AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 4/24/26

The Alliance Group (“Alliance”), a national consulting firm partnering with the Office of the CFO, today announced the launch of its AI & Data Analytics Practice, a new service offering designed to help finance organizations operationalize data and artificial intelligence capabilities in alignment with business priorities, regulatory expectations, and existing finance processes. 

The launch responds to growing demand across the Office of the CFO, where finance leaders are increasingly expected to deliver real-time insights, support enterprise-wide transformation initiatives, and manage expanding data volumes across fragmented systems. Many organizations continue to face gaps between data availability, process maturity, and the practical application of AI and these are challenges the new practice is specifically designed to address.  

The AI & Data Analytics Practice will focus on foundational improvements alongside targeted use cases for automation, advanced analytics, and AI.   

American Express today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Hypercard (Hyper), an agentic expense management company, adding to Amex’s AI expertise and capabilities across its commercial services business. Hyper’s team of AI experts will help American Express continue to build agentic tools and AI-powered solutions that help businesses automate processes and simplify operations. 

Founded in 2022, Hyper has focused on transforming expense management from a manual process into more autonomous workflows, successfully developing native AI agents that auto-categorize and file expenses, check them against budget and policy, and send reminders that submissions are due. In 2024, American Express and Hyper partnered to launch the Hypercard Rewards American Express card with embedded AI-powered expense agents leveraging the Agile Partner Platform. Since then, Hyper has continued to focus and refine its agentic expense management capabilities. 

Amex Business Membership brings together award-winning service, best-in-class card products, intelligent software and next-generation AI tools. Last month, Chairman and CEO Stephen J. Squeri outlined the company’s strategy and how AI is transforming the way we operate in his annual letter to shareholders, and the company announced plans to integrate the latest AI technology into products and services to help businesses automate processes and operate more efficiently. The acquisition of Hyper builds on these plans by bolstering the company’s AI talent and capabilities. 

AppZen, the AI-native platform for autonomous finance, today announced the launch of its AP Inbox Service Center. This Agent-native AP inbox solution fully automates how AP teams manage vendor email. The launch adds eight prebuilt AI Agents to AppZen Inbox, transforming it into a structured service center where every inbound vendor email becomes a trackable, auditable request. 

AP Inbox Service Center addresses one of the most persistent capacity constraints in enterprise finance. While invoice processing has seen significant investment in automation over the past decade, the vendor-facing communication layer surrounding invoicing has remained largely manual. Payment status inquiries, bank change requests, duplicate invoice resolution, vendor statement reconciliation, W-9 submissions, and remittance requests still require AP team members to read each email, research relevant records, draft responses, and route them to the right person. AppZen customer data indicates AP reviewers dedicate as much as one week per month to this work. 

Each AI Agent inside AP Inbox Service Center handles a specific vendor email scenario end-to-end, from reading and interpreting the email to looking up records in the ERP. Each evaluates the request against the organization’s policies and takes structured action. Every decision is fully auditable, showing what the Agent evaluated, what it found, and why it took the action it did. 

Behavox, the AI company that helps organizations safeguard and enhance their businesses through a unified controls framework, today announced that Mizuho Securities, the securities arm of Mizuho Financial Group and one of Japan’s most prominent investment banking and securities firms, has successfully implemented Behavox Quantum AI for communications surveillance. The deployment delivers end-to-end traceability from initial discovery through to resolution, marking a strategic advancement from standalone monitoring to an integrated internal controls framework. 

Going live with Mizuho Securities reinforces Behavox’s commitment to Japan, where top-tier financial institutions are moving beyond fragmented monitoring tools to adopt regulator-ready, AI-native architectures that scale risk coverage across channels and languages. 

Behavox Quantum provides Mizuho Securities with a SaaS-based, AI-native surveillance solution across chat, and email in Japanese, English, and other languages. Rather than functioning as a standalone surveillance tool, Quantum operates as a core pillar of Behavox’s Unified Controls Framework, integrating communications surveillance with trade surveillance, regulatory data retention, and policy management. This architecture seamlessly integrates preventive and detective controls, enabling consistent risk detection, reliable evidence preservation, optimized model risk, and a continuous improvement cycle that links observed risk behaviors to durable risk reduction. 

BetaNXT, a leading provider of wealth management technology solutions with real-time data capabilities and an enhanced advisor experience, announced today that it has rolled out Val, an intelligent validation platform designed to apply consistent, rules-based intelligence across documents, data, and workflows to ensure predictable outcomes at scale. The solution enables financial services firms to deploy automated validation logic across high-volume processes, improving accuracy, consistency and operational efficiency. Val is the first release from BetaNXT’s new AI Innovation Lab, created to apply AI in focused, practical ways to solve high-impact operational challenges. 

Initially focused on validating client communications prior to delivery, Val supports documents such as broker statements, trade confirmations, and tax forms by automating reviews that have traditionally relied on manual, reactive processes. By consistently applying client-defined rules across document populations, Val enables firms to identify issues earlier, reduce rework, accelerate processing and scale validation coverage. 

For financial services firms, this strategy delivers tangible impact by increasing confidence in the communications they deliver to clients at scale, while also establishing a foundation for broader operational validation across enterprises. 

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: BR), a global Fintech leader, today announced a strategic partnership and minority investment in CENTRL, a leading provider of AI-powered due diligence solutions for financial institutions. The partnership enhances Broadridge’s data and analytics solutions for the asset management and retirement advisory industries with leading due diligence technology and expands its AI-enabled capabilities, helping modernize counterparty due diligence and RFP processes through data-driven, innovative technology. 

The financial services industry continues to face increasing regulatory scrutiny, fragmented counterparty oversight processes and a growing volume of manual and duplicative due diligence requests. By integrating Broadridge’s trusted data and market infrastructure capabilities with CENTRL’s AI-driven due diligence platform, firms can reduce manual touchpoints, eliminate redundant data gathering, improve accuracy and consistency, and strengthen regulatory audit trails. 

Through the partnership, Broadridge will integrate CENTRL’s AI-powered workflow and automation capabilities across solutions serving asset managers, retirement recordkeepers, and retirement advisors. The collaboration includes modernizing Broadridge’s Fi360 RFP Director, embedding Broadridge data into CENTRL’s workflows, and expanding access to AI-driven tools that automate due diligence, RFP responses, and counterparty oversight processes. 

Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH), a leading AI builder and technology services provider, announced today that it has joined the J.P. Morgan Payments Consultant Implementation Program (PCIP), a trusted network of resources that helps J.P. Morgan clients modernize their business by unifying technology and treasury with implementations guided by the expertise of J.P. Morgan and its partners. Cognizant will offer enhanced connectivity to help mutual clients connect J.P. Morgan Payments solutions to their treasury management system (TMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms. 

With Cognizant now integrated in the PCIP ecosystem, clients gain an accountable implementation partner with 30 years of payments expertise, more than 10,000 certified payments professionals, industry leading enterprise applications practice, and AI labs capable of rapid prototyping and production deployment. 

Cognizant brings deep expertise in ISO 20022 messaging standards and the evolving Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+) requirements set to take effect in November 2026. With a strong understanding of the global payments landscape and the regulatory shifts driving ISO adoption, Cognizant is well positioned to help clients navigate the transition and ensure compliance ahead of the mandate deadline. Separately, Cognizant, in collaboration with J.P. Morgan Payments, has developed a suite of ready-to-deploy payment adapters designed to be both user-friendly and fully CBPR+ compliant to help clients align their existing payment infrastructure with new messaging standards. 

Deloitte announced today a major expansion of its alliance with Google Cloud by establishing a dedicated, end-to-end agentic transformation practice, incorporating market-leading Google Cloud technologies — including Gemini Enterprise — to help power industry and sector transformation. 

Building on Deloitte’s AI experience across Fortune 500 clients and its own business, this expanded collaboration is designed to deliver transformation services for organizations looking to deploy agentic AI securely and at scale. The new practice will deploy Deloitte’s rapidly expanding suite of Google AI and agentic assets and use Deloitte Ascend™, its AI-infused services and delivery platform. Services span strategy and process redesign through implementation, governance and adoption, with an industry-focus on retail, health care, financial services and government and public services. 

Deloitte’s “2026 State of AI in the Enterprise” report shows AI tools are now available to the workforce of about 60% of surveyed organizations — industries including consumer; energy, resources and industrials; financial services; life sciences and health care; technology, media and telecommunications; and government and public services — signaling a shift from pilots to true enterprise scale. 

FutureVault, a leader in AI-powered Digital Vaults and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) for financial services, today announced the launch of its MCP and AI Orchestration Layer, turning insights into Automated Next-Best-Actions, giving firms a secure way to connect AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT directly to their document infrastructure without breaking governance, permissions, or data privacy controls. 

Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for secure, context-aware data access, FutureVault MCP enables AI systems to search, read, and reason over enterprise data using natural language, connecting directly to documents across client, advisor, and enterprise vaults. MCP is becoming the “new API” and the standard connection point between a firm’s data infrastructure, AI tools and agentic orchestration layers. FutureVault MCP is built to participate within this broader ecosystem, enabling firms to connect FutureVault directly to any MCP-compatible AI agent, orchestration harness, or tool. Queries and outputs leverage private LLMs, ensuring document data stays within the firm’s own security and privacy framework and is never passed to external models or public infrastructure. 

Enterprise teams leveraging AI for document workflows often face fragmented, manual processes to access relevant data, creating bottlenecks at scale. FutureVault MCP replaces these approaches with a direct, governed connection to the Vault, enabling secure and scalable AI across client, advisor, and enterprise records. 

Guidewire (NYSE: GWRE) today announced the launch of Guidewire ProNavigator, an AI assistant embedded in its core applications, InsuranceSuite and InsuranceNow. Introduced in the company’s latest release, Palisades, ProNavigator delivers expert guidance, enables confident decision-making, and accelerates time to value for Property and Casualty (P&C) insurers, equipping underwriters, claims adjusters, billing specialists, and customer service representatives with role-specific AI insights that are governed, secure, and context-aware. 

Expanded functionality in Palisades gives developers the ability to safely leverage their preferred AI tools to create unique digital experiences. It also drives greater precision across critical financial processes, and gives pricing teams the agility to respond quickly to shifting market conditions. 

JIM.com, the real-time payment app powered by CloudWalk and featuring an AI business assistant, continues to evolve to help small businesses sell more and run their businesses more efficiently. Today, the company introduces JIM Booking – a new capability within JIM that allows customers to manage bookings, charge in advance, and organize their schedules as simply as talking in a chat. The goal is to help them to fill their calendars, reduce no-shows, and get paid upfront. The launch is paired with new data showing that micro-businesses and solopreneurs are increasingly operating outside traditional business hours, with weekends emerging as peak revenue windows. 

JIM Booking is built for merchants who sell their time and are tired of juggling appointments across texts, DMs, and calls – while also chasing payments after the job is done. With JIM, it’s simple: now the AI business assistant has a dedicated section for scheduling and is capable of listing all appointments. 

From there, clients can book and pay online using a payment link in one seamless flow – no extra tools, no extra setup. Once the payment is made, the money lands instantly in the JIM account. Automatic reminders are sent to clients as well, helping reduce no-shows and making the whole process smoother from start to finish. 

K1x, an AI-native private markets tax data platform, today announced the closing of a $175 million growth investment led by Sumeru Equity Partners (“Sumeru”), with additional investment from current investor Edison Partners. Sumeru will become the majority shareholder as part of the transaction, while Edison’s participation represents its third investment in the business since 2022, as K1x enters the next chapter of its growth journey and accelerates its mission towards digitizing the K-1 ecosystem. 

The investment comes at a pivotal moment as private markets expand beyond traditional institutional investors, driving a sharp increase in the volume and complexity of tax reporting—an estimated $27 billion annual burden on the industry. The rapid growth of pass-through entities, including LLCs and S corporations, has intensified demand for Schedule K-1 creation and reporting, exposing long-standing infrastructure gaps. As expectations for timely, accurate, and compliant reporting rise, pressure is mounting across accounting firms, general partners, limited partners, and technology platforms alike. 

K1x was purpose-built to solve this challenge and serve the firms that manage, report, advise, and facilitate private investments at scale. The company’s patented, AI-native platform automates the extraction, aggregation, and standardization of complex K-1 data—eliminating manual processes and enabling a fully digital, scalable approach to tax reporting. By transforming fragmented workflows into a unified, intelligent system, K1x empowers professionals to operate with greater speed, accuracy, and confidence, defining the modern infrastructure for private markets tax reporting. 

Mosaic, the AI-driven deal modeling platform built for private markets, today announced it has raised an $18 million Series A led by Radical Ventures. Mosaic will use the new funding to deepen product capabilities across private equity workflows and accelerate expansion into adjacent markets including investment banking and private credit. 

Mosaic is building the operating system for the world’s most sophisticated investors and their advisors by automating the deal modeling analyses historically built and maintained manually in Excel. Mosaic combines deterministic, rules-based calculations with AI-driven ingestion and agentic workflows to help deal teams move faster, reduce spreadsheet errors, and focus on applying investment judgment rather than performing mechanical tasks. 

Today, Mosaic is used by leading private market institutions including Warburg Pincus, Bridgepoint, CVC, New Mountain, and Evercore. Customers report up to 20x faster completion of core deal analyses such as LBOs and DCFs while completely eliminating spreadsheet “mis-link” errors through Mosaic’s rules-based modeling engine. 

OneVest, a leading provider of next-generation wealth management technology, today announced it is partnering with Mackenzie Investments (“Mackenzie”), a leading global asset manager, as the firm advances its digital experience transformation strategy. 

Through this joint initiative, Mackenzie will introduce its new digital client and advisor portals with modern, scalable infrastructure, supported by OneVest’s wealth management operating system later this year. 

This collaboration with OneVest represents an important milestone in Mackenzie’s broader digital transformation and its client experience ecosystem, spanning digital platforms, data infrastructure, and servicing capabilities to reduce friction and better support advisors and investors. 

Perpetuals.com Ltd (Nasdaq: PDC), a financial technology company combining trading infrastructure and artificial intelligence, today announced the execution of a strategic licensing agreement with the German University of Digital Science (German UDS) for the integration of the company’s proprietary BayesShield AI predictive intelligence platform. German UDS, a state-recognized, accredited, fully digital university based in Potsdam, Germany, will license BayesShield AI for deployment across its research centers and digital learning infrastructure, including its Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Research Center for Cybersecurity, and Research Center for Digital Transformations. 

The partnership positions BayesShield as both a teaching tool and a live research platform at a premier German university and marks Perpetuals’s entry into the $83 billion global online education market, which is expected to grow 22.2% annually. The university’s dedicated research centers will also serve as applied R&D environments for advancing BayesShield’s machine learning models, strengthening the company’s intellectual property portfolio and market positioning while generating recurring SaaS licensing revenue for Perpetuals. 

German UDS will integrate BayesShield AI into its curriculum as a live case study and applied research platform across multiple graduate programs, including its M.Sc. in Applied AI, M.Sc. in Cybersecurity, MBA in Financial Technology, and MBA in Digital Technologies. Students and faculty can leverage BayesShield’s probabilistic AI models, trained on 11.7 billion retail trades and more than 1 million unique user histories, to analyze real-world trading patterns, conduct research on retail investor behavior, and develop next-generation risk management frameworks. 

PlanPort, the leading platform for intelligent retirement plan document analysis, today announced that Ascensus, the engine at the center of America’s savings ecosystem, has begun using PlanPort’s AI-enabled platform to support select operational workflows related to retirement plan document review. 

The capability is designed to help streamline document processing while maintaining Ascensus’ existing review standards and robust quality controls. By leveraging PlanPort’s technology, Ascensus is able to reduce time spent on repetitive aspects of document review and focus more resources on higher-value work that supports its clients and retirement savers. 

Since its launch in March 2025, PlanPort has seen adoption by a wide range of industry stakeholders supporting 401(k), 403(b), 457(b), and defined benefit plans. The PlanPort platform’s rapid growth is a testament to the industry’s need for modern, flexible solutions that simplify plan administration for advisors, third-party administrators, and recordkeepers. The rapid adoption of PlanPort’s solution highlights its immediate impact and effectiveness in the market. 

SkySparc, a trusted global provider of digital transformation solutions for treasury and finance institutions, today announced the acquisition of Covarius Group Limited (“Covarius”) and Uniun Technology Limited (“Uniun”). The acquisitions accelerate SkySparc’s European expansion and deepen its specialist support for treasury transformation. Financial terms were not disclosed. 

Covarius and Uniun operate complementary businesses together enabling a more complete, end-to-end treasury solution. Covarius specialises in the implementation and optimisation of treasury management systems, underpinned by deep partnerships and a well-established global presence. Uniun adds a real-time, API-based integration platform focused on ERP-to-TMS connectivity and cash forecasting, supported by AI and data science. 

For clients, the combined proposition the two companies bring centres on improved cash visibility and stronger cash flow prediction, with greater automation across treasury workflows, improving the value derived from existing technology investments. 

Slash Financial, Inc., the banking platform1 built for modern businesses, is now valued at $1.4 billion following a $100m Series C funding round led by Ribbit Capital. New investor Khosla Ventures and Goodwater Capital, who led Slash’s Series B just 16 months ago, co-led the round. This latest funding elevates Slash to unicorn status and brings the total amount of capital raised to more than $160 million. New Enterprise Associates and Y Combinator also participated in the round and are investing in Slash for a fourth time. 

With the Series C, Slash is making its most significant product investment to date, one that extends the platform both deeper and wider. Twin, Slash’s new AI-powered financial agent, brings a new level of intelligence and automation to the financial workflows of existing Slash customers. Twin acts as an AI Chief of Staff by leveraging contextual access to a company’s entire Slash account to surface insights on recurring financial or operational tasks, and take real action via direct card or bank payments and other key functions. 

Twin represents a fundamental shift in how businesses interact with their finances. Rather than logging into a dashboard to manually execute transactions, Slash account holders can now direct Twin to handle any action available within the platform, from payments and invoice generation to spinning up new cards, all informed by real-time data across their accounts, card spend, treasury, virtual accounts, and reimbursements. The underlying premise is that businesses shouldn’t have to operate their financial tools manually if an intelligent agent can do it for them. All activity runs through a secure agent layer that keeps sensitive account and card details protected. 

SOLVE, a leading provider of pre-trade data and predictive pricing for fixed income securities markets, today announced the promotion of Michael Pellerito to Senior Vice President of Innovation. This appointment reflects SOLVE’s continued focus on embedding artificial intelligence and machine learning (AIML) across its product roadmap and scaling its innovation strategy to support long-term growth and client value. 

In his new role, Pellerito will lead SOLVE’s efforts to accelerate the development and deployment of AI-driven products and capabilities across the business. He will be responsible for aligning AIML initiatives with the firm’s broader strategic priorities, overseeing the execution of high-impact projects, and guiding cross-functional collaboration to ensure solutions are practical, intuitive, and informed by real-world market experience. His mandate includes advancing SOLVE’s innovation agenda by enhancing model usability, improving integration across workflows, and driving measurable gains in efficiency, accuracy, and client experience. 

Pellerito brings a decade of experience at SOLVE, where he has contributed across sales, product development, product management, data, and financial engineering. He has worked closely with AIML and engineering teams to design and implement many of the company’s most impactful pricing, valuation, and risk models. His ability to bridge deep technical expertise with front-office insight has played a key role in advancing SOLVE’s platform and makes this promotion a natural progression for both Pellerito and the organization. Prior to joining SOLVE, he held senior roles across the financial industry, including leadership positions at Bloomberg, where he helped develop and scale evaluated pricing models across a wide range of fixed income asset classes. 

Tax Guard, a Cogency Global company and the leading provider of real-time IRS tax data services, today announced a partnership with Casca, the first AI-native loan origination system. Together, the companies are redefining how lenders verify and evaluate borrower risk, combining trustworthy tax data with intelligent automation in one seamless workflow. 

As lenders adopt AI-driven workflows, maintaining strong due diligence while increasing speed remains a key challenge. This partnership ensures that lenders can achieve both. Casca automates up to 90% of manual effort across the loan origination lifecycle—from applicant intake through closing—enabling banks and lenders to process loans up to 30x faster than industry averages. 

As a longtime industry partner, Tax Guard gives lenders direct access to verified tax transcripts that are critical for assessing creditworthiness and fraud risk. With Tax Guard’s verified data integrated into Casca’s automated workflow, lenders can manage origination and due diligence with more data and more informed credit decisions. 

TechCreate Group Ltd. (NYSE American: TCGL) (“TechCreate” or the “Company”), a technology consultancy and advanced software solutions provider specializing in payment solutions, cybersecurity, and digital services, announced its intention to collaborate with pQCee Pte Ltd, a quantum cybersecurity solutions provider, to explore the incorporation of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) approved Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms in the Company’s QR Hybrid POS terminals. 

These terminals are expected to explore transitioning away from current encryption standards—like RSA and ECC—which are vulnerable to quantum computing, with a view to enhancing the security of cardholder data and transaction keys. Such an approach is intended to help mitigate the “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” (HNDL) threat, where attackers are currently capturing and storing encrypted sensitive data (payment details, user IDs) from QR/card transactions with the intention of decrypting it years later. 

In addition, as regulatory bodies across the world begin to standardize PQC, these quantum-safe Hybrid QR POS terminals are intended to support alignment with evolving security standards. 

Wealth.com, the AI-powered platform modernizing how wealth management firms deliver estate and tax planning, today announced it has raised $65 million in an oversubscribed Series B round. New investors included Titanium Ventures, Pruven Capital, The K Fund and Dynasty Financial Partners, with participation from existing investors including Charles Schwab (“Schwab”), GV (Google Ventures), Citi Ventures, 53 Stations, Anthos Capital and Alumni Ventures. The round builds on strong prior institutional support, with GV leading Wealth.com’s Series A in September 2024 and Charles Schwab making a minority strategic investment in April 2025. 

Wealth.com has built the most advanced central intelligence layer for modern wealth management, unifying estate and tax planning within a single platform designed for financial advisors and their clients. Over the past year, the company has seen 664% year-over-year growth in AI-powered workflows as firms increasingly replace fragmented, manual planning processes with structured data and intelligent automation. 

Wealth.com has also expanded rapidly across enterprise, registered investment advisory (RIA) and institutional channels. In 2025, the company secured approvals from the three largest broker-dealers in the United States, unlocking access to over 50,000 financial advisors. This momentum builds on breakout performance, with the company achieving at least 3x revenue growth in each of the past four years, driven by accelerating enterprise adoption, agreements with three of the top five banks in the country, and increasing demand for integrated estate and tax planning. Wealth.com now supports advisory firms that collectively service more than $15 trillion in client assets.