AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 12/13/24

Alvaria CX, an Alvaria company, a leader in contact center infrastructure software serving global enterprises, including top financial services and media/telecom brands, has announced the launch of the Alvaria Intelligence Platform (AIP). The platform is a direct response to increasing demand for the company’s world-class compliance, advanced AI integration capabilities, customizable workflows, and leading digital channel integrations. This platform combines capabilities of both the Alvaria Advanced Outreach and CXP products while providing API integrations to partner solutions.  

The global contact center infrastructure software market is valued at $29.32 billion in 2024, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.92% from 2024-2031, reaching $83.16 billion, according to Verified Market Research. Meanwhile, Deloitte found that 81% of contact center executives planned to invest in AI for agent-enabling technologies that could improve operational efficiency and the agent experience.  

By leveraging AIP, enterprise contact centers around the globe can seamlessly Reach Out Right™ with customers at the right time, with the right message, and at the highest compliance standards. Alvaria CX’s technology empowers businesses to drive customer acquisition, expand portfolios, foster retention, and transform satisfied clients into brand advocates. Every stage of the customer journey is enhanced, creating lasting, value-driven relationships.  

Conquest Planning Inc. (“Conquest”), a technology platform modernizing financial planning with customized and consumable advice, today celebrates a significant milestone after recently surpassing 1 million financial plans. This accomplishment is bolstered by its continued expansion into the United Kingdom and the United States, along with its recognition as one of 10 companies to win Manulife and the World Economic Forum’s Prospering in Longevity Challenge, among other notable accolades.  

Originally founded in 2018 by Dr. Mark Evans, an industry veteran with over 30 years experience, Conquest’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software empowers institutions to offer financial advice at scale, from mass-market clients to ultra-high-net-worth individuals. Conquest serves financial advisors, banks, brokerages, wirehouses, insurance firms and pension providers, offering a platform that meets the unique demands of a diverse customer base, across the entire wealth continuum. Leveraging its Strategic Advice Manager (SAM), an AI-based engine that performs thousands of complex calculations around every piece of client information, advisors and clients are able to quickly and accurately understand the impact of different scenarios on clients’ goals and recommend the next best financial decision.  

With its AI-powered platform, Conquest is working to make best-in-class financial guidance more accessible to people around the world. The firm’s recent recognition as a winner of the “Prospering in Longevity Challenge,” where it was named one of only three top innovators, highlights its focus on delivering innovative, accessible solutions aimed at enhancing quality of life for people worldwide. This challenge was designed to recognize organizations with forward-thinking approaches to helping people live longer, healthier lives. Conquest believes all people, whether they are in the borrowing, accumulation or decumulation phase of life, deserve a flexible, dynamic financial plan that adapts to life’s changes and accounts for extended lifespans.  

Today, DataVisor, the world’s leading AI-powered fraud and risk platform, launched a groundbreaking solution that computes hotspot, distinct count, and high-frequency features in real-time with 100% accuracy for high-dimensional data at an unprecedented scale. Identifying hotspots and computing distinct counts in real time has long been a significant challenge due to the complexity and volume of streaming data, but this solution sets a new standard for scalability and precision. Traditional systems often rely on estimates or delayed batch processing, sacrificing accuracy for speed. In contrast, DataVisor’s solution delivers 100% accurate results within milliseconds, enabling organizations to stay ahead of modern fraud threats with unmatched efficiency and total transparency.  

Hotspots—areas of unusually high activity, such as a sudden surge in transactions from a specific region or device—often signal potential fraud, making their real-time identification critical. Distinct counts, which measure the number of unique items in a dataset (like customer IDs or device fingerprints), are essential for uncovering anomalies and maintaining data integrity. Fraud detection heavily relies on identifying these abnormal patterns and counting unique behaviors quickly and precisely. Speed and precision are crucial for uncovering hidden threats and mitigating risks before they escalate, especially given fraudsters’ increasingly sophisticated tactics. Achieving this requires advanced analytics that can handle massive volumes of data without compromising accuracy.  

At the same time, meeting regulatory requirements and ensuring customer transparency are key expectations for modern financial systems. Regulations increasingly mandate that financial institutions provide detailed, accurate insights into how fraud is detected, while customers demand understandable explanations for actions taken on their accounts. This makes precision in identifying hotspots and counting distinct activities essential—not only for catching fraudulent behavior effectively but also for proving compliance and building trust with customers with complete transparency.  

DeFi Technologies Inc. (the “Company” or “DeFi Technologies”) (CBOE CA: DEFI) (GR: R9B) (OTC: DEFTF), a financial technology company that pioneers the convergence of traditional capital markets with the world of decentralised finance (“DeFi”), is pleased to announce the acquisition of a minority  stake in Neuronomics AG (“Neuronomics”), a Swiss asset management firm specializing in quantitative trading strategies powered by artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and quantitative finance.  

Under the terms of the LOI, DeFi Technologies will increase its stake in Neuronomics by subscribing for 10% of the issued and outstanding securities of Neuronomics (the “Investment”). This strategic investment aligns with DeFi Technologies’ goals of expanding its presence in the asset management space, leveraging Neuronomics’ technological innovations and market expertise. DeFi Technologies had previously acquired a toe-hold investment in Neuronomics.  

Neuronomics, founded in Switzerland, has established itself as a leader in asset management by developing advanced quantitative trading strategies based on artificial intelligence (“AI”) and computational neuroscience. The firm holds an asset management license from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (“FINMA”), enabling it to manage and administer financial assets on behalf of clients. Neuronomics’ research-driven approach focuses on two key areas: AI and Computational Neuroscience in Finance.  

Digital Matrix Systems, Inc. (DMS) announced today that it has entered a strategic alliance with Stratyfy, a fintech leader empowering small to midsize financial institutions with the ability to safely leverage advanced machine learning in their financial decisions. This alliance supports the two companies’ common goal of helping leading institutions improve processes and mitigate risk. Stratyfy’s proprietary decisioning approach paired with DMS’ data solutions enable mid-market lenders to easily automate and incorporate AI/ML into their credit decisions.  

With smaller lenders faced with fewer resources, Stratyfy has made it their mission to ensure transparency is built into their solutions from the ground up. Not only does this allow lenders to easily explain and interpret how credit decisions are made, but it also speeds up the model risk management process allowing for quicker, safer deployment of new strategies. By bringing together DMS’ data solutions and Stratyfy’s decisioning approach, lenders can confidently adopt AI/ML, helping them generate data-driven growth.  

Today Domo (Nasdaq: DOMO) announced its partnership with advisory and accounting firm Richey May, providing customized data-driven insights for its mortgage banking consulting practice. To date, more than 80 mortgage bankers in Richey May’s client base have tapped Domo’s data and AI platform to gain actionable insights about their business.  

With more than 40 years of expertise in the mortgage industry, Richey May provides full-service advisory and technology consulting to clients across the mortgage and financial services sectors. Thanks to Domo’s wide range of integrations, low and no-code offerings and secure AI models, Richey May is able to tailor its strategies to meet each client’s unique needs and deliver custom reports that map back to their business goals.  

In addition to setting its clients up with Domo, Richey May uses the platform as an analytics engine, which allows the firm to expand its offerings, including the recent addition of industry benchmarking. Then, using Domo’s built-in features like Domo Everywhere and Domo Publish, Richey May can easily aggregate and securely distribute industry reports to its clients, offering an additional layer of value and insights.  

Experian® — the global data and technology company — announced today it has acquired Audigent, a leading data activation and identity platform in the advertising industry.  

The acquisition further expands Experian’s deeply integrated marketing data and identity capabilities in the advertising ecosystem. With the addition of Audigent’s combined first-party publisher data and vast inventory network, Experian adds sell-side distribution to its existing demand-side capabilities and builds on its holistic identity activation technology, allowing clients to understand, expand and reach their audiences with targeted advertising.  

Over the past three years, Experian and Audigent have partnered to deliver a range of industry leading innovations including the integration of Experian data into the Audigent SmartPMP and the creation of Experian Contextually-Indexed Audiences, which combines deterministic audience targeting with contextual targeting.  

Fiduciary In A Box (FIAB), the leading SaaS platform for ERISA health and retirement plan compliance, has announced a groundbreaking partnership with Homa Health, an innovative AI company. This collaboration brings the power of artificial intelligence to plan sponsors and fiduciaries, enabling seamless, automated contract reviews to ensure compliance with ERISA regulations and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 (CAA).  

Through this partnership, FIAB users can now have their uploaded plan contracts reviewed by Homa’s advanced AI system. The resulting report provides a detailed evaluation of compliance with federal requirements, including the critical prohibition of gag clauses under the CAA. Gag clauses restrict transparency around cost and quality information, a practice explicitly barred by the law.  

The announcement comes at a pivotal time for plan sponsors, as Gag Clause Prohibition Compliance Attestations are due by December 31st, 2024. The Department of Labor is ramping up enforcement efforts and high-profile class-action lawsuits against companies like Johnson & Johnson, the Mayo Clinic, and Wells Fargo are bringing renewed scrutiny to fiduciary practices. FIAB and Homa Health’s solution empowers plan sponsors to stay ahead of these challenges, avoiding costly penalties and reputational damage.  

Interactive Brokers (Nasdaq: IBKR), an automated global electronic broker, announced the introduction of AI-generated news summaries to its News & Research offering. This advanced feature, available at no additional cost, enables clients to access concise summaries of news articles, streamlining insights from leading providers and making it easier for investors to stay informed.  

Leveraging the power of AI, this tool extracts market-relevant information, allowing clients to quickly scan for important updates and giving them more time to make informed decisions and manage their portfolios. This, along with the ability to filter news related to stocks in portfolios and watchlists, makes it easy for users to stay updated on coverage directly impacting their investments.  

The AI-generated news summaries feature is available to eligible clients of the Interactive Brokers affiliates in Canada, the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and Japan. Interactive Brokers is discussing with its regulators a potential expansion of AI-generated new summaries to clients of IB LLC.  

Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced a multi-year strategic partnership to empower millions of Amazon sellers to manage their finances, stay compliant, access capital, and grow their business. By leveraging Intuit’s AI-driven expert platform, millions of Amazon sellers will be able to discover and access Intuit’s platform seamlessly, benefiting from powerful financial insights like profitability, cash flow, and estimated tax liabilities to fuel their growth.  

QuickBooks will become Amazon’s preferred partner for financial management solutions integrated directly in Amazon Seller Central, the Amazon site where sellers manage their businesses.  

This partnership will help Amazon sellers manage and grow their businesses with real-time financial updates, powered by new integrations. Sellers will have the ability to bring their existing Amazon data into Intuit’s AI-powered business platform, ultimately making it easier for sellers to understand and optimize profitability, manage cash flow, access capital, and simplify taxes with confidence.  

Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU), the global financial technology platform that makes Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, today announced its tax platform offerings for personal and small business filers. New innovations and seamless integrations across Intuit’s AI-driven expert platform deliver an accurate and personalized “done-for-you” tax filing experience with speed, guaranteeing maximum refunds faster. Extending its efforts to empower taxpayers beyond tax season, Intuit now also helps customers make smart money decisions year round for an even better tax outcome next year.  

The assisted tax preparation method is plagued with inefficiency for tax filers and tax preparers. It is time-consuming, manual, and expensive, with little price transparency. Intuit’s AI-driven expert network delivers full service, assisted tax prep with a live tax expert in a modern, tech-enhanced, and convenient experience from start to finish.  

Now filers can have their tax year 2024 taxes prepared for them in as little as two hours. Through Intuit’s AI-driven expert network, customers are connected virtually with a qualified tax expert with experience in their tax situation and complexity, directly through TurboTax, the Credit Karma app, or QuickBooks Online. Whether filing personal or small business taxes, Intuit customers can get their taxes done for them with confidence knowing that TurboTax experts have the power of Intuit’s AI platform at their fingertips flagging the highest deductions, credits, and accuracy along the way.  

NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) today announced that Fulton Bank, a financial service holding company, is taking the next step in its digital transformation by selecting NICE’s Enlighten-powered agent assist and self-service solutions. Fulton Bank selected CXone Mpower Copilot, CXone Mpower Autopilot, and the enhanced knowledge management solution CXone Mpower Expert, to transform its digital self-service capabilities and level up agent augmentation with generative AI. With NICE’s innovation, Fulton Bank will improve efficiencies for employees and members with a consolidated knowledge base as part of the CXone Mpower platform that will increase customer satisfaction with faster resolutions.  

Powered by Fulton Bank’s knowledge base to provide a single source of truth, Autopilot will help members use self-service in an omnichannel experience. To further improve the agent experience, Copilot will provide relevant member information in real-time to assist Fulton Bank employees during an interaction along with helpful next-best actions using Generative AI trained on Fulton Bank’s knowledge articles to answer a member’s needs. With the ultimate AI hyper platform for customer service automation, Fulton Bank is deploying cutting edge innovations to design, build and operate agents, workflows, and knowledge.  

NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) today announced that Prosper, a financial services company, has selected NICE as their CX transformation partner. With a breadth of enterprise capabilities to leverage now and in the future, NICE will enable Prosper to manage its customer experience holistically, scale effectively, mitigate risk, and improve operations.  

Dedicated to meeting customers wherever they are in the journey to advance their financial well-being, Prosper selected NICE CXone Mpower to future-proof their business for all CX needs. The flexibility, openness, and extensibility of the award-winning CXone Mpower platform is intended to adapt into the Prosper ecosystem, creating full visibility into operations with the tools to enable agile, swift responses to meet market and business changes. Adding SmartReach for proactive outbound engagement enables Prosper to reach customers quickly and effectively to meet business KPIs and increase revenue.  

With NICE’s industry-leading Workforce Management capability, Prosper expects to realize significant improvements in forecasting, scheduling, and intraday management, along with Enhanced Strategic Planner to model long-term “what if” scenarios and plan effectively for the future. Further, NICE Interaction Analytics with Enlighten AI for Complaint Management surfaces & remediates customer complaints automatically. Enlighten for Customer Satisfaction powers coaching on key agent soft-skill behaviors and raises performance across the business. With NICE, Prosper is poised for further digital and AI innovation to deliver exceptional experiences.  

9fin, the data and analytics platform for debt capital markets, has promoted Kerry McClelland from VP Finance to Chief Financial Officer.  

Kerry joined the company in June 2024, having previously worked as CFO for Fiit, a B2B SaaS fitness app. She was instrumental in 9fin’s $50m Series B round, led by Highland Europe, which closed in December 2024. The process was executed within three months — a lightning turnaround led by Kerry within her first six months at the business.  

In her role as CFO, Kerry will continue to build out 9fin’s best-in-class international finance function, supporting the company’s continued rapid expansion as it becomes an established player in debt capital markets.  

Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the Enterprise Transformation Company™, today introduced the next generation version of its market-leading Pega Smart Dispute™ offering, including new generative AI and automation features that helps banks accelerate resolution of disputes and fraud claims for any type of payment. With the new Pega Smart Dispute Enterprise Edition, banks can now resolve complex disputes and claims even faster across a wider range of payment types, all through a single, powerful, and time-tested Pega solution.  

Banks worldwide are facing a massive surge in chargeback requests, which are costly and time-consuming to process. Research firm Datos Insights found customers disputed $11 billion worth of charges in the U.S. last year alone, with this figure expected to rise 40% by 2026. The adoption of alternative payment methods beyond Visa and Mastercard has surged in recent years with significant growth in mobile wallet payments, peer-to-peer payments, buy now pay later (BNPL), and real/near-real time payment systems. Banks must navigate this ever-growing array of global and regional payment types while working across a complex web of evolving chargeback policies, often across siloed systems.  

Trusted for decades by dozens of the top global banks to handle card payment disputes, Pega Smart Dispute Enterprise Edition can now process any possible payment type more efficiently and effectively with gen AI and expanded automation capabilities. By tapping into Pega GenAI Blueprint™ – the workflow design platform launched earlier this year – users can extend Pega Smart Dispute Enterprise Edition to support new payment types in just seconds using natural language prompts. This means banks can easily support emerging, regional, or niche payment types as quickly as they come to market. Pega leverages its 20 years of extensive chargeback experience and the power of gen AI to automate new payment workflow creation. This complements existing out-of-the-box support for more established payment types, such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Zelle, and others, all under one centralized disputes platform.  

Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), The Enterprise Transformation Company™, today announced a new edition of Pega Smart Investigate™, including expanded automation and generative AI capabilities to help banks process payment exceptions and investigations faster and more efficiently. With a dramatically improved user interface, the new Pega Smart Investigate Enterprise Edition enables end-to-end process automation and supports the latest ISO 20022 standards to help financial institutions tackle the growing volume of payment exceptions while reducing operational costs and improving client satisfaction.  

Banks around the world are racing to meet the goal set by the G20 to process cross-border payments in under an hour by 2027. But with the increasing volume of global sanctions and ever-changing payment standards, many banks struggle due to outdated systems, manual and siloed processes, and already strained resources. Banks need ways to automate more of these costly payment exceptions and investigations to meet the increasing expectations from clients.  

With an updated modular architecture, Pega Smart Investigate Enterprise Edition adds extensive automation capabilities through the entire payment investigation lifecycle. This significantly reduces manual work and brings complex cases to resolution much faster. As the leading ISO 20022 compliant solution with MT and ISO interoperability, Pega Smart Investigate Enterprise Edition builds on its decades of market leadership to quickly orchestrate and automate exceptions for even the most complex cross-border payment scenarios.  

Praxis Solutions, an AI-driven, tech-enabled services firm, has launched KAIA (Kapital AI Analyst), a groundbreaking AI agent set to transform business analytics and investment decision-making for wealth and asset managers. Combining cutting-edge technology with industry expertise, KAIA enhances efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, setting a new benchmark for financial services analytics.  

KAIA can extract data from written documents and spreadsheets and summarize the results into a customized output that is ready for review by a firm’s investment committee or compliance committee.  

KAIA is a game-changer for due diligence, reducing evaluation time for investments like real estate and private placements by up to 70%. Firms can use KAIA to screen investments for suitability, or highlight the most attractive options for investment. By automating document reviews, scoring, and reporting, KAIA enables teams to make data-driven decisions faster and while ensuring compliant decision making and record keeping.   

Riverbed, the leader in AI Observability, announced today that Arab National Bank, one of the largest banks in the Middle East and headquartered in Riyadh, has collaborated with Riverbed to help deliver on its commitment to meeting the high expectations of its customers through “brilliant digital interfaces.” By implementing Riverbed’s Platform – including Network and Infrastructure Observability and AIOps solutions – Arab National Bank has seamlessly migrated its core banking application and delivered top-quality digital experiences for over two million customers and over 4,000 employees.  

Providing innovative tailored financial solutions and a fast and simple experience is central to Arab National Bank’s mission, and the Bank sees Riverbed as an essential business partner.

Most crucially, Riverbed also managed a critical migration of the bank’s core banking infrastructure to a new version of Infosys Finacle, an industry-leading universal banking solution. Such migrations, which are typically executed only once every decade, are highly complex and critical to a bank’s operations, requiring meticulous planning and flawless execution to avoid disruptions.  

Sandbox Wealth, a turnkey banking solution for non-bank financial institutions, announced today the successful pre-seed fundraise of $1.25 million in capital, led by NextGen Venture Partners, with participation from Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, gener8tor, and RevTech Labs. The investment validates Sandbox’s vision to provide RIAs and Family Offices access to deposits, lending, and enterprise-grade analytics through its open architecture banking platform.  

The new capital will support Sandbox’s efforts to attract top engineering talent and further R&D related to building out its three-sided marketplace for advisors, bankers, and their clients. The company seeks to provide a seamless experience for advisors, who would be partners and support their ability to drive organic growth, provide a full suite of private banking solutions, and deepen client relationships. For lenders, it provides an attractive channel to grow their deposits and lending base with lower-risk borrowers, including High-Net-Worth Individuals with stable financial profiles.  

Multiple trends are playing out in the wealth management industry that support the launch and future growth of the Sandbox Wealth offering. These include innovations in artificial intelligence, open finance, and global instant payment networks that are shaking up the banking industry. This confluence of factors has the potential to empower independent advisory firms, which manage over $8 trillion, according to LLR Partners, with an alternate driver of organic growth. Sandbox is building a solution for a segment that needs access to holistic liquidity solutions while banking partners can grow high-quality lending and deposit portfolios.  

ThetaRay, a leading provider of AI-powered financial crime detection technology, today announced the deployment of its new GenAI Financial Crime Detection Suite, made possible through a collaboration with Microsoft. By integrating Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, ThetaRay is poised to further transform the landscape of financial crime detection, enhancing risk assessment, operational efficiency, and reporting in anti-money laundering (AML) practices.  

This deployment is part of ThetaRay’s ongoing integration of advanced GenAI capabilities, aimed at empowering financial institutions of all sizes to combat increasing challenges posed by sophisticated financial crimes, including money laundering and terrorist financing. Amid rising regulatory scrutiny and demand for AI solutions, ThetaRay’s integration with Microsoft delivers a GenAI-powered case manager that enables institutions to detect financial crime, adapt strategies over time, and easily meet legal reporting standards.  

Reinforcing its position as a pioneer in AI technology within the financial sector, ThetaRay’s newest GenAI features are designed to streamline operations across various business areas, such as risk detection, investigation support, quality assurance, and reporting. These features ensure consistency in how risks are evaluated across the organization, updating to reflect new threats and trends, ensuring that financial institutions’ AML strategies remain relevant and effective.