Today’s AI is pretty good at a lot of things. In many cases, artificial intelligence is maybe not great, but good enough for most purposes.
Welcome to another busy week in AI & Finance!
Picking back up, we would argue that those use cases include artistic creation, writing, editing and publishing, but also investing, banking, trading, financial planning, wealth management and advice.
Furthermore, it turns out that AI is pretty effective as a salesperson, which is great for financial services as the entire industry, not just wealth managers, has gradually moved away from sales-centric roles.
Of course, this means that many of the people once engaged in selling financial products and services are now in the business of managing relationships and/or selling knowledge or skill. Artificial intelligence already has access to all of our knowledge and skills. Are we really down to selling relationships and the appearance of human authenticity as our main products? If so, we’re like the subjects in an Allison Schrager book. You can figure out which one.
Anyway, all this was top of mind as we wrote this because of “The ‘Mass Affluent’ Are Losing Their Allure for Wealth Managers Navigating AI” a recent Bloomberg column that primary makes that assertion by quoting Deborah Patnaik, a McKinsey & Co. senior partner, as follows: “The mass-affluent client now gets something close to private-banking quality from AI,” and going on to say that it means that advisors had might as well hand clients with $100,000 to $1 million in net worth off to AI.
There’s still plenty of demand for human financial advice among the mass affluent, but we think this works both ways: Most practitioners of traditional wealth management no longer want to serve mass affluent clients, and most mass affluent clients prefer hybrid solutions to traditional wealth management.
Another way to think about this is that since the mass affluent client now has access to what were once boutique-level wealth and asset management services via technology, traditional asset and wealth manager providers are throwing in the towel—they can’t compete on scale or profitability.
Another problem is that the technological tools available to the mass affluent keep improving in sophistication and effectiveness, while lowering costs and other barriers to access. At some point wealthy investors will look over the shoulders of their mass affluent peers and ask whether they’re really getting all that much value from their human advisors.
Technology can make mass affluent clients profitable. Traditional financial providers who won’t adopt the technology can’t do it—and so they won’t. That’s what happens, these clients are ceded to technology one way or another.
So much for using today’s mass affluent to access tomorrow’s new wealth.
The best solution for advisors who can’t build or white label their own AI wealth management platform in this case might be to use existing technology platforms for client referral. Of course, we’re once again presuming that a mass affluent young person who has used technology to access a high level of wealth and asset management services at a very low cost over most of their adult life to this point will have any desire to potentially pay more for less at a traditional financial advisor.
Research to this point suggests that once one reaches a certain level of wealth, financial complexity and the dollar amounts involved will break the inertia of staying with a technological financial provider and drive one into the arms of a human advisor.
As we progress through generations and technology changes the way we think and behave, we’re not sure that will always hold true
Let’s get to our headlines…
1. Alchemy
Alchemy, the largest AI developer and infrastructure platform for the onchain economy, today launched AgentCard’s integration with Visa Intelligent Commerce, giving AI agents a complete identity and payment stack and allowing them to make online purchases on consumers’ behalf. With AgentCard, an AI agent built on models from any provider, including OpenAI or Anthropic, can book a vacation, order groceries, or renew a subscription on a consumer’s behalf, without the consumer ever touching a checkout screen. Setup takes developers under a minute and provisions everything an agent needs to operate, including a Visa payment token, a dedicated email address, a phone number, and a crypto wallet, through a single API.
AgentCard is a unified payments and identity product that now integrates Visa Intelligent Commerce, Visa’s portfolio of initiatives and solutions designed to enable secure and trusted AI-driven commerce experiences at scale. Through this integration, agents can transact using Visa-issued tokens, preserving rewards, credit lines, and card benefits without creating new accounts or credentials.
AgentCard features built-in spend controls, including merchant category restrictions, per-transaction limits, and customizable budgets, that are configurable at setup or in real time. A crypto wallet is available alongside the token. Transactions default to tokenized card payments, with support for emerging agent payment protocols, including crypto where accepted by the merchant.
2. Aria Systems
Aria Systems, the leader in AI-powered billing automation, and ServiceNow, the AI control tower for business reinvention, today announce the launch of the world’s first agentic Business Support System (BSS) solution for communication services providers (CSPs).
The joint solution combines the ServiceNow AI Platform, including its CRM solution and workflow automation capabilities, with Aria’s real-time agentic billing and monetization technologies to help telecom providers replace fragmented legacy systems with a unified execution platform built for the AI era.
As CSPs face growing pressure from AI-driven service models, rising operational costs, disjointed business processes, and increasing customer expectations, many continue to operate across dozens of inflexible legacy systems that are not in sync with one another. The combined ServiceNow and Aria solution addresses these challenges by enabling providers to automate operations, streamline service delivery, and modernize monetization on a unified end-to-end cloud-native platform.
3. Behavox
Behavox, the AI-native controls platform for global banks, asset managers, hedge funds, and commodity firms, today announced a $175 million preferred equity investment from investment funds and accounts managed by HPS Investment Partners, a leading global credit investment firm and a part of BlackRock (“HPS”). The completed investment positions Behavox to accelerate global growth, expand its Unified Controls Platform, and pursue disciplined M&A.
With this investment, HPS joins a roster of leading institutional investors on Behavox’s cap table, including SoftBank, Citigroup, Index Ventures, and Hoxton Ventures.
As part of the completed transaction, Behavox fully repaid and retired its $70 million venture-debt facility with Hercules Capital Inc. (NYSE: HTGC), further strengthening its balance sheet. Behavox secured a $70 million credit facility from Hercules Capital in autumn 2024 to support strategic expansion, including its acquisition of Mosaic Smart Data and its strategic investment in b-next. Together, those transactions accelerated Behavox’s move into trade surveillance by adding FICC front-office analytics and deep capital markets trade surveillance expertise.
4. Blue Sage Solutions
Blue Sage Solutions, a provider of cloud-native mortgage technology, today announced expanded capabilities across the Blue Sage AI ecosystem, delivering intelligent automation and embedded AI workflows throughout the mortgage lifecycle. Blue Sage AI, the company’s unified AI framework, brings together intelligent document analysis, workflow automation, underwriting support, predictive analytics, and conversational AI natively within the Blue Sage Digital Lending and Digital Servicing platforms to help lenders reduce operational friction, improve efficiency, and accelerate loan workflows.
The latest Blue Sage AI advancements span three core solutions focused on intelligent automation across origination and servicing.
SageVision, Blue Sage’s AI-powered Intelligent Document Analysis (IDA) solution, moves beyond legacy OCR and ADR workflows through automated document classification, contextual analysis, cross-document validation, and intelligent data extraction across mortgage documents and lending workflows.
5. Duck Creek
Duck Creek, the intelligent core of insurance, today announced that Southern Trust Insurance Company has selected Duck Creek Embedded Payments and Duck Creek Policyholder Portal to modernize its insurance billing and digital payments experience.
Duck Creek Embedded Payments will centralize insurance payment processing across digital channels while connecting Duck Creek Billing and Duck Creek Policyholder Portal into a unified financial ecosystem. The integrated solution enables Southern Trust to offer flexible digital payment options, improve payment visibility and reconciliation, and provide policyholders with secure self-service access to billing and account information. The initiative supports Southern Trust’s commitment to delivering a modern insurance billing and payment experience while improving operational efficiency through a connected cloud-based platform.
The initiative creates a connected financial ecosystem that simplifies how policyholders view bills, make payments, and manage their accounts through a single digital experience. By bringing together billing, payments, and policyholder self-service, Southern Trust can reduce operational complexity, improve payment flexibility, strengthen financial visibility, and deliver a more modern insurance customer experience. The decision builds on Southern Trust’s prior adoption of Duck Creek OnDemand Cloud Delivery, including Duck Creek Policy and Duck Creek Billing, as part of its broader cloud modernization strategy.
6. Earnix
Earnix, the first AI company purpose-built for decisioning, today announced the launch of AIOS, the AI Orchestration System for Insurance. AIOS extends the company’s market-leading intelligent decisioning engine across the insurance lifecycle, enabling insurers to apply AI where it can most directly enhance business outcomes. It brings speed, governance, and consistency to the high-stakes decisions that determine insurance performance — from risk evaluation and underwriting to claims and customer engagement — with the explainability and visibility for the regulatory control that the industry demands.
Insurers are under mounting pressure to act with greater speed and precision as risk conditions accelerate; customer expectations increase, margins tighten, and regulatory scrutiny intensifies. Unlike systems built primarily to administer the business, AIOS orchestrates dynamic decisioning around risk, pricing, underwriting, customer engagement, and profitability.
AIOS anchors intelligence in the insurer’s decisioning layer, rather than isolating it within generic AI tools or in data from core systems. Operating above and across these environments, integrating insurance-specific context, governance, and human oversight, enabling insurers to scale AI without the costly rip-and-replace of existing systems or change management projects.
7. Future Proof
Future Proof, the wealth management industry’s largest community and event platform, today announced the launch of Future Proof Research, a new data and intelligence arm dedicated to tracking the forces reshaping the business of financial advice. Its first initiative: The State of AI in Wealth Management, which will be co-commissioned with Impruve, selected on the merit of their pioneering role in the emerging category of AI Stewardship for wealth management, opens for responses today, and will become a semi-annual benchmark for how wealth firms and the professionals inside them adopt, govern, deploy, and profit from artificial intelligence.
AI is moving through wealth management faster than any technology shift before it, yet most firms are navigating it without a clear picture of where they stand against their peers. Future Proof Research was built to close that gap with rigorous, repeatable data rather than headlines and hype. The inaugural findings will debut live on the main stage at the 2026 Future Proof Festival, September 14–17 in Huntington Beach, California, with a new edition released alongside each flagship Future Proof event going forward.
The research is designed around two lenses at once. The Firm Lens measures where firms are on their AI journey: strategy, spend, governance, and outcomes, and powers a proprietary AI Maturity Index. The Individual Lens measures how professionals in every role and function are adopting AI and who is driving the change, powering a companion AI Champion Index. Together they let a leader open the report and answer two questions at once: “Where do firms like mine stand?” and “Where do people in my role stand?”
8. Interactive Brokers
Interactive Brokers (Nasdaq: IBKR), an automated global broker, today announced the expansion of its agentic trading capabilities with the addition of ChatGPT and Grok, further broadening a growing ecosystem of AI platform integrations that began with Claude. Available through certified AI connector marketplaces across multiple leading platforms, these integrations allow clients to research, analyze, and generate instructions with speed and efficiency to uncover new trading and investing opportunities instantly. With this release, Interactive Brokers also extends the selection of products available for order instructions to include support for options, futures and futures options in addition to equities and ETFs.
Clients can now link their existing IBKR account to ChatGPT, Grok, or Claude in minutes using their IBKR login at no extra cost, with no new account required, and no passwords or API keys ever shared with the AI provider. Once connected, clients can use natural language to explore their portfolio, analyze markets, and generate order instructions. Every instruction is reviewed and approved by the client in a dedicated AI Instructions tab before any order is submitted to the market.
9. Kanverse.ai
Kanverse.ai today announced the launch of its Agentic AI Platform for Finance, a new solution that enables organizations to build, deploy and manage AI agents across finance operations.
The Agentic AI Platform introduces a new approach to finance automation, helping organizations move beyond task-based workflows toward intelligent, outcome-driven operations. By combining agentic AI, document intelligence, orchestration and enterprise integrations in a unified platform, organizations can coordinate work across systems, documents, approvals and exceptions while maintaining governance and control.
The launch marks a significant milestone in Kanverse.ai’s evolution from intelligent document processing and workflow automation to agentic AI, expanding the company’s vision from automating tasks to orchestrating intelligent operations across finance processes.
10. Liberty Bank
Liberty Bank announced the launch of its AI Center of Excellence, a dedicated function chartered to bring advanced artificial intelligence capabilities to every part of the bank. In addition, Flare AI, an enterprise AI partner for regulated industries, has been selected as a strategic technology partner for the initiative.
The Center of Excellence will serve as the hub for AI strategy, governance, and execution across Liberty Bank’s personal, commercial, and digital banking operations.
The partnership will initially focus on deploying secure AI systems to enhance productivity and improve customer experience, automating complex core processes that have historically constrained operational speed, and building reusable AI capabilities that compound in value as the program matures.
11. Linvo
Linvo AG, a Zurich-based multi-family office and wealth management firm, today set out its vision for the year ahead, naming applied artificial intelligence as the centre of its strategy for 2026 and opening a new set of AI advisor roles to deliver it.
The firm sees the coming year as the point at which AI moves from a support tool to a core discipline within wealth management — shaping how portfolios are analysed, how clients are served, and how advisory teams spend their time. The new AI advisor roles are intended to anchor that shift inside the firm.
Linvo expects the investment to define its trajectory over the coming years, positioning the firm at the front of a Swiss wealth sector still finding its footing with the technology.
12. Marble
The National Association of Enrolled Agents (NAEA), the leading professional organization representing America’s 60,000+ enrolled agents, today announced the selection of Marble as its preferred vendor for AI-powered tax research. Under the partnership, NAEA members will receive exclusive discounted access to Marble’s full platform, which delivers citation-backed answers grounded in the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, IRS guidance, and state-level tax authority across all 50 states.
The announcement comes ahead of NAEA’s Tax Summit 2026, taking place July 27-29 at the New Orleans Marriott, where Marble will serve as a Platinum Sponsor. Marble will showcase its platform at the Summit through live demonstrations, a dedicated exhibit booth, and a sponsored Practice Management Boot Camp session exploring how AI is reshaping modern tax workflows.
NAEA evaluated Marble over a multi-month pilot beginning in early 2026, during which the platform was made available to members at no cost through tax season. Marble’s selection followed a formal review by NAEA’s steering committee, which assessed the platform’s accuracy, data security posture, and relevance to the daily work of enrolled agents.
13. MarketAxess Holdings
MarketAxess Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: MKTX) today announced the launch of TraX® Tape, a data solution that delivers a clean, consolidated view of bond market activity, enriched with additional context and real-time insights.
The launch comes as UK and EU transparency reforms increase the availability of bond trading data while adding complexity to how that data is reported and interpreted. TraX Tape addresses these challenges by providing a single, standardised feed that consolidates and enhances market data, enabling clients to interpret trading activity more efficiently and with greater confidence.
Built on MarketAxess TraX data, TraX Tape aggregates data from a global network of dealers and clients and applies proprietary data cleansing processes refined over 10 years. The solution then enriches the regulatory transparency data with additional real-time insights and analytics, including trade direction and pricing context from MarketAxess’ AI-powered pricing engine CP+™.
14. Parrot Finance
Bitwise Asset Management, the global crypto asset manager with more than $11 billion in client assets, and Parrot Finance, a next-generation RIA that uses an intelligent recommendation engine to automate personalized investing and mimic top-performing strategies, today announced the availability of Bitwise’s crypto model portfolios on Parrot’s platform. For Parrot clients, who collectively hold over $200 million in assets on the platform, the new offering provides a curated framework for accessing the $2.5 trillion digital asset class.
The rollout marks the latest milestone in Bitwise’s entrance into the model portfolio solutions space. Model portfolios have become an increasingly important tool for financial advisors looking to capitalize on third-party expertise in developing client allocations, providing a seamless and scalable way to invest in emerging themes. From 2023 to 2025, assets tracking third-party model portfolios grew from $400 billion to more than $645 billion, a 62% increase.1
Bitwise’s model portfolios leverage the research and specialist expertise of Bitwise to select crypto-themed ETPs for different investor profiles and risk preferences. “Core” models offer broad exposure to the crypto ecosystem, while “thematic” models give investors the ability to fine-tune their positioning by emphasizing specific themes, such as risk-managed exposure or crypto assets beyond bitcoin. The models are monitored and rebalanced systematically to mitigate target portfolio asset-allocation drift.
15. Trussed AI
Trussed AI, a leading provider of AI governance and compliance solutions for regulated enterprises, and Nassau Financial Group (“Nassau”), an insurance and asset management company, today announced an investment in Trussed AI through the Nassau Reimagine program.
The investment marks an important milestone in Trussed AI’s growth and further strengthens its position as a trusted partner for enterprises seeking to deploy AI responsibly and at scale.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in core business operations, regulated enterprises face mounting pressure to deploy AI responsibly while meeting evolving compliance and risk management requirements. Trussed AI’s platform provides visibility, control, and auditability across AI systems, helping organizations manage AI risk, ensure regulatory alignment, and operationalize governance frameworks at scale. The company serves customers across insurance, financial services, healthcare, and other highly regulated industries.
16. Unimarket
Unimarket, a global leader bringing clarity, control, and impact to Source-to-Pay solutions, today announced the launch of AI Invoice Automation — a standalone AI-powered product purpose-built to eliminate the inefficiencies of manual invoice processing. Designed for AP and finance teams, AI Invoice Automation brings intelligent document processing into Unimarket’s product suite, addressing one of the most persistent challenges in finance operations: the time, cost, and error risk that come with processing invoices by hand.
Unimarket’s AI Invoice Automation, transforms how finance and accounting teams manage their invoice operations. The solution automatically captures, classifies, and validates invoice data from arrival through to payment, reducing processing costs by up to 85%, and achieving 95%+ data capture accuracy. Validated data is then routed through automated approval workflows and delivered seamlessly into downstream procurement and ERP systems, giving organizations real-time visibility over payables and cash flow with significantly less manual effort.
Unimarket’s AI Invoice Automation covers the full invoice lifecycle, from receipt to payment, helping organizations of all sizes reclaim time lost to manual data entry, exception handling, and approval chasing. The result is faster cycle times, improved accuracy, and greater financial visibility and control.
17. Upstart Holdings
Upstart Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, today announced its renewal of its forward-flow agreement with Neuberger Specialty Finance, the dedicated asset-based investment team within Neuberger, a global investment management firm. As part of the renewal, funds managed by Neuberger Specialty Finance are expected to invest in up to $600M of consumer loans originated through the Upstart platform.
18. Valence
Valence today announced its launch, introducing a fundamentally new operating model for wealth management. Built on proprietary AI-native technology and a contrarian premise, the firm was founded on the belief that the future of the industry will not be defined by more investment offerings, more advisors, or new advisor tools. It will be defined by an entirely new approach built around the high-net-worth client’s personal and lived experience.
For individuals and families whose financial lives have grown increasingly complex, wealth management extends far beyond investments. Tax planning, trusts and estates, insurance, private investments, liquidity events, philanthropy, and intergenerational wealth transfer often span multiple advisors, firms, and institutions. Yet clients remain responsible for coordinating much of it themselves. Valence was built to manage every dimension of a client’s financial life, and, in doing so, carry this burden instead of it falling to the client.
The founding team includes CEO Dan Petrozzo, former Partner at Goldman Sachs and Partner and Investor at Oak HC/FT; Chief Product Officer John van Moyland, formerly of Kensho; and Chief Commercial Officer Erick Goralski, formerly of Stone Ridge Asset Management and Deutsche Bank. Together, they bring decades of experience across wealth management, financial technology and company building.
