AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 4/12/24

AdvisorEngine released the next generation of its scalable financial planning ecosystem, offering investment advisors and their clients a planning experience within a comprehensive wealth management platform that is simple to engage with and adaptable to needs over time. 

For the first time, advisors can work with clients to quickly create and fund a financial plan that can be fully implemented without jumping through multiple systems or enduring repetitive steps. 

AdvisorEngine’s goals-based planning tool, developed in collaboration with Franklin Templeton, is seamlessly embedded into its platform and workflows – outputs from a client’s plan, for instance, automatically kicks off implementation by the advisor, providing wealth management firms unmatched scalability thanks to AdvisorEngine’s industry-leading custodian integrations. 

Ai for Alpha, a fintech firm specializing in leveraging AI for sophisticated investment strategies, announced the launch of its “Global Macro Decoding” strategy. 

The strategy leverages a selection of 24 highly liquid markets across equities, Credit, sovereign bonds, commodities, and currencies. Our method involves mapping betas not only to individual markets but also to trend factors derived from these markets. This dual approach effectively captures the non-linear behaviors and directional biases inherent in various asset classes typical of Global Macro strategies. As a result, it achieves a correlation of 0.83 with global macro strategies and maintains a consistent superior risk-adjusted return. 

AlphaTrAI announced the appointment of financial services executive, accomplished entrepreneur and FinTech innovator John Sweeney as its new president. Mr. Sweeney will use his over three decades of leadership experience, deep industry expertise and technological capabilities to lead the firm in implementing its strategic vision to drive automation and efficiency into the wealth and asset management industries. He will report directly to industry veteran and AlphaTrAI CEO and Chairman Bill Dwyer. 

Most recently, Mr. Sweeney founded and served as managing partner of Momentum Capital Partners, LLC, providing consulting and advisory services to global financial services firms, FinTech start-ups and private equity firms. Prior to that, he was Chief Operating Officer of Osprey Funds, an investment manager that built tradable investment products on top of digital assets and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Before joining Osprey, he was Head of Wealth and Asset Management at Figure Technologies, a FinTech unicorn building Business to Consumer (B2C) financial products on top of a Business to Business (B2B) blockchain called Provenance.       

Provana, a highly specialized knowledge process management provider and Brand Engagement Network, an emerging provider of personalized customer engagement AI, announced today a partnership that will enable BEN’s AI assistants to be integrated with Provana’s contact center solutions. This strategic partnership aims to optimize compliance and business process management (BPM) across a variety of industries, including health insurance, personal injury, and credit servicing. 

Provana, a pioneer and industry leader in the credit and collections, legal servicing, healthcare, and revenue cycle management sectors, along with BEN have begun crafting multiple use cases to deploy using the BEN conversational AI platform. This collaboration is designed to empower Provana to enhance its multi-modal strategy across various use cases, from digital AI “transfer agents” for credit servicing and personal injury law to Medicare Advantage Enrollment. 

Traditional chatbots often fall short in highly regulated industries due to limited conversational skills and base knowledge. BEN’s AI assistants, paired with Provana’s unique, multi-modal approach to managing compliance and business processes will be designed to unlock advantages in productivity and performance to Provana’s global user base. 

Cohesity announced it is collaborating with Intel to bring Intel’s confidential computing capabilities to the Cohesity Data Cloud. Leveraged with Fort Knox, Cohesity’s industry-leading cyber vault service, this data-in-use encryption innovation will be the first of its kind in the data management industry. 

Together, Cohesity and Intel are solving one of the most pressing cybersecurity challenges for CIOs. Traditionally, options have been limited for protecting data in use while it is actively processed in memory, which can leave data unencrypted and vulnerable to insider attacks. Confidential computing enabled by Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) will support Cohesity customers to reduce the risk posed by potential bad actors accessing data while it is being processed in main memory. This is especially critical for highly regulated industries like financial institutions, healthcare, and government. 

Cohesity’s flagship platform, Cohesity Data Cloud, has long included many proven and cutting-edge technologies to help the world’s largest organizations manage and secure their most critical data from cyber criminals. 

Corlytics has signed an investment from specialist growth investor Verdane for a majority equity stake in the company. Verdane was chosen as an investor with a proven track record of creating category leaders. The transaction was managed by investment bank Baird in a competitive process that saw significant market interest. 

Driven by increasingly demanding regulatory requirements, financial services firms spent ~€163 billion on their risk and compliance functions in 2023. Corlytics enables customers to stay ahead of regulatory demands and is the only solution with a fully integrated end-to-end offering, from regulatory horizon scanning to policy management and through to attestation. It enables clients to align with, and stay ahead of, regulatory demands, which now include growing levels of proof of compliance. 

Corlytics continues to invest heavily in innovation, with Group investments in R&D exceeding €50 million to date. Since 2020, Corlytics has grown 60% per annum, while the number of customers has roughly doubled during this period. 2023 also saw Corlytics make two significant acquisitions – ING SparQ and Clausematch – creating an unparalleled platform that manages the entire regulatory risk value chain on a global scale. 

Acante announced a new partnership with Databricks, the Data and AI company, that will empower customers to accelerate their AI, model building and data analytics initiatives. This new integration will allow joint customers to more easily deliver on data security, access governance, compliance and privacy mandates from their security teams. The solution is designed for extreme ease of onboarding and provides a much lower total cost of ownership compared to home-grown or legacy approaches. 

According to Enterprise Storage Group (ESG), most enterprises collect data from more than 50 sources across the modern data stack. The explosive growth of AI initiatives in organizations is matched only by the growing security and privacy concerns around responsible use of the underlying data they are built on. The success of these initiatives has become inextricably linked to the maturing of security and governance of access to data. In fact, the ESG report shows that 46 percent of organizations ranked security concerns as the top challenge to building a modern data platform. 

With this new integration, Acante’s Data Security Intelligence Platform provides the necessary data security observability, access governance and workflow automations that radically simplify and accelerate how data teams democratize data for their growing Data + AI initiatives. 

DataVisor announced that it has partnered with Mitek to enhance the platform’s comprehensive check fraud protection offerings. By integrating Mitek’s Check Fraud Defender, a consortium based check fraud detection solution with DataVisor’s advanced machine learning and real-time data analysis, financial institutions (FIs) can now benefit from industry-leading check fraud protection within a single platform. This powerful pairing provides a comprehensive perspective for FIs to execute real-time orchestration of check fraud decisions, minimizing fraud losses and increasing operational efficiencies. It is a significant step for FIs to eliminate silos and to bring a unified experience to customers, at the same time saving resources that would otherwise be spent on integrating separate check fraud solutions into their systems. 

Mitek’s industry-leading Check Fraud Defender leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision technology to accurately detect check fraud in real-time by visually evaluating distinct check attributes. As check fraud continues to rise and fraudsters keep evolving their tactics, identifying check fraud becomes more challenging when examining check images individually in isolation. Through the power of Mitek’s unique consortium model, Check Fraud Defender, DataVisor’s customers will now be able to proactively flag future check deposits tied to stolen or fraudulent checks across participating institutions. And by combining Mitek’s check image analysis with DataVisor’s multi-layered, AI and machine-learning powered approach to analyzing both check data and customer lifecycle data, this all-encompassing solution will enable comprehensive protection that can accurately detect and prevent emerging check fraud, including check kiting and remote deposit capture fraud, and other common check fraud, such as check washing, counterfeit checks, and identity theft. 

Deloitte and Intel announced a major expansion of their alliance to help enterprises around the world deploy their AI solutions cost efficiently with the latest hardware and software optimizations. These new offerings aim to address the growing needs as the marketplace evolves from experimenting with AI to scaling implementations for distinct use cases that deliver real value. This collaboration can help clients meet and exceed their performance requirements and budget targets by shifting AI workloads to a more cost-efficient architecture.              

Organizations today face several AI challenges that can prevent them from deploying fully scaled solutions to production due to cost, performance or energy inefficiencies. One of these challenges is the right infrastructure and software choices, with some AI workloads benefiting more from the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs, while others may prioritize a nimble and versatile CPU-based architecture from the edge to cloud. Intel and Deloitte have teamed to help clients optimize for their specific industry, workload and situation. 

To do so, Deloitte has deployed over 35 of Intel’s OpenVino™ AI models in their CortexAI platform to drive greater time to value and efficiency for their clients including improved wait time analytics using Intel’s SceneScape for the hospitality industry, better data wrangling using Intel® Geti™ for computer vision AI, automated infrastructure inspection utilizing Intel’s edge solutions for the utilities industry, smart warehouse deployment utilizing Intel® RealSense™ cameras for the manufacturing industry and field service engineer technical specification generation for the industrials industry. Intel’s latest offerings, from the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with built-in accelerators and Intel® Core™ Ultra for AI PC to Intel® Gaudi®, a specialized AI accelerator intended for GenAI applications, all combine to make these workloads possible from the cloud to the edge. 

Digital Wealth News (DWN), a multi-tiered media platform spotlighting news, thought leadership, partner content and industry press in the wealth management and fintech sectors, announced the launch of AI & Finance to serve as a home for news, views and partner content at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and finance. 

Since its February 2024 launch, the publication has experienced a significant increase in organic and unique web traffic. DWN data confirms that its flagship homepage and the new AI & Finance landing page have driven a 100% increase in traffic over the past 2 months. Recently, the publication reported 250,000 unique daily visitors for the first time. 

Entrust announced that it has completed its acquisition of Onfido, a global leader in identity verification. With this completed acquisition, Entrust now provides the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of AI-powered, identity-centric security solutions. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. 

Attacks on identity are on the rise, with nearly two-thirds of data breaches caused by compromised credentials. This is only becoming more prevalent as AI-powered fraud becomes more accessible through technologies such as generative AI — enabling more sophisticated attack vectors. According to its recent report, Onfido saw a 3,000% increase in deepfakes and a five-times increase in forged identities over the past year. Onfido’s technology fights fire with fire, utilizing AI to deliver reliable liveness detection and spot deepfakes, video spoofs, masks, and similar identity theft tactics. Over the last year and a half, Onfido prevented over $6 billion in potential fraud. 

Gradient AI, an enterprise software provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in the insurance industry, announced the appointment of Alan Sherman as vice president of marketing. With leadership and marketing roles spanning more than 25 years, Sherman brings a wealth of experience to his new position. 

Prior to joining Gradient AI, Sherman served in senior marketing and general management roles, including five years as vice president of marketing at Hebrew College, where he led strategic marketing initiatives that significantly enhanced enrollment and philanthropy, driving notable market share and revenue growth. He was previously vice president of marketing at IntelliVid, a provider of intelligent video analytics solutions for the retail industry, where he played a key role in driving the company’s marketing strategy and expanding its market presence prior to its acquisition by Tyco International. 

Informatica announced new solutions, product innovations and an expanded partnership with Google Cloud at the Google Cloud Next event, currently underway in Las Vegas. Informatica launched its Master Data Management (MDM) Extension for Google Cloud BigQuery, making it easier and faster to get trusted MDM data that can be leveraged for analytics and generative AI applications across industries such as retail, financial services and healthcare. The MDM Extension for BigQuery can reduce the time to onboard high-quality customer master data—from weeks to minutes—enabling customers to rapidly develop and deploy their customer data platform and generative AI applications on Google Cloud to drive improved marketing strategies, accurate forecasting and deeper customer insights. 

Informatica will also showcase a new end-to-end solution based on the MDM Extension to enable customers to develop enterprise-grade GenAI applications with Informatica’s AI-powered Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC), Google Vertex AI platform, BigQuery and Gemini models LLMs on a foundation of trusted enterprise data.   

InMoment announced its collaboration with Potlatch No. 1 Financial Credit Union (P1FCU) to implement a progressive credit union AI-based technology to elevate experiences across all facets of the business to foster member loyalty and satisfaction. 

Utilizing InMoment’s XI Platform, P1FCU can now pinpoint friction points across the member journey with a sophisticated solution that uses proprietary natural language processing (NLP) and AI technology. This integration and analysis of experience feedback from post-loan and new account surveys, online website visits, and call center conversation transcripts enable the intelligent identification of key drivers of satisfaction and sentiment. As a result, P1FCU can provide more personalized experiences tailored to member preferences. 

Intention.ly, the growth engine design consultancy firm transforming the way finserv and fintech companies approach sales and marketing, announced the launch of an outsourced Sales Development Representative (SDR) service. This new offering, aimed at empowering businesses to accelerate their sales pipeline and drive revenue growth, comes less than six months after the introduction of Intention.ly’s sales consulting division and the appointment of veteran sales leader Kyle Hiatt as partner and head of sales consulting. 

The SDR service provides firms with a cost-effective alternative to hiring and managing internal sales representatives, enabling them to concentrate resources on core business activities. Experienced SDRs are allocated to work closely with Intention.ly clients, gaining a thorough understanding of the target market, buyer personas and sales goals. This model is based on a monthly retainer along with a small additional fee per prospect meeting booked. Importantly, the service integrates lead generation from a marketing standpoint, merging it with Intention.ly’s existing comprehensive offerings to construct a potent engine for scalable, sustainable growth. 

Kyriba, a global innovator in liquidity performance, announced a first of its kind innovation with Onyx, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain business unit, to improve cash management, payments and liquidity performance for CFOs and Treasurers. Furthermore, a new partnership with Workday, Inc. will fully embed bank reporting and bank payment connectivity for Workday Financial Management to help Workday customers achieve greater banking agility. 

Together with Onyx’s Blockchain Deposit Account product, JPM Coin, Kyriba leverages the power of blockchain and efficiency of real-time payment processing to increase end-to-end payments transparency. For the first time, customers can operate their JPM Coin Blockchain Deposit Accounts (BDAs) within Kyriba’s treasury management system (TMS), enabling treasury teams to facilitate real-time cross-border transfers on a permissioned distributed ledger. 

This innovative cross-border payment solution is complemented by real-time payments and real-time bank reporting through the J.P. Morgan’s Global Payments API, available within the Kyriba Marketplace. 

Majesco announced the Spring ’24 Release of its portfolio of software solutions, spearheaded by the revolutionary enhancements of Majesco Copilot. With this update, Majesco reaffirms its position at the forefront of the insurance technology industry, introducing cutting-edge Generative AI (GenAI) and other business capabilities that redefine how insurance professionals interact with their business solutions. 

The Spring ‘24 Release marks another significant milestone in Majesco’s commitment to innovation and excellence. Majesco Copilot, already a cornerstone of efficiency, productivity, and support for insurance operations, now boasts enhanced capabilities that leverage the GenAI technology for actions. Users can now effortlessly copy quote, close claims, add notes, send emails, create detailed descriptions and more, all within the intuitive interface available on every screen of Majesco’s solutions including P&C Intelligent Core Suite, L&AH Intelligent Core Suite, Loss Control, Digital 360 Solutions, and Distribution Management offerings. This advancement positions Majesco as the first in the industry to integrate GenAI within its entire portfolio of offerings, showcasing a dedication to driving the future of insurance business operations and technology. 

NICE Actimize announced the availability of IFM 11 (Integrated Fraud Management), a new release of its market leading, AI-driven fraud management and detection platform. The new release leverages recent advancements in artificial intelligence together with NICE Actimize’s unique collective intelligence capabilities to introduce unprecedented fraud detection accuracy, agility and efficiency to protect financial services firms and their customers from the next generation of AI-driven fraud and scams. 

This enhanced version is the first solution to deliver AI pervasively across all fraud prevention processes from detection and strategy to investigations and operations as well as intelligent data orchestration. 

With this new platform, organizations will also benefit by preventing more scams and stopping money mules with their existing data by building deeper and richer entity risk profiles and augmenting network analytics and Generative AI capabilities in fraud detection, fraud strategy, alert triage, investigations and claims management. 

Qraft Technologies announced a strategic technical collaboration with First Securities Investment Trust Co, a distinguished asset management firm. The partnership’s goals will be to develop new tools for investment management through the joint development of sophisticated AI and deep learning algorithms. These initiatives will look to refine multi-factor screening models and enhance forecasting of market risk and set new benchmarks for investment strategies. 

At the present time, where AI and deep learning are changing the world of investing, Qraft brings its cutting-edge expertise to this collaboration, driving the development of innovative financial technologies. This venture will utilize Qraft’s advanced AI algorithms to identify and analyze extensive global financial data, while optimizing the stock selection process and market risk sentiment predictions. Qraft and FSITC’s goal is to broaden and elevate the toolkit available to mutual fund, DAM account, and Active ETF portfolio managers, ensuring top-tier investment management services are accessible to the public. 

Reply introduced LoopMind, a solution designed to ensure monitoring, security, and compliance in processes that utilize artificial intelligence. Developed by Sprint Reply, a company within the Reply Group specializing in Hyper Automation, LoopMind enables a controlled and efficient environment for integrating AI into existing workflows, allowing organizations to confidently adopt this new technology. With its monitoring capabilities, LoopMind provides operators with full visibility into workflows and automated operations using AI, in compliance with the standards established by the European AI Act. 

LoopMind keeps human intervention central in business processes, involving operators when necessary. The “Human-in-the-Loop” approach combines the best of technology with team expertise. Additionally, the platform archives and records all information related to AI-based operations, enabling monitoring and performance maintenance even with changes in the nature of monitored data. 

Flexible and versatile, LoopMind adapts to the specific needs of each company. Its architecture allows the use of various AI models such as those from OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Anthropic, and seamlessly integrates with existing IT infrastructures. The solution provides near real-time control over AI operations in workflows, intercepting potential errors and preventing regulatory violations. 

S&P Global announced the launch of S&P AI Benchmarks by Kensho. This innovative benchmarking solution assesses and ranks the quantitative reasoning abilities and expertise of large language models (LLMs) across the business and finance industry. The results of these assessments will be displayed on a scoreboard, providing a transparent and comprehensive view of the performance of different LLMs. 

S&P AI Benchmarks by Kensho is set to overhaul the way financial professionals evaluate which LLM to leverage for their financial workflows. The solution measures and ranks how well LLMs can solve complex quantitative reasoning questions, understand business fundamentals, and extract relevant financial information from documents. By rigorously validating the model’s outputs, S&P AI Benchmarks by Kensho offers accurate and reliable assessments of LLM applications for financial professionals. 

S&P AI Benchmarks by Kensho stands out due to its rigorous validation process, developed in partnership with a diverse team of specialists. This includes esteemed academics, seasoned researchers, subject matter experts across various domains, and financial professionals from across S&P Global’s divisions, all contributing to the tool’s precision and efficacy. 

Submittable, the software company helping thousands of organizations worldwide launch, manage and measure social impact programs, today announced its ‘AI for the Greater Good’ initiative. 

This initiative defines Submittable’s principles for developing responsible AI technology for grant management and CSR efforts as well as helping organizations adopt AI intentionally. It also invites social impact practitioners to get hands-on in shaping Submittable’s current and future AI tools. 

‘AI for the Greater Good’ builds on Submittable’s partnership with Microsoft, aligning with Microsoft’s ‘Responsible AI Principles’ and emphasizing AI’s transformative power for enhancing communities. 

SymphonyAI, a provider of predictive and generative enterprise AI SaaS solutions, announced SensaAI for Sanctions, a platform-agnostic “AI upgrade” for any sanctions solution. It dramatically impacts sanctions evasion efforts by optimizing match accuracy with deep, context-aware AI-based matching algorithms. 

SensaAI for Sanctions, delivered via API, is pre-trained and ready to use out-of-the-box. Using an organization’s existing data, SensaAI for Sanctions works in parallel with rules-based systems using AI to power the match process from rationalizing unstructured data, including SWIFT transaction data. It then applies predictive matching models that enable investigators to accurately distinguish the legitimate risks from the resource-consuming false positives. SensaAI for Sanctions is part of SymphonyAI’s strategy to deliver AI capabilities for financial crime prevention, including the introduction last year of Sensa Investigation Hub, power by SymphonyAI’s award-winning EurekaAI generative and predictive AI platform. 

Risk and compliance officers can harness market-leading AI capabilities, including continual learning built to evolve accurate matching as quickly as bad actors evolve evasion tactics. SensaAI demonstrates quantifiable low-cost gains by supporting more efficient investigation, transparent explainability, and seamless integration with existing solutions, providing immediate adoptability and intuitive insights for users from the front-line investigator to the boardroom. 

Turing Technology announced thatEnsemble Active Management, or EAM, now boasts a stronger lineup of actively managed US equity portfolios than any mutual fund company in the nation. EAM was introduced to the market in 2018, deploying advanced technology coupled with a fundamental rethinking of active management. Five years later, based on live and verifiable returns, EAM is now able to ‘claim the throne’ to an important performance validation. 

The specifics behind EAM’s mantle as the strongest active US equity lineup, as well as other insights into EAM, are detailed in a Paper co-authored by Rob Nestor, President of Turing and Vadim Fishman, the company’s Co-Founder, published last month by the CFA Institute titled “EAM: How and Why AI-Powered Active Management Will Dominate Passive.” 

As background, the investment industry labels equity portfolios based on size (large, mid, small) and style (value, blend, growth), with the 3×3 matrix creating 9 ‘style boxes’. Using the lead EAM strategy for each style box, two powerful statistics emerge: (1) All 9 lead EAM strategies outperform their benchmarks since inception, and (2) the annual excess return vs its benchmark, for all 9 style boxes, averages 5.2% (516 basis points). 

Vena, the Complete Planning platform loved by finance and trusted by business, today announced that it is bringing state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams with Vena Copilot. 

Vena Copilot for FP&A combines Vena’s category-leading FP&A expertise with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service large language models, including GPT-4, to help FP&A teams and their collaborators increase productivity, operational efficiency, and business agility so they can focus on driving strategic impact. 

Today, 75 percent of an FP&A team’s work is gathering data and administering processes. That stops now with Vena Copilot. Vena Copilot acts as an extension of the FP&A team, doing tactical work and producing insights using the most intuitive interface there is—natural language—to unlock everyone’s strategic potential. 

Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions has launched OneSumX® Reg Manager to help U.S. community banks and credit unions enhance their regulatory change management efforts. This artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solution represents the latest addition to the Compliance Solutions OneSumX portfolio suite, a trusted product line designed to help financial institutions across the U.S. more effectively navigate regulatory change. 

OneSumX Reg Manager leverages the robust capabilities inherent in the broader portfolio suite and delivers a purpose-built workflow that tightly aligns to the unique needs of community banks and credit unions. This new solution seamlessly integrates AI with a deep wealth of compliance expertise, providing a powerful tool for navigating regulatory landscapes with efficiency and precision.