AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 8/2/24

ACA Group (ACA), the leading provider of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions to clients in the financial services industry, announced the acquisition of Encore Compliance (Encore), a leader in AI compliance software solutions. This acquisition enhances ACA’s Managed Services suite of people, processes, and technology, adding AI-enabled surveillance for expert network chaperoning and research calls to help asset managers and investment advisors comply with SEC, FCA, and ESMA regulations. Additionally, this technology can enable research teams to create their own expert libraries and identify potential risks in other voice communications subject to heightened regulatory oversight, aimed to strengthen overall compliance controls. 

In the U.S., the SEC has intensified its scrutiny on firms’ use of expert networks and alternative data under Section 204A of the Investment Advisers Act. This heightened focus has also been felt in Europe under the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR). Overall, Encore helps compliance teams monitor and protect against material non-public information (MNPI) related risks of multiple compliance regimes. 

This technology creates a highly efficient, insight-driven operation for compliance and investment teams, who can now leverage the technology directly or through ACA’s Managed Services Team. Users benefit from accurate and timely insights, comprehensive compliance-reviewed call summaries and transcripts, and automatic transcription and review of expert calls. AI technology meticulously identifies potential areas of concern, strengthening proactive risk management and enabling research teams to drive alpha generation through improved data quality. 

Acuity Knowledge Partners (Acuity), a leading provider of bespoke research, analytics, staffing and technology solutions to the financial services sector, welcomes Jon O’Donnell as its new Chief Operating Officer (COO). 

Jon brings to Acuity over 16 years of leadership experience at IBM, where he successfully led EMEA Business and Technology Consulting Divisions of up to 15,000 practitioners and $3 billion per annum turnover, delivering impressive market growth. He was part of the Global Leadership Team of IBM Consulting, and held critical leadership positions across numerous markets, including EMEA and North America. 

As COO for Acuity, O’Donnell will join the Executive Committee and oversee the Digital Solutions Group, Global Strategy and various enablement teams including Information Technology, Information Security, and Legal. 

Arch, a digital admin platform modernizing private investment operations and investor communications, today announced it has passed more than $100 billion in private markets assets on the platform. To keep up with the rapidly growing universe of alternative investments, Arch has more than doubled its headcount, adding a key new hire to lead sales and partnerships. Infrastructure required for seamless private markets investing, delivering on its plans for expansion and product development following its recent $20 million Series A funding. 

Arch currently serves thousands of families and institutions across more than 270 clients, including single- and multi-family offices, private investment firms, institutional allocators, banks and wealth managers. Notably, Arch also works with four of the world’s largest investment banks. Its client- and advisor-facing platform automates the manual work traditionally associated with investing in and managing alternative investments, providing a superior digital client experience. By aggregating data and documents, Arch offers unparalleled insights into a diverse array of private investments. 

Following the recent launch of next-generation digital tools, which includes artificial intelligence (AI) summaries, financial visualization and EIN Tax Validation, Arch is bolstering its product set with a focus on bringing institutional quality tools and insights to family offices, investment advisors and bank wealth management teams. Most recently, the team has introduced Portfolio Look-throughs, a new feature that presents each fund’s underlying portfolio in an aggregated view. Look-throughs enable advisors and investors to demystify underlying holdings with simple visualizations of their direct and indirect exposures to portfolio companies. For example, clients can see how much Stripe or SpaceX they hold, both directly and through funds. This enables easy comparisons of company valuations across different managers, all in one consolidated snapshot. 

Armanino LLP (Armanino), a top 20 accounting and consulting firm, continues to revolutionize the SOC 2 assessment process with the integration of bespoke, generative AI updates to Audit Ally™, the firm’s custom-built data compliance assessment tool. Already, Audit Ally’s AI enhancements have reduced evidence submission and approval processes by approximately 50%, saving clients and Armanino professionals significant time. These enhancements reinforce Armanino’s position as a premier provider for SOC 2 assessments. 

Audit Ally, powered by AWS Bedrock and Anthropic Claude 3, now boasts native generative AI capabilities to summarize highly-technical audit notes and translate them into actionable insights for clients, all while keeping the auditor fully in control of the communications. This new feature saves auditors valuable time while effortlessly informing auditees in plain English about the progression of their assessment, missing information or improper documentation, creating a self-contained paper trail within the dashboard. Audit Ally puts client privacy and data security at the forefront as well, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations. To learn more about Armanino’s AI-powered accounting tools with Claude, click here. 

Audit Ally also integrated Intercom’s Fin AI Agent, providing clients with instant responses to questions around their SOC 2 assessment from a trained chatbot. This chatbot can help immediately answer questions around progress, missing items, or alert and connect the client with an Armanino team member for a quick resolution. 

Axle Automation, Inc. (“Axle” or “Company”), a trailblazing provider of AI-powered solutions for compliance teams, proudly announces the successful close of its seed funding round. The Company will use the $2.5M to scale the team and optimize and supercharge compliance teams at fintechs, banks, and other financial institutions. Led by Diagram Ventures, with participation from Mistral Ventures, Uphonest Capital, StreamingFast and other strategic angels, this round underscores the growing demand for innovative solutions to combat money laundering in the financial sector. 

Over $200 billion is spent annually on AML compliance, a figure that is growing by 20% each year. Despite this investment, the magnitude of money laundering activities persists with estimates suggesting up to $2 trillion laundered annually. Traditional operational processes and detection methods have fallen short and are highly manual and inefficient, leaving financial institutions grappling with escalating compliance costs. Axle is leveraging the power of generative artificial intelligence to automate inefficient processes such as Enhanced Due Diligence. By doing so, Axle empowers organizations to scale their compliance efforts while reducing fraud, compliance risks, and operational costs, and increasing revenue. 

Giannaros brings invaluable expertise to Axle, having served as the previous CEO and first Chief Compliance Officer of Wyre, a crypto-as-a-service company, which he founded in 2013. His firsthand experience navigating the compliance and AML landscape brings him invaluable experience in the category and positions Axle as a leader in the fight against financial crime. 

Confluence Technologies, Inc. (“Confluence”), a global financial technology solution provider for regulatory, analytics, and investor communications, announced today that its industry-leading Unity platform suite of products went live and completed filings for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Tailored Shareholder Reports (TSR). Confluence helps fund administrators and asset managers produce TSR documents and filings for tens of thousands of classes and achieve compliance with the SEC TSR. 

Confluence developed its investor communications solution to ease the data management challenges and automate the creation, publishing, and Inline eXtensible Business Reporting Language (iXBRL) tagging of the TSR documents. The solution removes recurring manual work and user interaction to return final documents in seconds rather than days to weeks. 

To produce TSR documents, Confluence worked closely with the industry to understand the needs and business challenges for easy and repeatable data integration, and template creation, driving efficiency in production and successful filing of compliant documents. 

Deloitte and Anthropic today announced they will collaborate to accelerate the adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) across public and private sector clients. This alliance combines Deloitte’s industry experience with Anthropic’s Claude model family to develop customized, enterprise-grade AI solutions that prioritize the trustworthy and human-centered use of GenAI. 

This alliance aims to help Deloitte’s clients build and deploy GenAI applications by using the Claude model family—Anthropic’s large language models (LLMs). Deloitte’s Trustworthy AI™ framework aligns with Anthropic’s Constitutional AI approach to training LLMs that include ethical safeguards. This helps provide the governance and guardrails necessary for organizations to responsibly use GenAI applications across teams and functions—particularly those in highly regulated industries such as financial services, health care and government. 

Through this alliance, Deloitte expects to train more than 15,000 professionals on Anthropic’s Claude family of LLMs. Deloitte has already begun development of several Anthropic-powered business applications that will be available this year for use by commercial and government clients. The first solution, Deloitte’s C Suite AI™ for CFOs, is designed to simplify enterprise contract workflows and offers a custom GPT to answer CFO questions, generate investor documentation drafts and automate customer service. It streamlines financial functions in the key areas of planning, operations, reporting and investor relations. C-Suite AI is a tool powered by NVIDIA to help financial services industry clients build custom LLMs using Amazon Bedrock from Amazon Web Services (AWS).  

EarnUp Inc., a financial wellness fintech company, announced today its newest product, AI Advisor, the industry’s first and only always-on AI-powered financial guru that helps to automate end-to-end consumer financial wellness. From expert advice to seamless execution, AI Advisor provides financial institutions with the ultimate customer engagement tool. 

Powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence, AI Advisor empowers users with hyper-personalized insights and guidance, enabling them to make informed decisions to achieve their financial goals. It does this by instantly analyzing the user’s real-time banking and credit data to answer complex financial questions with personalized, actionable answers, including tailored product recommendations. An autonomous AI chatbot solution to supercharge customer engagement, AI Advisor ensures that every user, regardless of their financial background, can benefit from expert-level advice and support and realize a stronger, more financially resilient future. 

What sets AI Advisor apart is the ability to understand and interpret the context of a query and respond with an actionable solution, including product offers such as HELOCs, cards, and consolidation loans. 

Gradient AI, a leading enterprise software provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in the insurance industry, today announced that it has raised $56.1 million in Series C funding. 

The round was led by Centana Growth Partners, with participation from existing investors MassMutual Ventures, Sandbox Insurtech Ventures and Forte Ventures. The funds will be used to support product development to continue driving innovation and efficiency in the insurance industry and to further bolster customer success and sales functions. 

According to McKinsey & Company, AI could deliver up to $1.1 trillion of annual value in the insurance industry. Gradient AI is uniquely positioned to be at the forefront of delivering solutions to unlock that value. 

HouseCanary, Inc. (“HouseCanary”), a national brokerage known for its innovation and accuracy of real estate information, today announced the beta launch of CanaryAI, a conversational AI tool designed to chat with anyone who may have questions about the real estate space and enable them to quickly and easily query HouseCanary’s industry-leading data and analytics platform to answer their toughest real estate questions. 

Historically, navigating the complexities of the $40 trillion U.S. real estate market has been dependent on aggregating disparate data sources, including public record data, county assessor data, AVMs, market forecasts, historical home sale data, rental yields, and comparable property data. Gaining access to and compiling this data can be challenging, costly, and time-consuming. Even with access to the data, finding the resources required to process and integrate it into daily operations can prove difficult, if not impossible. 

CanaryAI solves these challenges by bringing together the most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date information on more than 136 million US residential properties with a conversational chatbot that enables anyone to ask questions easily and get the answers they need quickly. 

Infrrd, a leading provider of AI-driven document processing solutions, proudly unveils MortgageCheckai, a revolutionary platform designed to expedite pre-fund and post-close loan audits for mortgage lenders and servicers. 

MortgageCheckai is a game-changer in mortgage auditing, empowering loan closers and QC reviewers to speed up loan reviews with unmatched data accuracy while upholding the audit’s integrity. With Infrrd’s cutting-edge AI technology, loan closers or QC auditors can now achieve substantial time savings, reducing the manual review of loan documents by at least 50%. 

Infrrd has teamed up with Asurity, a leading provider of compliance-focused services and solutions, to design MortgageCheckai. Infrrd is applying its cutting-edge technical capabilities to harness Asurity’s extensive mortgage industry expertise. This collaboration has allowed Infrrd to automate laborious mortgage closings and QC processes with compliant, complex document types, and variations in loan structures. Asurity’s role in developing this innovative platform has transformed it into an invaluable tool serving as a loan closer and QC auditor’s second brain. 

Ledger, the world leader in Digital Asset security for consumers and enterprises, today launched for sale Ledger Flex, its second new product launch in 2024. Released during Ledger’s tenth anniversary, Ledger Flex and the previously released Ledger Stax mark the inception of a new generation of Ledger hardware, featuring secure E Ink® touchscreen displays powered by Ledger’s Secure OS. Ledger Flex is available to purchase today on Ledger.com and through our retail partners around the world for $249, shipping immediately. 

Ledger Flex marks the new standard for Ledger devices, featuring NFC and a secure E Ink® touchscreen, at an attractive price point. Ledger Flex is an homage to the iconic black and steel motif featured on Ledger devices for a decade, a reminder of Ledger’s heritage of uncompromising security. Its high-resolution, 2.8” display provides clarity when signing transactions or approving logins. E Ink® offers unmatched energy efficiency, so the battery can last for weeks or even months on one charge. 

Secure signing devices are key to a future where Proof of You becomes essential — as more of our value becomes digitized, society will need trusted methods to prove identity. The rapid advancement of AI pushes provenance to the forefront of technology’s biggest challenges, and trusting what you see becomes increasingly difficult. Ledger devices are the only products in the world with secure touchscreens, making them essential for protecting both your digital value and your identity. Ledger devices bring security to your inherently insecure devices. 

MetLife, Inc. (NYSE: MET) today added two accomplished and experienced leaders to their Global Technology and Operations organization. Tamar Shapiro will join MetLife as their Chief Data and Analytics Officer and Dan Antilley becomes the company’s Chief Information Security Officer. 

Shapiro was the Head of Analytics at Instagram where she led a team of data scientists and data engineers responsible for driving growth and engagement of more than one billion users by launching best-in-class products and features. She also worked for more than 10 years at American Express, leading the digital analytics team responsible for analytics, reporting, experiments and customer insights. Shapiro comes to MetLife from TZP Group, a Private Equity firm, where she leveraged data and technology while applying Artificial Intelligence and advanced analytics to drive engagement, sales and profitability. She is a passionate advocate for women in tech and has served as a mentor for Built by Girls, Minds Matter, and Women Unlimited, as a speaker for Girls Who Code, and as co-chair of the Analytics Collective. Shapiro will be based at MetLife’s Global Headquarters in New York City. 

Antilley brings more than 30 years’ experience in the technology industry, the majority at Bank of America where he led Cybersecurity Operations, Cyber Forensics and the company’s Incident Response Program. He also created and led the company’s Insider Threat program, Application Security program and Third- Party Assessment program. He most recently worked at NCR Atleos, where he was the Chief Security Officer. Antilley is an active and respected member of the cyber community, including leading partnerships with Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA). He will be based at MetLife’s Global Technology Hub in Cary, NC where the company is home to more than 2,600 employees. 

Monto, the first-of-its-kind AI connector designed for any ERP, today exited stealth with $9 million in seed funding to bring order to B2B payments collection chaos. Monto enables B2B finance teams to seamlessly get paid from any AP portal used by their enterprise customers. The company also announced the opening of a U.S. office in New York City. 

The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Verissimo Ventures, F2 Venture Capital, Firsthand Alliance and Room40 Ventures. Serial entrepreneur Ariel Maislos and fintech angels who come from executive positions at Intuit, Plaid, Salesforce and more also participated. Monto will use the funding for its U.S. expansion and continue advancing its technology to make the collection of B2B payments–mostly ACH and RTP–as easy as tapping a card. 

Regulations worldwide are pushing businesses to establish their own e-invoicing platforms. According to Deloitte, companies worldwide will adopt e-invoicing, whether mandated by governments in the case of Europe, or from market leaders supported by the government. In this new B2B world, suppliers must integrate with each customer’s payment software, each with its own complex logins and workflows, creating endless chaos for payment collection teams that can severely impact cash flow and working capital. 

MyChoice, a Toronto-based Insurtech company, has released an insurance assistant that allows users in the US and Canada to receive real-time life insurance quotes while interacting with an insurance AI assistant through their website. Watch the company’s demo video to see how the bot works. This seamless insurance shopping experience is also available through the GPT store in the US and Canada. In 2023, MyChoice was part of the Google for Startups Accelerator, enhancing the company’s AI capabilities with access to top talent and cutting-edge technologies. 

The company’s newly released assistant, integrated with MyChoice’s API, represents a significant leap in customer service for insurance. This AI bot is designed to address the need of customers seeking a more personalised insurance shopping experience outside of the broker serviced hours of 9-5. When a customer interacts with the bot, their information is automatically logged into MyChoice’s CRM, ensuring a seamless follow-up process by MyChoice’s broker partners. 

While this AI bot significantly enhances the efficiency of obtaining life insurance quotes, it is not intended to replace licensed professionals. It offers a faster, more convenient alternative to filling out forms where user can ask questions prior to connecting with a licensed professional. As language and text-to-speech models improve, we plan to launch voice enabled versions of our assistant and further integrating our auto and home insurance services. 

Numerated, a leading fintech providing modular commercial lending solutions, is excited to announce a strategic partnership with on-demand accounting data provider Validis. This collaboration will provide lenders with the same intuitive experience now with expanded data sets, stronger financial analysis capabilities and the highest quality credit decisions. 

The integration of Validis’s data sharing technology with Numerated’s platform will be rolled out in phases, with initial implementation in 2024 and full implementation in early 2025. This phased approach ensures a seamless transition for customers and maximizes the benefits of the new capabilities. 

The ability to create relevant and impactful content is essential for marketers to break through digital noise and connect with customers. For example, Gen Z consumers respond to communications that are authentic and personalized. To help enterprises create high-performing copy that “speaks” to important segments, Motivation Artificial Intelligence (AI) company Persado has released new GenAI technology for brands to create content at scale, which engages specific groups—along with 20 pre-built marketing segments that speed message generation. With this innovation, Persado is the first provider of an AI-driven content generation tool for creating emotion-informed copy that is proven to increase engagement with specific groups of consumers. 

Persado generative AI equips brands with the flexibility to tailor content for each segment by defining user attributes, using pre-built segments, or both. Data and marketing leaders can also upload their pre-existing segment documentation to define and create custom segments based on unique customer attributes, such as brand engagement (customer value, engagement frequency, or loyalty status) or spending behaviors (product preferences or affinity, purchase frequency, etc.). 

The Motivation AI platform leverages 12 years of historical campaign data, continuous model training, and security and privacy adhering to regulatory standards. These unmatched benefits, along with a growing list of pre-built segments, enable enterprises to pinpoint the most authentic language to engage key audiences, such as those who often fall into the Gen Z demographic—a group with increasing economic influence—or groups with significant discretionary spending power. 

Savvy Advisors Inc. (herein “Savvy” or “Savvy Advisors” or “the firm”), a registered investment advisor (RIA) affiliated with Savvy Wealth, Inc. (“Savvy Wealth”), today announced the hiring of six new wealth managers: Brad Morgan, CFP®; Alex Austin, CFP®, WMS℠; Brian Boswell, CFP®; Colin Farr, CFP®; J. Nick McLaughlin; and Michaela Sullivan, CFP®. Leveraging Savvy Wealth’s proprietary technology-powered advisor platform, the firm’s advisors are empowered to scale their practice and provide high-net-worth clients with a modern experience. 

Morgan joins Savvy from Mariner Wealth Advisors, where his team managed more than $300 million in client assets. He specializes in serving current and former Procter & Gamble (P&G) employees and helping them navigate the complexities of the company’s unique compensation and retirement options. Morgan’s move to Savvy cements the firm as a platform complete with solutions that can support advisors with large client bases and high assets under management (AUM). 

Prior to his decade-long tenure as an advisor, Morgan was a senior engineer at P&G, and comes from a multi-generational P&G family. Bringing his practice to Savvy, he reunites with former Mariner colleague Nate Kunkel, CFP®. The duo has vast experience in solving various tax, charitable, stock option, estate, income and investment planning needs of P&G employees, and will continue to focus on serving P&G executives and staff. 

SentinelOne (NYSE: S), a global leader in AI-powered security, today announced the SentinelOne Risk Assurance Initiative, a new program to help insurers secure their clients’ networks with the world’s most advanced AI security platform. With the SentinelOne Risk Assurance Initiative, insurers can offer the SentinelOne Singularity™ Platform to clients at preferred rates to stop attacks before they happen and reduce financial loss and insurance premiums. 

Leading carriers and cyber insurance providers around the globe, including AXA XL, Coalition, Travelers, At-Bay, and CFC, are already offering the Singularity Platform to clients to encourage deployment and prevent ransomware across all surfaces. The new SentinelOne Risk Assurance Initiative will enhance their efforts. 

Tungsten Automation announces the launch of InvoiceAgility, a new, integrated capture and e-Invoicing Network solution that simplifies accounts payable (AP) processes while eliminating friction and empowering financial operations through AI-powered workflow automation. Supply chain complexities, ever-changing regulations and growing fraud are overloading AP teams. InvoiceAgility eliminates those complexities to accelerate invoice processing, reduce errors and ensure compliance, significantly enhancing efficiency. 

InvoiceAgility combines the global scale of the Tungsten e-Invoice Network with the seamless capability to capture incoming paper or image-based invoices through Tungsten’s industry-leading AP Essentials cloud solution. The integration of key capabilities from this solution empowers AP teams. 

With a 40-year history in workflow innovation, Tungsten Automation is driving the next evolution of financial technology: AI. This month, the company was named a Leader in IDC’s MarketScape: Worldwide Accounts Payable Automation Software for Large Enterprise 2024 Vendor Assessment. 

The Bank of Elk River, one of the largest community banks in Sherburne County, Minnesota, has announced a new partnership with Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, to provide digital-initiated personal loans to customers outside of their typical footprint. 

The Bank of Elk River became an Upstart Referral Network lending partner in June 2023. With the Upstart Referral Network, qualified personal loan applicants on Upstart.com who meet The Bank of Elk River’s credit policies will complete an online application and closing process in a Bank of Elk River-branded experience. 

Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC) announced today that Bridget Engle has been named Senior Executive Vice President (SEVP) and Head of Technology, reporting to Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf and joining the company’s Operating Committee, effective August 12, 2024. 

Engle will be responsible for all technology across the Company. She brings more than 30 years of experience managing large, global technology organizations in complex financial institutions. Engle joins Wells Fargo from BNY where she served as SEVP and Chief Information Officer (CIO) from 2017 until earlier this year. Prior to her role at BNY, she served in several roles at Bank of America, including as the CIO of Consumer Banking as well as CIO of Global Banking and Markets, and in various roles at several other financial institutions earlier in her career. 

The company also announced that Tracy Kerrins will serve as the Head of Consumer Technology and will lead a new Generative AI team, which will be responsible for driving the adoption of Generative AI across Wells Fargo, reporting to Engle. 

Today, ZestyAI, the leading provider of climate and property risk analytics solutions powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Amica Mutual Insurance, a leader in auto, home, and life insurance, announced they will be expanding their long-standing partnership. Amica will now leverage ZestyAI’s full property and climate risk analytics platform. This includes AI-powered climate risk models that evaluate both the hazard and vulnerability of hail and wind damage, Z-HAIL™ and Z-WIND™, as well as ZestyAI’s property risk solution, Z-PROPERTY™. Amica will integrate these new predictive analytics models into a unified AI platform with their existing wildfire risk assessment, Z-FIRE™, and regulatory compliance solutions, CA Compliance Prefill. 

As natural catastrophic events, like severe convective storms and wildfires, become increasingly frequent and severe, insurers need to find better ways to accurately predict and proactively address the growing threat of climate risk. ZestyAI provides accurate, property-specific data to help insurers determine the true risk for each property. The models examine the interaction of climatology, geography, and the unique characteristics of every structure and roof, analyzed in 3D, including accumulated damage from historical storms. The models are rooted in decades of science and experimentation by researchers, including the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), and are trained on huge amounts of loss data, making them the most accurate solutions on the market. 

With ZestyAI models, carriers are able to move from territory-based segmentation to a property-by-property risk assessment. They also benefit from enhanced underwriting and portfolio optimization and can more accurately align policies with coverage needs.