agentic tax and compliance leader, today announced it has acquired Versori, a next-generation integration platform company specializing in automated connector development powered by agentic AI workflows. Deal terms were not disclosed. 

The acquisition strengthens Avalara’s ability to scale integrations across thousands of systems while advancing its long-term strategy to deliver real-time, always-on, audit-ready compliance as part of every transaction worldwide. 

Versori brings a modern, automation-first approach to integration, enabling faster deployment, simplified maintenance, and global scalability across enterprise systems, including ERPs, ecommerce platforms, marketplaces, and financial applications, without compromising accuracy or reliability. 

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America® (Guardian) today announced a strategic partnership with Avantos, an AI-native operating system built to modernize how financial institutions onboard and service clients. 

With Avantos’ platform, Guardian’s financial advisors will soon be able to leverage next-generation technology to deepen client relationships and better support their holistic financial well-being. Over time, Guardian’s financial advisors will have access to additional Avantos-powered capabilities, with AI tools designed to help advisors support all facets of clients’ investment and protection needs. 

In addition to using the platform for its advisors, Guardian is also a strategic insurance partner for Avantos and has made an investment in the company. Guardian’s early-stage investment in Avantos underscores its confidence in the transformative potential of AI and its commitment to leveraging the technology to modernize its platforms and further enhance its wealth management capabilities. 

Aye Finance, India’s leading provider of business loans to the underserved micro-scale MSMEs, has completed a pilot that uses the predictive capability of Gen AI technology, which will enhance its formal credit to the trading businesses in tier 2 and beyond cities. The cutting-edge solution developed in-house utilises Generative AI and Machine Learning (ML) models to estimate business sales directly from images of store premises and other parameters. This significantly reduces the ‘cost-to-serve’ for the micro-enterprise segment. 

Aye Finance is the first NBFC to have received equity investment from Google Capital in 2018. It set up its Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Unit in 2019 and has successfully deployed many customised ML models at key processes across the customer lifecycle. This optimizes the unit economics and allows inclusion of a larger population of the grassroots businesses. 

The newly developed system serves a critical segment of trading stores by transforming their unstructured data—specifically, store images—into actionable financial insights. It is built on Aye Finance’s extensive internal datasets and is rigorously tested for consistency.   

Basware, a global leader in Invoice Lifecycle Management (ILM), is redefining how the world’s finance teams turn accounts payable into a strategic lever for cash, compliance, and growth. Today, the company named Donna Wilczek Chief Product and Technology Officer to lead its next era of AI-driven innovation and growth. The former Basware board member and Coupa executive will lead product strategy, technology vision, and the roadmap that will make Basware the defacto standard in intelligent finance. Wilczek will join Basware’s Executive Team and report directly to CEO Jason Kurtz. 

A veteran technology leader, Wilczek has more than two decades of experience driving product and innovation strategy for B2B companies. She most recently served as Chief Product Officer at Oomnitza where she spearheaded innovation strategy for the enterprise IT asset management platform. Prior to Oomnitza, Wilczek spent 13 years at Coupa, most recently as EVP of Strategy and Innovation, where she helped build the company from an early-stage startup to over $1 billion in annual billings and an $8 billion valuation. Before Coupa, she held roles with TriNet, IBM and Accenture. 

BILL (NYSE: BILL), the intelligent finance platform trusted by nearly half a million businesses to manage, move and maximize their money, today announced a partnership with Rillet, the AI-native ERP, to streamline financial operations for growing businesses and accounting firms. As part of the partnership, the companies will launch a real-time, native two-way integration that continuously aligns AP, spend, and financial data across both systems – providing finance teams with a real-time financial position and the clarity and confidence to make informed decisions as they scale. 

As growing businesses modernize, many are turning to AI-native finance platforms designed to operate in real time. Yet when critical tools aren’t continuously aligned, fragmented workflows and disconnected systems can still create silos, limit visibility, and delay reporting at close. The new integration addresses this challenge through real-time, bi-directional data synchronization. 

With this integration, AP, spend, and expense data – including vendors, accounts, bills, credits, and all payment activity are automatically synchronized across BILL and Rillet for supported workflows, thereby reducing errors and eliminating unnecessary manual steps. A real-time, two-way sync keeps financial records continuously aligned across both platforms, preventing duplication and preserving data integrity. Deep links allow teams to move seamlessly between systems, accelerating review and reconciliation. 

Billtrust, the leader in B2B accounts receivable (AR) workflow and payment software, today announced the availability of Agentic Credit Lines, a new AI‑powered capability that helps finance teams proactively identify payment risk and make faster, more confident credit decisions. 

Agentic Credit Lines, embedded in the Billtrust Credit Review workflow, analyzes payment history, utilization patterns, and external credit data using Billtrust’s proprietary network of 13 million buyers and 25 years of B2B payment intelligence. It delivers prioritized account reviews and clear, audit‑ready credit limit recommendations with transparent rationale, giving finance teams greater visibility, stronger portfolio control, and earlier detection of emerging risks. 

Credit management has traditionally relied on static rules and manual reviews, leaving organizations vulnerable to late payments, unmanaged credit limits, and avoidable bad debt. For AR teams, the impact is clear: rising DSO, worsening aging buckets, and quietly eroding working capital, often before any warning signs appear. As AI reshapes financial operations, finance leaders need tools that enhance, rather than replace, human judgment, and Agentic Credit Lines delivers with transparent, data‑driven recommendations that let teams act quickly while maintaining full oversight and compliance. 

BlackRock has appointed Citi Investor Services to provide select middle office functions for $4.0 trillion in U.S. domiciled iShares ETFs on the Aladdin platform. 

Expanding on the long-standing partnership between BlackRock and Citi, this integrated operating model streamlines the lifecycle of an ETF order, offering enhanced transparency into basket composition, order status, and settlement. 

This latest asset servicing collaboration between BlackRock and Citi follows from a separate mandate in 2021 when BlackRock appointed Citi as an additional post-trade service provider for U.S. domiciled iShares ETFs. As part of the 2021 mandate, Citi provides custodial, fund administration, and transfer agency services to these ETFs. 

Blend Labs, Inc. (NYSE: BLND), a leading digital origination platform for banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders, today announced the launch of Blend Autopilot, the first agent of Blend Intelligent Origination. 

Traditional mortgage origination averages 30 to 60 days and costs $11,000 or more per loan; a cycle plagued by batch-oriented review processes where borrowers wait hours or days for a loan officer to review and assess next steps. Blend Autopilot changes that by reviewing borrower documents and application data in real time, completing compliance checks, generating follow-ups, updating application fields, and delivering proactive needs lists in as little as 15 seconds. As a non-decisioning tool, it automates document review and follow-ups but leaves all credit decisions to underwriters and Automated Underwriting Systems (AUS), reducing manual effort, compressing timelines, and engaging borrowers at the moment of intent. 

Despite decades of technology investment, mortgage origination has remained a batch-oriented process with borrowers waiting on loan officers and vice versa. That mismatch costs lenders in three compounding ways: borrowers disengage when follow-ups arrive past the moment of motivation, loan officers spend hours on routine review, and inconsistent manual review creates uneven loan quality across an organization. Blend Autopilot eliminates all three. 

Cass Information Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CASS), a leading provider of enterprise payment and spend management solutions, today announced a strategic partnership with Caspian, the AI command center for customs refunds. Together, the companies will deliver a comprehensive tariff cost management solution designed to help U.S. importers improve cash flow, strengthen compliance, and better understand their true landed product costs. 

Ongoing tariff complexity and difficult customs processes continue to elevate compliance and financial risks for U.S. importers. Shippers need processes and technology that improve financial controls and supply chain resiliency, while reducing the work they face each day. 

The Cass–Caspian partnership will deliver an integrated solution connecting payment, audit, compliance, recovery, and improved visibility. To enhance Cass payments and reporting, Caspian will contribute AI‑driven HTS modeling, detailed tariff audit capabilities, refund identification, and full support for post summary corrections (PSC), protests, and duty drawback programs. 

CINC Systems, the largest and most innovative technology partner in community association management (CAM) industry, today announced the official launch of Payables+, the market’s most advanced accounts payable (AP) automation solution. Payables+ delivers a powerful combination of artificial intelligence, seamless invoice processing, and integrated electronic payments — all designed to streamline financial workflows, eliminate manual back-office bottlenecks, and minimize human errors and fraud. 

Additionally, Payables+ offers its users the ability to generate incremental revenue with digital payment transactions. This enables community association management companies to transform accounts payable from a pure cost center into a high-margin revenue operation. 

With mounting expectations for operational efficiency in a competitive CAM market, Payables+ automated invoice ingestion, coding, and payments provides CAM companies the ability to grow without proportional increases in staffing. Consolidating AP automation, intelligence, and payment execution into one seamless experience, CINC Systems helps finance leaders refocus talent on higher value work. 

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. 

ECI Software Solutions, Inc. (“ECI”), a leader in AI-powered, cloud-based business management software and services, has acquired Drypowder, a financial technology company focused on modernizing accounts receivable, billing, and digital payments for the building materials and construction industries. This acquisition accelerates ECI’s vision of delivering intelligent, embedded financial workflows across its industry-specific ERP platforms, helping customers improve the full invoice-to-cash lifecycle. 

In building materials and construction, field service, manufacturing, and distribution industries, credit accounts, project-based billing, service contracts, and multi-location operations are common. Relying on manual AR processes can slow collections, increase errors, create reconciliation challenges, and tie up working capital. Drypowder delivers purpose-built, industry-specific technology that integrates end-to-end invoice-to-cash processes into ECI ERPs, transforming payments from a disconnected task into a seamless operational experience. 

By uniting ERP data, digital payments, and AI-driven automation, the combined solution will help customers prioritize collections, predict cash flow, reduce risk, and automate routine AR workflows, freeing teams to focus on higher-value activities. 

ElevenLabs, the AI audio research and deployment company, released a new enterprise case study highlighting how Better.com, a leading AI-native home finance company, uses ElevenLabs Agents to automate mortgage conversations at scale. This empowers Better.com to provide significant cost savings, higher conversion, and a faster borrower experience while meeting the demands in a highly regulated industry. 

Better.com uses ElevenLabs Agents as the voice interface for Betsy™, its generative AI loan agent, to handle nearly 100,000 mortgage-related phone calls per month, automating 35.5% of borrower inquiries end to end. In 2025 alone, Betsy placed 1.89 million inbound and outbound calls, saving Better’s loan officers more than 1,666 hours of human time each month. 

These gains have allowed Better’s licensed consultants to shift away from repetitive follow-up tasks and focus on higher-value advisory work – helping borrowers navigate complex scenarios and make informed financial decisions. 

Family Office Club and Avestor Inc. announced a collaboration in which Family Office Club will license its Investor SuperIntelligence artificial intelligence toolset, comprising 40 core AI tools and hundreds of codified functions, to the Avestor community of over 500 capital raisers and fund managers. Under this licensing agreement, Avestor members now have access to advanced AI capabilities directly integrated into their investment management portal, which materially improves capital-raising, deal vetting, and investment platform development. 

Investor SuperIntelligence is the most advanced AI toolkit for investors, founders, and capital raisers globally. It codifies what founder Richard C. Wilson has learned over 19 years of growing his investor club, hosting 300 live events, and featuring 1,500 investors presenting and being interviewed. Over time, Family Office Club has collected exclusive data, and the tools represent over 225 AI use cases for its members. Each tool is pre-trained and point-and-click operational, with no training needed.  

The AI tools are built on the nuances learned after operating Family Office Club for just under 2 decades. They are designed to make founders and fund managers more thorough, disciplined, and effective as they build scalable investment platforms and communicate with investors at a higher level. 

CIBC Innovation Banking announced today that it has provided growth capital financing to Gradient AI (Gradient). This financing will support Gradient’s growth plans and development efforts to better serve clients and address evolving challenges across the insurance industry. 

Gradient is a leading enterprise software provider of artificial intelligence solutions in the insurance industry. The company’s solutions help improve loss ratios and profitability by predicting underwriting and claim risks with greater accuracy, as well as reducing quote turnaround times and claim expenses through intelligent automation. 

Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm that invests in high-growth, disruptive companies, today announced that Leland Lockhart joined the firm as Head of AI, further advancing the firm’s ongoing commitment to embedding AI capabilities across its portfolio. In this role, Lockhart will work with portfolio company management teams to drive AI strategy, innovation, and efficiencies across all functional areas to build long-term value creation. 

Lockhart brings over 15 years of experience in leveraging data science, AI, and machine learning to drive transformational growth. Most recently, he served as Executive Director of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Vista Equity Partners. Previously, Lockhart held senior technical roles at Kershner Trading Group, a proprietary trading and technology firm; XOR Data Exchange, a data exchange, aggregation, and analytics company; and Kasasa, a financial technology and marketing services company. He has also contributed to global AI governance through his work on the Business Roundtable AI Working Group and the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance, both of which bring together leaders from business, policy, and academia to advance responsible and ethical approaches to artificial intelligence. Lockhart also holds a U.S. patent in identity data security. 

This strategic hire highlights Great Hill’s meaningful investments in its Growth Team over the past year, including adding seasoned leaders in technology, financial services, and healthcare, and functional experts aligned to key areas of Great Hill’s value creation playbook such as revenue operations, talent, and AI enablement. 

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. 

Once enabled, a new GReminders meeting tab appears, giving advisors real‑time access to AI-generated summaries, scheduling activity and booking management inside each client record. 

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. 

Gryphon Investors (“Gryphon”), a San Francisco-based middle-market private investment firm, today announced it has completed a majority investment in HRSoft (“the Company”), a leading provider of enterprise compensation management software. Existing investor Bow River Capital will retain a minority stake, and the current executive team, led by Chief Executive Officer Joe Poxson, will continue to manage the business. Financial terms for the transaction were not disclosed. 

Based in Denver, Colorado, HRSoft delivers a purpose-built, low-code compensation management platform that enables enterprises to administer complex merit, bonus, long-term incentive, variable pay, and carried interest programs. The platform integrates with leading HRIS systems, including UKG and Workday, and supports configurable compensation structures, workflows, and reporting requirements. Its architecture enables organizations to manage increasingly complex pay programs with control and auditability. 

Demand for modern compensation solutions continues to grow as enterprises expand globally, implement multi-variable incentive frameworks, and navigate heightened regulatory and transparency expectations. Despite this complexity, many organizations continue to rely on inefficient manual workflows, creating operational risk and limiting visibility. 

During MWC Barcelona 2026, Huawei hosted the finance session themed “Powering Resilient Intelligence, Co-creating Finance Future”. At the event, Huawei announced a comprehensive upgrade of its Banking AI and Foundation Model Solutions, elevating core capabilities in Scenario, Technology, Systems Engineering, and Ecosystem. 

Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance BU, highlighted that in today’s world of uncertainty, banks must build resilience across multiple dimensions, ensuring multi-active redundancy to prevent system failures, reinforcing multi-layer security against cyberattacks, and laying a solid foundation for global financial institutions to accelerate into the AI era. 

Alvin Feng, President of Huawei Digital Finance International, delivered a speech titled “Beyond Digital: Towards AI-Infused Finance.” He emphasized that the transition from traditional banks to AI-driven banks brings profound changes in customer interactions, human-machine collaboration, decision-making approaches, system architecture, and customer experience. Banks need a clear blueprint that links business strategy with technology execution. 

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, the leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for financial advisors and other financial services providers, today announced Diana Cabrices has joined the company as Chief Evangelist. A recognized wealthtech growth expert and industry speaker, Cabrices will advance Jump’s advisor education, growth strategy content and data-backed coaching initiatives as the company continues to scale its productivity and organic growth solutions to advisors.  

In her role as Chief Evangelist, Cabrices will serve as a growth partner to advisory firms nationwide, delivering data-driven playbooks, live coaching, educational content and industry keynotes focused on improving in-meeting performance and accelerating organic growth. 

Cabrices brings more than a decade of experience in the financial advisor ecosystem to Jump, driving awareness and growth for wealthtech and financial services brands. She has been recognized as a ThinkAdvisor Luminary, InvestmentNews Female Trailblazer of the Year excellence awardee and Wealth Solutions Report Brand Advocacy Executive of the Year. Since entering wealthtech in 2016 following 15 years in sales and marketing, she has spoken on dozens of industry stages and hosted hundreds of advisor webinars. Her experience spans prospecting, marketing, branding, customer relationship management, estate planning, recruiting, M&A, succession planning and advisor communities, giving her a broad understanding of advisor growth challenges. 

Majesco, the insurance industry’s foremost innovator in cloud-native, AI-native software, today announced that Majesco L&AH Intelligent Core Suite has received an XCelent recognition for Advanced Technology in Celent’s report “2025 Policy Administration System: Life Insurance; North American Group/Voluntary Edition.” 

Celent’s report evaluates policy administration systems available to North American life insurers and profiles 21 PAS solutions, including Majesco L&AH Intelligent Core Suite and Majesco V3locity, across dimensions such as functionality, technology, implementation, pricing, and support. 

Majesco L&AH Intelligent Core Suite is designed to support group, voluntary benefits, worksite and individual carriers with modern policy administration and product configuration, backed by an extensible architecture built for integration across the ecosystem. Majesco has embedded AI directly into the solution to help insurers move beyond standalone tools, bringing intelligent assistance and automation into the workflow to streamline operations, improve decisioning, reduce operational costs, and elevate experiences across the policy lifecycle. 

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. 

MEXC, the fastest-growing global cryptocurrency exchange redefining a user-first approach to digital assets through true zero-fee trading, today announced the full deployment of its AI trading suite — six integrated tools that support the complete crypto investment workflow, from real-time market monitoring through to trade execution and portfolio management. The suite has served 1.57 million users recording approximately 100,000 daily interactions, and over 8.4 million intelligent responses in 2025. 

The six tools are designed to operate in sequence, each addressing a specific stage of the investment process. AI News Radar surfaces market-moving developments as they happen. AI Select List filters thousands of assets to identify those with genuine emerging momentum. AI Trending Search captures what the broader MEXC community is actively researching in real time. The AI assistant aptly named “Smart Candles” integrates technical pattern recognition with live news context to produce probabilistic price outlooks. MEXC AI, the platform’s conversational investment agent, converts upstream analysis into personalised position strategies and monitors portfolios continuously. AI Copy Trading enables users to follow live, performance-verified AI traders without constructing a strategy from scratch. 

Operating in sequence, these six tools create a fully integrated intelligence architecture, establishing a seamless end-to-end decision engine that transforms institutional-grade trading infrastructure into an accessible, always-on advantage for every user. 

Milemarker, a leading wealth management data infrastructure platform built on Snowflake, today announced the appointment of Adrienne Paulsen as Vice President of Operations. Paulsen brings over a decade of progressive leadership experience from Orion Advisor Solutions, where she most recently served as Senior Director overseeing Premier Service and Professional Service teams supporting $190M+ in annual recurring revenue. 

In her new role, Paulsen will lead operational strategy and execution across Milemarker’s growing client base of RIAs, broker-dealers, and family offices. She will oversee service delivery, professional services, and client success initiatives as the company continues to scale its platform of 130+ integrations. 

During her seven-plus years at Orion, Paulsen oversaw nine teams and 80+ professionals, delivering operational excellence for 1,500+ advisory firms and high-net-worth clients. She served as a trusted advisor to executive leadership, translating client needs and operational metrics into actionable business insights. Her expertise spans data reconciliation, professional services delivery, and executive stakeholder management in fast-paced SaaS environments. 

MSCI Inc. (NYSE: MSCI) announced today that Dinesh Gupta has joined the firm as Chief Data Officer and Global Head of Operations. Mr. Gupta comes to MSCI from Goldman Sachs, where he led AI and digitization efforts. Based in New York, he will report to Henry Fernandez, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. 

In this role, Mr. Gupta will lead MSCI’s global data organization, overseeing enterprise-wide data governance and ensuring the continued integrity and reliability of the firm’s data capabilities. He will advance a comprehensive data strategy aligned with MSCI’s business objectives and regulatory standards and lead the firm’s global data engineering and operations functions. 

Mr. Gupta joins MSCI with more than three decades of experience in the financial services industry, including across data engineering and AI innovation. At Goldman Sachs, he served as Partner, led the organization responsible for building AI platforms and machine-learning capabilities across a broad range of use cases and also led firmwide digitization initiatives. His work on AI and digitization spanned multiple Goldman businesses, including Investment Management, Consumer, Asset Management and Private Wealth Management. 

Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) has added Berenberg to its framework of dynamic currency hedging solutions, enabling Northern Trust’s clients to incorporate third-party currency management strategies, such as Berenberg’s AI based models, into their range of risk management choices. 

Northern Trust’s dynamic currency hedging solution allows clients to adjust hedge ratios based on real-time market conditions and model-driven forecasts. By incorporating capabilities from solutions such as Berenberg’s, Northern Trust’s clients can choose to add models that complement their investment strategies, helping them to reduce volatility and improve risk-adjusted returns. The solution is available across the US, UK, Europe, Australia, and Canada, and is designed to support both asset owners and asset managers. 

Berenberg is one of Europe’s oldest banks and is among the leaders in applying artificial intelligence to financial markets. Its proprietary FX alpha and risk models are designed to capture market signals and support dynamic risk management within currency hedging strategies. 

Today, OneVest announces the launch of its Agentic Wealth Operating System. This is not a new tool, a chatbot, or a feature set. It is an intelligent, institutional-grade engine where AI is not an add-on, it is the very fabric of the system. This is built to redefine how modern firms operate, scale, and compete by advancing passive dashboards with autonomous execution; a decisive shift from static software to intelligent execution from command to completion. The result is eliminating the massive “Legacy Tax” where advisors are buried in hours of manual labor every week, fragmented data, and AI that does little more than summarize notes. 

Wealth management is at an inflection point. For decades, firms have survived by layering “modern” interfaces over decaying legacy cores, rebranding incrementalism as innovation. The result is a massive pile of complexity instead of progress: slower operations, fragmented experiences, middle-office teams trapped in a cycle of repetitive data reconciliation, siloed workflows, and shrinking returns. 

While the rest of the industry remains enamored with AI “window-dressing” – chatbots that talk but cannot act – OneVest has built an engine of execution designed to elevate every stakeholder in the firm. Advisors are finally liberated from the “Swivel Chair” workflow. The Agentic Wealth OS handles the heavy lifting of opening accounts, initiating fund movements, and data entry. It prepares client summaries and handles the “operational drag,” allowing advisors to move from task managers back to relationship leaders, enhancing the advisor-client experience. OneVest is setting a new benchmark for the industry, one where AI doesn’t just inform decisions, but executes them. Where firms scale without sacrificing control or compliance, and where technology becomes a competitive advantage, not a bottleneck. 

Orion today announced a major milestone in its AI platform strategy at Ascent 2026: the enterprise version of Orion Denali AI is now live, with broader availability planned later this year to bring the same integrated AI experience to advisors and firms of all sizes. Orion also went live with two new AI Assistants – Report Assistant and Query Studio. Today’s news builds on Orion’s continued industry leadership and AI momentum, including an announcement earlier this week that it is expanding its ongoing collaboration with Anthropic. 

Denali AI brings firm-approved, permissioned data together inside Orion – across portfolio management, planning, CRM, reporting, and an extensive data network – so teams can ask one question and get a clear answer in the flow of work. It’s also available as a mobile and tablet app, so advisors can get the same answers and context wherever they work. Because it’s built into Orion’s connected wealthtech platform, Denali AI delivers broader context than standalone AI tools that only see part of an advisor’s tech stack with a consistent AI experience across workflows. By turning trusted data into ready-to-use insights and first drafts, Denali AI helps firms move faster, personalize at scale, and stay in control with reviewable outputs and human oversight. 

New insights from Orion’s 2026 Advisor Wealthtech Survey underscore the urgency. Only one in ten advisors is utilizing more advanced AI capabilities (agentic tools or cross-system AI integration), and nearly one-quarter (23%) report having no AI tools in place today. Meanwhile, advisors view AI and automation tools as the number one force multiplier for their firm’s growth and success, and 60% of advisors say using such tools to drive efficiency and personalization is a top priority for 2026. 

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. 

Paychex, Inc. (Nasdaq: PAYX), an industry-leading human capital management (HCM) company, announced today new AI-driven advancements within its Paycor® and Paychex Flex® platforms to streamline workforce management and increase efficiency for businesses. Major enhancements to the Paycor Smart Scheduler and new automated time and attendance features across both platforms embody the company’s commitment to infusing AI technology in its HCM platforms to democratize access to enterprise-grade AI innovations. 

According to Nucleus Research, modern workforce management automation can deliver measurable business value, returning an average of $12.24 for every dollar invested due to streamlined scheduling, improved staffing alignment, and reduced errors. Additionally, the research and industry analyst firm reports that automated scheduling can reduce scheduling time by up to 50% and meaningfully improve coverage and labor stability, making intelligent scheduling an essential tool for operational efficiency and workforce retention. 

Phemex, a user-first crypto exchange, unveiled the AI Bot, a tactical milestone of the Phemex AI-Native Revolution, following its landmark transition into an AI-native organization. This launch evolves artificial intelligence from a strategic vision into a high-performance “Intelligent Trading Partner,” shifting the industry paradigm from emotional manual execution to a disciplined “Human + AI Collaboration” model for its 10 million users worldwide. 

Earlier this year, Phemex introduced its AI-Native Initiative, committing to integrate artificial intelligence across internal operations and external product architecture. The launch of AI Bot serves as a live demonstration of that strategy in practice, moving beyond conceptual transformation into user-facing applications. 

Utilizing advanced machine learning to analyze millions of data points in real-time, the Phemex AI Bot automates complex quantitative strategies across Futures Grid, Spot Grid, and Martingale systems. Engineered with a “Risk-Aware Intelligence” , the engine prioritizes capital preservation by dynamically adjusting leverage and parameters based on historical volatility. This ensures that intelligence remains a tool for resilience, allowing traders to gain significant leverage from AI rather than losing their competitive edge to it. 

Pictet Asset Management, part of the independent Geneva-based Pictet Group, today announced the launch of the Pictet AI Enhanced US Equity ETF (PQUS). The ETF offers actively managed exposure to large-cap U.S. equities, using an AI-driven stock selection process that seeks consistent active alpha1 with low tracking error relative to the main U.S. equity benchmark. 

PQUS is the U.S. counterpart to the Pictet AI Enhanced International Equity ETF (PQNT), which launched in October 2025 among Pictet’s first U.S. ETFs, alongside the Pictet Cleaner Planet ETF (PCLN) and the Pictet AI & Automation ETF (PBOT). 

Both PQUS and PQNT are managed by the firm’s Quantitative Investments team, and utilize the same proprietary machine learning and AI models that power Pictet’s institutional strategies. 

QuantumStreet AI, a leading fintech specialized in building AI-powered indexes and forecasting models for institutional investors with more than $7.5 billion deployed globally, today announced the appointment of Marc Zieger as executive vice president of investment solutions. 

Zieger co-founded Scientific Beta, the smart beta index provider established by EDHEC-Risk Institute, and served as its head of North America from 2013 to 2022. Across nearly a decade, he helped build the business from launch to more than $60 billion in assets tracking its indexes across 60-plus institutional clients. Singapore Exchange acquired a majority stake in Scientific Beta in 2020 for approximately $250 million. 

He joins QuantumStreet AI from Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking, where he was director of quantitative investment solutions. His career spans more than 25 years across asset management and investment banking, with previous roles at BlackRock, Morningstar, Munich Re and Morgan Stanley. 

Revenue Analytics, a leader in AI-powered revenue and margin optimization, today announced the launch of a newly enhanced Climber RMS experience that empowers hotels at every stage of revenue maturity to automate pricing decisions, operate more strategically, and scale their revenue performance without added operational complexity. 

The enhanced Climber RMS platform introduces three progressive stages — Smart Pricing, Growth, and Pro — designed to align with a hotel’s commercial sophistication and operational needs. Built on a single unified system, Climber RMS enables hotels to begin with essential pricing automation and seamlessly evolve toward advanced AI-driven revenue strategies, all while maintaining full control, transparency, and performance visibility. 

Across all three stages, Climber RMS replaces manual, spreadsheet-driven workflows with intelligent automation. AI continuously monitors demand shifts, occupancy levels, and competitive movements, dynamically adjusting pricing recommendations to protect margins and capture incremental revenue opportunities in real time. 

S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) today announced the launch of DataXchange and AmendX, two lending solutions designed to modernize loan management by supporting more digital, standardized and scalable workflows for the rapidly expanding private credit and syndicated loan markets. As part of S&P Global Market Intelligence’s comprehensive Lending Solutions portfolio, these integrated offerings provide enhanced security and support both digital and analog processes to accommodate diverse lender preferences. 

The exponential growth in the loan market has created demand for robust technology solutions that enable administrative agents to focus on value-add tasks rather than manual administration. The platforms address critical operational challenges facing those agents transitioning from Excel-based processes and seeking scalable alternatives to costly, inflexible legacy systems. 

DataXchange serves as a centralized platform for agents to deliver syndicated and private loan notices to lenders through a self-managed workflow portal, designed to eliminate labor-intensive notice retrieval and resends. The platform incorporates AI-powered data categorization to automatically tag and organize unstructured documents, while maintaining agents’ preferred formats and operational workflows. DataXchange enhances lender experiences with self-service portals, addresses operational bottlenecks through scalable automation and operates on a no-fee model for lenders that removes traditional access barriers. 

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. 

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. 

Victory Capital Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: VCTR) (“Victory Capital” or “the Company”) today announced that it has named Molly Weiss as Chief Technology Officer and Head of Digital Innovation. In her new role with Victory Capital, Ms. Weiss will be a member of the Executive Committee and have overall responsibility for the Company’s technology infrastructure, including its artificial intelligence (AI) framework, and data and analytics platform. Additionally, she will lead the Direct Investor Business. 

Ms. Weiss brings more than two decades of experience in technology, sales and service, product management and operations. She was previously Group President of Wealth Platforms at Envestnet Financial Technology, with a focus on driving product expansion and strategy. During her tenure with the firm, Ms. Weiss also championed the launch of next-generation technology solutions and orchestrated transformative user experience initiatives. 

Wealth.com, the industry’s leading estate and tax planning platform, today announced that nationally recognized private wealth attorney Chris Nason has joined the company as head of private wealth. Nason joins Wealth.com from McDermott Will and Schulte, where he served as a partner in the firm’s San Francisco office, advising ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) families and international clients on complex estate and tax planning matters. 

In this role, Nason will lead the continued development of Wealth.com’s private wealth strategy, embedding substantive legal and tax expertise directly into the platform’s architecture, estate and tax planning workflows, advisor education initiatives and enterprise partnerships. He will work closely with product and engineering teams to ensure the platform reflects the technical precision required for sophisticated multigenerational and tax-sensitive planning. 

A graduate of Yale Law School, Nason served as an editor of the Yale Journal of International Law, was a fellow at the China Law Center and co-president of the Law and Africa Society. Prior to law school, he studied Chinese language and law at Peking University as a CSC Scholar. He has been recognized by Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch in America for Trusts and Estates (2021–2026), named “Up and Coming” by Chambers High Net Worth in Private Wealth Law (California, Northern) and selected as a Private Client Global Elite “Ones to Watch” honoree (2017–2021). Nason is admitted to practice in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.