AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 8/21/26

Adastra, a global leader in AI and data-driven transformation, today announced that it has been awarded Databricks Brickbuilder Specialization status in three industries central to its practice: Financial Services; Manufacturing, Transportation & Energy; and Security & Governance. 

The Brickbuilder Specialization is awarded only after an independent assessment, and earning it in three industries at once signals the breadth of Adastra’s delivery on the Databricks Data+AI Platform. 

The Databricks Brickbuilder Specialization is a formally assessed status that partners earn against a defined set of requirements. To qualify, a partner must show certified technical and sales expertise, live customer implementations already running on the platform, named customer success stories, and ongoing published thought leadership. Because the assessment is based on recent, verifiable work and must be renewed regularly, clients can trust that the expertise behind the badge is current, not historical. The Security & Governance specialization carries an additional requirement: a live technical assessment conducted in front of Databricks’ own specialist teams. 

AdvisorFinder, the modern organic growth platform for financial advisors, today announced the launch of AdvisorFinder Intelligence, a new platform designed to help advisors see and understand exactly how they appear online and how artificial intelligence (AI) platforms represent and recommend them. The solution allows advisors to measure and monitor their visibility when prospects use AI tools or search, and provides a plain-English action plan for how to improve their chances of being surfaced by AI platforms.  

AdvisorFinder Intelligence was created as a solution to a challenge discovered by the company’s own research into how consumers find financial advisors and how AI platforms recommend them. AdvisorFinder’s inaugural State of Advisor Discovery report documented broad changes in how consumers look for financial advice, with 45% of people searching for an advisor being wealth builders rather than retirees. The findings underscore a changing advisor-discovery landscape where the next generation client is approaching their search for financial advice differently.  

Advisors who use AdvisorFinder Intelligence receive a Digital Presence Report that includes a letter grade for search visibility, website health, online credibility and local presence. Advisors also receive a prioritized action plan to strengthen their online presence. AdvisorFinder also maintains an AEO Leaderboard, ranking the top 300 advisory firms based on their visibility across leading AI platforms. 

Alkami Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: ALKT) (“Alkami”), a digital sales and service platform provider for financial institutions in the U.S., today announced that Strata Credit Union has selected Alkami’s Digital Banking Platform to modernize its consumer digital banking experience and support its long-term strategy of delivering personalized, secure, and mobile-first banking that helps members build stronger financial futures. 

Through its partnership with Alkami, Strata Credit Union will create a connected digital banking ecosystem designed to simplify everyday banking, reduce friction across digital interactions, and deepen member relationships. The modern, mobile-first experience will bring together financial tools, payments, and personalized engagement into a unified Platform while giving the credit union the flexibility to continue innovating as member expectations evolve. 

Strata Credit Union will leverage Alkami’s open and extensible architecture to create a cohesive digital experience that connects best-in-class technologies across its ecosystem. The Platform will bring together capabilities such as payments, transfers, card management, financial wellness tools, and security features into a unified experience, while helping members gain greater visibility into their financial health through spending insights, savings goals, and a more holistic view of their finances. 

Alliant Insurance Services today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Nava Benefits, combining Alliant’s advisory depth, analytics, scale, and risk expertise with Nava’s AI-native HQ platform to help define the next generation of employee benefits brokerage. 

The acquisition comes at an important inflection point for the industry. Technology has long supported benefits brokerage, but artificial intelligence creates an opportunity to fundamentally change how benefits are delivered. Rather than adding another technology layer to a traditional service model, Alliant and Nava intend to create a more connected operating model in which real-time intelligence, technology, and human expertise work together to improve benefits performance for employers and their people. 

For decades, the industry has operated around a persistent tradeoff: better service meant higher costs, while greater efficiency often meant less support. AI creates the opportunity to break that tradeoff. By delivering better service more efficiently, the combined model serves more people more deeply, rather than providing less support to the same population. 

Amplify Technology (“Amplify”), the enterprise growth platform built on an AI-native data lake, today announced a partnership with Ned Davis Research (“NDR”), a leading independent investment research firm, to deliver NDR’s trusted institutional research as turnkey managed portfolios through the Amplify platform. The collaboration enables financial advisors to implement NDR’s investment models across every client account on any custodial platform, eliminating the day-to-day operational demands of portfolio management. 

NDR’s investment models are built on decades of objective, data-driven market research designed to help advisors navigate changing market conditions through intentional portfolio construction and risk management. By delivering their models to Amplify’s network of advisors, NDR eliminates the need to build and maintain models internally. Advisors continue to lead their client relationships and investment strategy, while Amplify manages trading, rebalancing, and performance reporting across their clientele. 

Behavox, the AI-native controls platform for global banks, asset managers, hedge funds, and commodity firms, today announced the opening of a new office in Milan — an on-the-ground commitment to continental Europe. The opening gives Behavox a local base to serve its fast-expanding continental client base. 

The Milan office is the latest move in Behavox’s global scaling. In June 2026, Behavox raised $175 million in a preferred equity investment from HPS Investment Partners (part of BlackRock) to accelerate global growth. 

The company notes that it grew its worldwide customer base by 86% in 2025, to more than 100 major financial institutions across five continents, and has been profitable since 2023. Continental Europe has been one of the company’s fastest-growing markets, with regulatory complexity driving demand: from MiFID II and the Market Abuse Regulation to the EU’s new AI Act, banks, asset managers, and trading firms across Europe are consolidating surveillance, communications monitoring, and compliance onto a single, auditable, AI-native platform. Behavox’s Polaris trade surveillance product has been a particular beneficiary — recently extended to prediction markets, it now covers 10 asset classes — as institutions demand the same regulator-ready rigor in trade surveillance that they already rely on Behavox for in communications monitoring. 

Bloomberg today announced a set of updates to ASKB, the new conversational AI interface for the Bloomberg Terminal® service, that brings its mobile and desktop experiences closer than ever. Financial professionals can now start an ASKB query on the desktop and pick up that exact conversation mid-thread on their mobile phones or tablets running iOS or Android, without repeating themselves. Users can now personalize ASKB based on their profile for tailored responses, and can find ASKB pinned to the tab bar in the Bloomberg Professional mobile app. The goal: give investors continuous access to ASKB when they’re away from their desk, in a meeting, at a conference, or on the move. 

Markets don’t wait for investment professionals to get back to their desks. Workflows have largely lived on the desktop, so the moment an investor stepped into a meeting, got on a flight, or simply walked away from their screen, that train of thought stopped. Questions that came up mid-meeting or at a conference could be irrelevant by the time they got back to their desk. And for those analysts or executives who are mobile-first or split their day between the desktop-based Terminal and the Bloomberg Professional mobile app, ASKB hasn’t fully been part of how they work, until now. 

A user can now personalize their ASKB profile: describing a job, role, area of focus, or core preference helps it tailor interactions and answers to the individual. This carries across devices, so ASKB responds the same way whether someone is on the Terminal or on their phone or tablet. 

Bloomberg Tax today announced the launch of Controlled Calculations for Bloomberg Tax Workpapers, a new capability that helps corporate tax teams perform multiple complex state tax calculations with greater confidence, transparency, and efficiency. 

Many tax departments still rely on sprawling spreadsheets to manage complex state tax calculations. As organizations grow, those manual processes become increasingly difficult to scale. Maintaining formulas across jurisdictions is time-consuming, increases the risk of errors, and pushes spreadsheets beyond what they’re designed to handle.  Controlled Calculations replaces those manual processes with a governed calculation environment that provides system-maintained tax rules, including general state apportionment rules, while allowing tax teams to customize calculations based on their specific business needs. 

Unlike traditional spreadsheet-based processes, Controlled Calculations embeds system-maintained tax rules directly into the workflow while maintaining flexibility for organization-specific requirements. Built-in auditability provides visibility into every override, adjustment, and calculation throughout preparation and review. 

bolt, a leading insurtech focused on distribution, today announced the industry’s first AI-powered insurance distribution platform enabling access across all lines for distribution partners. This launch represents the next evolution of agentic enterprise solutions for the insurance industry. 

Customers expect insurance to be as fast, connected, and personalized as the digital experiences they receive from banks, retailers and other service providers. Yet, insurance agencies remain constrained by disconnected systems, duplicative data entry, and manual workflows that create friction and revenue leakage at every step of the customer journey. 

With this announcement, bolt introduces Connected Distribution, a new operating model for revenue growth that brings together customer data, workflows and integrated market access into a single, intelligent, AI-powered connected system. The platform helps distribution partners – including independent agencies, brokerages, carriers and consumer and commercial brands – reduce manual work, move faster and retain more business by connecting the entire distribution lifecycle, from prospecting and quoting to placement, servicing and renewal. 

Bybit, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has strengthened and expanded its security systems following the February 2025 theft of approximately $1.46 billion in digital assets, moving toward a model designed to detect threats earlier, respond faster and continuously adapt as attackers adopt new techniques, including artificial intelligence. 

In its H1 2026 Risk & Security Report, covering January 1 through June 15, Bybit details the operation of three layers of protection: user and account security, real-time on-chain monitoring, and AI-assisted security operations. 

The objective is not simply to add more controls, but to create a security system that can continuously learn from emerging threats and reduce the time between detection and intervention. 

Bybit, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, is pleased to announce TradFi Perpetual Contracts now offer over 200 curated TradFi-themed listings, marking one of the highest quality coverage of TradFi derivatives exposure available on a crypto-native platform. The lineup now spans equities, ETFs, precious metals, indices, and oil, with coverage extending across premium US, Hong Kong, South Korean and other equities markets. 

Bybit is expanding its TradFi offering as it builds a broader, always-on trading environment connecting mature crypto infrastructure with global financial markets. One of Bybit’s strongest suits traditionally, the perpetual contracts product line is centered around listing quality, timeliness, and access to global opportunities. 

Since introducing TradFi Perpetual Contracts in April 2026, Bybit has added new weekly listings, building out a product suite of a total of 200+ high-quality, high-potential TradFi Perpetual listings, with a lineup of coveted assets such as gold, silver, crude oil, technology sectors across Asia and North America, global indices, ETFs, inverse ETFs, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence. The expansion reflects sustained trader demand for accessible multi-market, multi-asset exposure on a familiar interface, and with leverage tools. Bybit TradFi Perpetuals enable traders to respond to market-moving events around the clock, including during hours when the physical exchanges are closed. 

Bybit, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, announced a major upgrade to its Options Data section, introducing a suite of institutional-grade analytics to provide traders with a clearer view of volatility, positioning, and market structure. The redesigned page integrates institutional-grade analytics with a cleaner, more accessible interface for all users. 

Options trading has been gaining popularity among digital asset derivatives traders, as they increasingly move beyond simple long or short positions to alternative strategies that account for volatility, time decay, and risk management. Options give traders the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an asset at a set price before a set date. 

According to ChainCatcher’s H1 2026 crypto options market report, which draws on data from CoinGlass and other industry sources, the overall options market grew 12% year-over-year in the first half of 2026, though options still account for just 2.4% of total crypto derivatives volume, a gap the report characterizes as substantial long-term growth potential. 

As institutional investors navigate compressed settlement cycles, continuous markets and AI-driven decision making, Citi Investor Services has launched Custody+, a comprehensive suite of near- and real-time solutions to meet always-on industry demand. The announcement comes as the bank completes the U.S. rollout of its patented Single Event Processing (SEP) technology, a milestone in the transformation of its custody infrastructure. 

Custody+ represents a strategic shift from a standardized and traditional custody model to a modular ecosystem of solutions that can be adapted to clients’ workflows and operating models at scale. Citi’s Custody business supports clients in over 100 markets worldwide, inclusive of 62 proprietary markets 

CogniCor, the award-winning intelligence and orchestration platform for RIA firms and other wealth management enterprises, today announced the addition of Shannon Eusey, Chairman and Co-Founder of Beacon Pointe Advisors (“Beacon Pointe”), to its Advisory Board. With a unique focus on unifying disparate data into a seamless intelligence layer that drives high-quality insight and orchestrated action, CogniCor is transforming its Advisory Board with the addition of industry leaders like Eusey to help accelerate the company’s next phase of strategic growth. 

An RIA channel leader and wealth management industry trailblazer, Eusey spearheaded the launch and growth of Beacon Pointe Advisors into one of the nation’s largest registered investment advisers, with over $62 billion in total assets under advisement serving private clients, foundations, and retirement plans. She joins CogniCor’s transformed Board to advise on the company’s strategic planning and growth initiatives. 

Over her 30-year career, Eusey has been a thought leader who has helped shape the modern wealth management industry. Prior to co-founding Beacon Pointe and building it into a highly successful RIA, she served as Senior Managing Director and Portfolio Manager at Roxbury Capital Management. She is regularly featured in The Wall Street Journal, InvestmentNews, Barron’s, Forbes, Financial Planning Magazine, and other publications, and has received numerous industry recognitions. 

Cornerstone Research, a leading provider of economic and financial consulting and expert testimony, has promoted the following professionals to senior vice president: Vildan Altuglu, Yan Cao, Craig Little, Maria Salgado, Celeste C. Saravia, Frank Schneider, and Narayanan “Nari” Subramanian. 

Vildan Altuglu coheads Cornerstone’s consumer fraud and product liability practice. Dr. Altuglu applies economic analysis and marketing research techniques to matters involving product liability, product misrepresentation, false advertising, and antitrust allegations, as well as intellectual property and general business litigation. She has consulted on consumer class actions and consumer protection matters brought by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. 

Yan Cao coheads Cornerstone’s finance practices, specializing in financial markets and financial institutions. With twenty years of experience, Dr. Cao consults on securities, valuation, market microstructure, and risk management issues across equities, fixed income, commodities, derivatives, foreign exchange (FX), and digital assets. She leads class certification, loss causation, and damages analyses in securities, corporate transaction, and complex commercial litigation. 

Datavault AI Inc. (“Datavault AI” or the “Company”) (NASDAQ: DVLT), an Artificial Intelligence Platform (“AIP”) company providing data monetization, credentialing, digital engagement, real-world asset (“RWA”) tokenization and spatial audio technologies, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire BankWyse subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. This acquisition adds the final piece to Datavault AI’s data monetization ecosystem. 

BankWyse operates under a Special Purpose Depository Institution charter granted by the state of Wyoming – generally viewed as the most innovative and digital asset advanced state in the U.S. They will provide custodial, commercial banking and other services in a safe and compliant manner. 

Over the last few years, Datavault AI has been creating the building blocks to fully service the digital asset ecosystem by leveraging and implementing cutting-edge technologies such as AI to offer state-of-the-art platforms and services that are safe and compliant. Customers will bring us their data and Real-World Assets. Those assets will be valued and tokenized, and will be held in custody, and when conditions are right, sold on our exchanges. Our exchange customers will be offered the opportunity to buy and sell these tokenized assets on our exchanges and also be able to utilize the full suite of banking services. This end-to-end data monetization ecosystem will eliminate the friction and fractualization prevalent in the market today. 

Datavault AI Inc. (“Datavault AI” or the “Company”) (NASDAQ: DVLT), an Artificial Intelligence Platform (“AIP”) company providing data monetization, credentialing, digital engagement, real-world asset (“RWA”) tokenization and spatial audio technologies, today announced the successful closing of its acquisition of NYIAX, Inc. (“NYIAX”), the pioneering contract management exchange and operator of one of the first blockchain-enabled marketplaces for trading guaranteed contractual assets. 

The acquisition is expected to add institutional-grade exchange infrastructure, blockchain settlement, and foundational IP to Datavault AI; complementing a platform that takes digital and real-world assets from origination and valuation through tokenization, commercialization, and exchange. Datavault AI and NYIAX have been working together and integrating capabilities and teams since entering a licensing and marketing agreement in March 2025, a collaboration that will now deepen under full ownership. NYIAX will play a key role in implementing Datavault AI’s tokenization pipeline. NYIAX’s team, exchange infrastructure, patents, and blockchain settlement capabilities will enable Datavault AI to accelerate the execution of these contracts and scale. 

Founded in 2017, NYIAX was built to bring the discipline and efficiency of modern financial markets to sectors and asset classes that historically lacked transparent, electronic trading and settlement capabilities. The NYIAX suite is powered by jointly developed intellectual property and exchange technology licensed from a leading global exchange operator. 

DeepVest, an AI-powered investment platform for financial advisors that enables CIO-level portfolio analysis and personalized proposals at scale, today announced the launch of MonitorLab, a comprehensive market monitoring and alerts platform layer helping advisors, wealth managers and investors stay aware of and react to market-moving developments. Using a simple natural-language interface, users can create sophisticated market alerts across securities, portfolios, earnings events, regulatory filings and macroeconomic signals, creating an always-on monitoring layer, continuously evaluating more than 50 technical, quantitative and market signals in real time. 

With MonitorLab users can create alerts using plain English, such as monitoring for a technical indicator crossover, portfolio drift from target allocation, performance versus a benchmark index, an earnings report, a portfolio risk threshold or a significant economic event. By replacing manual dashboard-watching with automated, event-driven intelligence, MonitorLab helps users identify risks and opportunities the moment they become actionable. 

Building on the launches of Advisor Hierarchy, which enables personalized investment recommendations at scale, Behavioral Investment Suitability Analysis, which integrates behavioral finance into the recommendation process and the Firm-Level Governance Framework, which helps firms establish consistent investment oversight, MonitorLab represents DeepVest’s latest step toward creating a more intelligent and connected advisor experience. Together, these capabilities help firms combine portfolio intelligence, behavioral insights, governance controls and market monitoring within a single platform. 

As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly transforms how organizations operate, Deloitte today announced expanded AI Controls and Assurance services and solutions designed to help organizations confidently adopt, scale and govern AI across the enterprise. 

From early exploration to enterprise deployment, Deloitte’s enhanced services provide end-to-end support across the AI lifecycle — combining advisory and assurance services across governance frameworks and AI-enabled transformation to help organizations manage risk while unlocking value. 

The need is increasingly urgent. While 74% of companies plan to deploy agentic AI within two years, only 21% report having a mature governance model for autonomous agents — highlighting a growing gap that puts organizations at significant risk as they scale AI systems, according to Deloitte’s “State of AI in the Enterprise” report. 

Data consumption is becoming agentic, and Dun & Bradstreet is among the first major data providers to bring that shift to Snowflake Marketplace. By pairing an AI-powered conversational interface with the D&B Commercial Graph™ — which connects 600+ million business identities consistently across systems — customers can now interact with D&B’s verified business intelligence through natural language, ask questions, generate insights, and streamline key workflows, all directly in Snowflake. 

A complementary sample of D&B’s B2B company and contact data is now available on Snowflake Marketplace, alongside agents that let users explore D&B’s business intelligence through natural language. Rather than querying raw data, teams can ask multi-dimensional business questions, evaluate market opportunities, and automate lead scoring conversationally — instantly accessible in Snowflake CoWork and CoCo with one click, no setup required. For sales and marketing teams, datasets targeting the $1+ trillion education market are also available to explore with agents in Snowflake. 

Dun & Bradstreet and nCino (NASDAQ: NCNO), the platform for agentic AI banking, today announced a strategic alliance to bring D&B’s verified business identity and risk context to the nCino Client Lifecycle Management solution, addressing one of the most persistent cost centers in commercial banking. 

A global survey of 409 bankers conducted by Celent and commissioned by nCino found that commercial onboarding remains burdened by manual processes and siloed data. Six of nine core KYC/KYB steps still involve significant manual work, and 66% of banks report asking customers to provide the same information more than once. These inefficiencies contribute to poor customer experience and an average of $14,700 spent onboarding each client. Much of that cost comes from banks re-verifying the same business data across disconnected systems at every stage of the relationship.  

The D&B and nCino alliance solves for this redundancy by connecting the D&B Commercial Graph™, anchored in the D-U-N-S® Number and covering more than 650 million global entities, with the nCino Platform. Backed by more than 107 billion monthly data quality checks, the D&B Commercial Graph™ provides continuously refreshed business intelligence at global scale, helping banks identify changes in ownership, risk profile, and financial standing without relying on manual reviews or point-in-time data collection. 

Ellis, the first-of-its-kind AI-native operations platform for private credit, launched today with more than $10 million in seed funding closed. 

First Round Capital led the financing with participation from a group of prominent operators and investors, including Kearny Jackson, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Slow Ventures, Wilshire Lane, Westbound, Collide Capital, Gallery Ventures, Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson, Thrive Capital Founder Josh Kushner, Mercury Founder and CEO Immad Akhund, among others. 

Private credit has become a multi-trillion dollar market and increasingly a vital source of capital for businesses around the world, yet the operating infrastructure behind the market has not kept pace. Many private credit managers still run critical workflows across disconnected fund-administrator outputs, general ledgers, loan-servicing systems, bank data, legal documents and spreadsheets. Teams spend significant time reconciling different versions of the same number, slowing closes and reporting, increasing operational risk and making it harder to scale efficiently. 

Feathery, the AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, today announced the launch of its new AI-Powered Proposal Generation solution for wealth management firms. As firms look for ways to improve organic growth rates, this innovation solves the long-standing operational challenge of creating highly personalized proposals for every client. 

Proposal Generation makes highly personalized proposals practical at scale. Feathery brings together client data, planning documents, advisor expertise, and firm-approved templates in a single AI workspace, drawing information from systems such as Salesforce, eMoney, Vanilla, Holistiplan, Addepar, Morningstar, and more. Feathery’s AI assistant, Robin, uses those inputs to draft a proposal tailored to each client’s financial picture, goals, and priorities while maintaining the firm’s templates, branding, and disclosures. Teams can then collaborate on the proposal and chat with Robin in natural language to make changes, with updates reflected directly in the document. 

With Proposal Generation, Feathery helps firms overcome the traditional tradeoff between speed and personalization. By reducing the manual preparation and coordination behind each proposal, Feathery helps firms deliver a higher level of personalization more consistently across their advisor teams, without requiring the same level of effort for every client. 

FINBOA, Inc., a leader in process automation solutions for regulatory compliance in financial institutions, today announced the launch of Recovery Assist. Recovery Assist extends FINBOA Payment Disputes with automated pre-chargeback resolution capabilities, allowing dispute teams to manage intake, case management, Recovery Assist processing, and chargebacks within a single workflow through the Visa Verifi™ Cardholder Dispute Resolution Network (CDRN®). 

FINBOA, Inc., a provider of intelligent process automation solutions for financial institutions, today announced the availability of Recovery Assist. Recovery Assist extends FINBOA Payment Disputes with automated pre-chargeback resolution capabilities, allowing dispute teams to manage intake, case management, Recovery Assist processing and chargebacks within a single workflow through integration with Visa Verifi™ Cardholder Dispute Resolution Network (CDRN®). 

Payment dispute volumes continue to grow while financial institutions face increasing pressure to improve operational efficiency and deliver faster cardholder resolutions. Traditional chargeback processes often require days or weeks of manual coordination between issuers, merchants, and payment networks, increasing both operational costs and customer frustration. Recovery Assist helps financial institutions overcome these hurdles by providing a streamlined, automated solution that connects issuers and merchants to resolve disputes efficiently. 

FINNY, the AI growth engine for financial advisors, today announced “Pay-as-You-Grow”, a new outcome-based fee model granting advisors unlimited access to its platform for $50 a month, plus a small slice of assets brought under management facilitated by FINNY, paid  

only while those clients remain with the advisor. By tying its pricing directly to client acquisition outcomes, FINNY is aligning its incentives with the growth of the advisors it serves. LPL Financial, the largest independent broker-dealer in the country, is the first to gain access to this new pricing model.  

Up until now, FINNY adopted the industry’s traditional software pricing model, charging a flat annual subscription of either $6,000 or $12,000, billed regardless of growth outcomes. However, as FINNY worked closely with advisors and industry leaders to shape its platform, the company heard a consistent message: upfront software costs were keeping many firms from investing in growth. Pay-as-You-Grow reflects FINNY’s commitment to building alongside advisors and responding to their evolving needs. 

Pay-as-you-win pricing isn’t new to wealth management. For years, leading custodians have offered referral programs using an identical framework. Historically, however, access has been limited to a select group of the largest RIAs, with minimums, custody requirements and lock-ins attached. FINNY is opening the same proven model to any advisor, but with no minimums, no custody move and no requirement to change how they run their practice. 

Finster AI, the AI intelligence layer for financial professionals, today announced a strategic investment by UBS Investment Bank as part of Finster’s Series B financing round, alongside FactSet. 

The investment relates to the development of AI-native workflows, secure enterprise systems, and trusted data infrastructure to support financial institutions in areas such as research, analysis, and client service.  

Finster AI is an AI-native platform designed to support research, analysis, and content workflows across investment banking and asset management. Finster’s intuitive platform uses AI to integrate structured financial data, unstructured content, and institutional knowledge into unified workflows to generate faster, traceable insights, and enhance client engagement. 

Highstreet Insurance Partners (Highstreet) one of the fastest growing community-based insurance brokerages and financial service firms in the US, announced today how its proprietary digital intelligence platform, ora, built using the Databricks Data + AI Platform, is transforming the way the organization serves clients, supports agency partners, and accelerates growth. 

Since 2018, Highstreet has grown through partnerships with more than 200 independent insurance agencies to become one of the top 25 insurance brokerages in the United States. As the organization expanded, it recognized the need to connect data, analytics, intelligent automation, and AI to help every colleague deliver a consistent One Highstreet Experience (ONEHXP) while preserving the local relationships that define its community agency of choice strategy. 

ora brings together trusted data, analytics, intelligent automation, and AI in a single environment on Databricks, giving colleagues timely insights directly within their daily workflows. The platform helps identify renewal opportunities, cross-sell recommendations, and client service priorities, enabling teams to act more quickly and consistently. 

Intellicheck, Inc. (Nasdaq: IDN) (“Intellicheck” or the “Company”), an industry-leading identity verification company delivering proprietary, on-demand digital and physical identity validation solutions, today announced that a recently signed channel partner has secured a major deployment with one of the world’s largest investment management companies. 

Under the deployment, Intellicheck’s advanced identity verification technology protects the investment management firm against identity-based fraud. At the same time, the technology helps the investment management company accelerate customer acquisition and protection, while enhancing customer trust, giving good customers a rapid, frictionless onboarding experience. 

The Company continues to expand its channel partnership initiatives as demand grows for scalable fraud prevention technologies that can be rapidly deployed across enterprise environments. Under the channel partner model, partners incorporate the Company’s identity-verification technology into their offerings and deploy it with their enterprise clients. 

Mili, an AI platform for wealth management firms, and Holistiplan, tax planning software used across more than 10,000 advisory firms, today announced a partnership that puts a client’s tax analysis to work across the advisor’s workflows. 

Advisors walk into meetings with a client’s latest tax summary already in their preparation, ask specific questions mid-meeting and get answers drawn from the return itself, and take Holistiplan’s scenario analyses into planning conversations and client follow-ups. That analysis also becomes firm-branded proposals and presentations, and Mili’s agents surface opportunities across an advisor’s full book. 

A tax return is the densest record a client ever hands their advisor: income, businesses, charitable giving, and life changes, documented in one filing. 

Nitrogen, an AI-powered suite of products for financial advisors, today introduced Insurance Center, a new product built to give advisors a structured way to assess a client’s coverage needs, including life insurance, long-term care, and retirement income. Insurance Center is anchored by the Coverage Number™, a scale that compares a client’s existing coverage against their calculated need and gives advisors a clear starting point for the conversation. 

More than 100 million Americans are underinsured or carry no coverage at all. At the same time, 11,400 people turn 65 every day, stepping into greater longevity and long-term care risk. Advisors increasingly want to bring insurance into the client conversation, but have lacked a quantitative way in. 

Insurance Center is designed to do for insurance conversations what the Risk Number® has done for investment conversations: turn a vague, easy-to-avoid topic into a single figure advisors can use to start the conversation and align clients with their best interests. The Insurance Coverage Assessment collects household, life insurance, and long-term care details and calculates a Coverage Number. While every client’s needs are different, a number below 100 may signal a gap worth discussing, and a score above 100 could point to potential excess coverage, but a score between 80 and 120 is typically considered on track. 

S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) today announced an expanded collaboration with Microsoft to integrate the breadth of S&P Global AI-ready data, insights and analytics into Microsoft 365 Copilot workflows and agentic experiences. The collaboration gives customers a seamless way to access S&P Global intelligence within the Microsoft tools they already use, helping them move from complexity to clarity faster with information that is transparent, traceable and grounded in trusted sources. 

As organizations increasingly use AI to navigate growing volumes of information, the quality, context, and traceability of the underlying data are essential. The integration is enabled by the S&P Global AI Data Portal’s Deterministic Retrieval solution (also known as the Kensho LLM-ready API), which allows Microsoft 365 Copilot and related experiences to access S&P Global content with accurate, cited, and verifiable results.  

Building on the existing integration of S&P Global Energy AI Ready Data in Microsoft 365 Copilot, this expanded collaboration brings S&P Global capabilities into the Microsoft ecosystem in a way that supports how customers already work. Rather than placing data into a standalone AI environment, the solution connects licensed S&P Global content to Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences, including a Copilot in Excel connector for analyst workflows and a plugin for agentic experiences in Copilot Cowork. 

SEI® (NASDAQ:SEIC) today announced a strategic partnership with Zocks, an AI assistant built specifically for financial advisors, expanding its advisor services ecosystem of partners with a resource intended to help firms reduce administrative burdens, strengthen client engagement, and scale more efficiently. 

Zocks helps automate meeting preparation, meeting notes, client follow-up, CRM and planning updates, client onboarding, forms, and client intelligence workflows. The platform is designed to help advisors spend less time on administrative work and more time delivering personalized service and advice to clients. 

SEI’s advisor services ecosystem is designed to help advisors solve common business challenges by providing access to third-party service providers, discounted pricing, and resources that support operational efficiency, practice management, and client experience. The addition of Zocks builds on SEI’s commitment to helping advisors more effectively deploy their capital, including time, talent, and technology, so they can focus on the client relationships that drive long-term growth. 

SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSNC) today announced that Lexington Capital Management LP has selected SS&C GlobeOp as its fund administrator. The Lakewood, New Jersey-based hedge fund manager focuses on absolute return strategies targeting double-digit annualized returns with low volatility. SS&C will provide a full range of fund services across more than $1 billion in assets under management, including the commingled funds and five separately managed accounts. 

The engagement underscores the breadth and scalability of SS&C’s operating model. Lexington initially started on SS&C’s Eze OMS. When its business grew exponentially with the addition of separately managed accounts, the firm expanded to include fund administration, investor servicing and reporting with SS&C GlobeOp. 

SS&C GlobeOp’s fund servicing solution combines investment operations, middle-office trade reconciliation, administration and regulatory and investor reporting. SS&C’s AI-enabled Trade Reconciliation Agent runs around the clock, enabling the team to securely process trade confirmations faster and more accurately. SS&C hosts the solution in a secure cloud environment, with LLM access funneled through SS&C’s governance platform, AI Gateway. SS&C’s experts then focus on problem reconciliations to help resolve them up to 95% faster. 

StructureFlow, the Structural Intelligence Platform, today announced that Lloyd Allen has joined its senior leadership team as Chief Technology Officer. Allen will report to Founder and CEO Tim Follett and lead StructureFlow’s global product and engineering organization, overseeing the company’s technology strategy, artificial intelligence capabilities, and product roadmap.  

In his role, Allen will lead the continued development of StructureFlow’s AI capabilities, data connectivity, and integrations with the systems through which firms manage legal, financial, and transaction information — and the AI-first ways of working that help a focused product and engineering team ship with greater speed and precision. These investments support the company’s broader vision of enabling information to move more smoothly between source systems, visual models, and the professionals responsible for making high-stakes decisions. 

Allen’s appointment advances StructureFlow’s commitment to building an AI-first product and engineering organization — bringing in senior technical leadership with experience of building and operating AI-first functions, so the company can deliver high-impact capabilities faster for the professionals who rely on it. StructureFlow serves clients across the legal, financial, tax, accounting, consulting, and advisory sectors — organizations where structural complexity is often acute — and is advancing Structural Intelligence as a distinct category of enterprise software. 

Synchrony (NYSE: SYF), a premier consumer financial services company, announced the appointment of Nimrod Barak as Chief AI Officer effective June 30, 2026. Barak will spearhead Synchrony’s enterprise AI strategy and execution, accelerating innovation across the business to elevate consumer experiences, unlock new value for partners, and fuel growth. 

In his new role, Barak will lead Synchrony’s enterprise-wide AI strategy, governance, and execution, helping further strengthen how the company serves customers, supports partners, and empowers employees. He will oversee the development and deployment of AI capabilities across the business, accelerating innovation, advancing agentic and intelligent automation initiatives, and ensuring AI is embedded responsibly into products, operations, and decision-making. 

Barak is a globally recognized technology and innovation executive with more than 20 years of experience leading large-scale engineering, data, and AI organizations. Most recently, he served as Managing Director, Head of AI Center of Excellence and Emerging Technologies at Citi. Throughout his career, Barak has built and scaled high-performing global teams, pioneered the deployment of emerging technologies, and helped organizations modernize operations, improve customer experiences, and create new sources of business value through innovation and responsible AI.

T. Rowe Price (NASDAQ: TROW) today announced leadership enhancements that support its firmwide artificial intelligence (AI) strategy and are designed to accelerate responsible adoption, scale practical AI capabilities, and translate AI innovation into value for clients, associates, and the business. The updates strengthen AI leadership within Investments and Global Distribution and build on the enterprise Technology, Data, and Operations foundation established to support scale and innovation.

The firm has built a strong enterprise AI foundation to support its strategy, including dedicated Technology, Data, and Operations capabilities, active use case development across key business areas, broader associate access to AI tools, and enhanced risk oversight to enable responsible scaling. These latest enhancements are designed to accelerate the momentum of AI work already underway across the firm, ensuring adoption is focused on high-value use cases that strengthen investment insight, improve the client and associate experience, and enhance the firm’s ability to deliver value for clients. 

Within Investments, T. Rowe Price is expanding its Investment AI Solutions organization as a core pillar of the firm’s AI strategy, with a focus on helping investors apply AI consistently across asset classes while accelerating the development and adoption of AI-enabled capabilities. Focused teams will advance agentic AI products, education, strategic partnerships, experimentation, and research, helping investment professionals use AI to sharpen analysis, improve productivity, and complement the human expertise that distinguishes the firm’s investment process. 

TransFi, the cross-border payments infrastructure leader, has launched JARVIS, a proprietary AI-powered compliance intelligence platform that consolidates customer and transaction data from across its internal systems and third-party providers into a single, risk-based view. The platform supports the company’s Compliance, Risk and Operations teams as it scales across emerging-market payment corridors.  

The move comes as stablecoin settlement pushes further into mainstream cross-border payments. Stablecoins processed $1.79 trillion in June 2026 across payments, settlements and treasury flows, sending more regulated volume through infrastructure that supervisors now watch closely. 

Regulators have shifted their posture on automation, with US authorities in 2026 explicitly encouraging institutions that responsibly experiment with innovative technologies in their financial crime programmes. Compliance teams, meanwhile, remain weighed down by manual review, with 53% of banks running false-positive rates above 20% in transaction monitoring. 

VastAdvisor, the AI-powered Organic Growth OS for wealth management firms, today announced the close of its $1 million SAFE round led by investments from fintech industry titans. The firm will utilize this funding to accelerate its product roadmap and support its go-to-market efforts. 

Debuting earlier this year at Future Proof Citywide, VastAdvisor has initiated its enterprise relationships and will be expanding across registered investment advisors (RIAs), broker-dealers and wealth platforms. VastAdvisor is building a new category of organic growth infrastructure focused not on managing assets, but on acquiring them — an area long underserved in wealth management. The platform integrates AI-driven audience intelligence, campaign orchestration, compliance automation, and continuous performance optimization into a single, self-improving system.  

Dani Fava, chief strategy officer at Carson Group, Jason Pereira, CFP, senior partner at Woodgate Financial and Sally George, partner at Convergency Partners, led the funding round. 

WealthBox and AdvizorPro announced an integration this week.  

AdvizorPro is an advisor intelligence platform built for asset managers, ETF issuers, wealthtechs, and distribution teams that need to identify, prioritize, and engage financial advisors. With verified data across 750,000+ RIAs, family offices, and broker-dealers, combined with AI-powered lead scoring, TrafficIQ visitor intelligence, native CRM integrations, and now direct connectivity to Claude and ChatGPT, AdvizorPro powers the go-to-market strategies of leading firms across the wealth management ecosystem. 

WealthReach, an AI-powered organic growth platform built for registered investment advisors (RIAs) and wealth management firms, today announced a two-way integration with SageContent, the all-in-one video content platform for financial advisors. Through the integration, a single click turns advisor video made with SageContent into website content that WealthReach automatically converts into blog posts and transcripts that can be found and cited on Google and AI platforms like Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity, helping advisors show up on the platforms their prospects are actively searching. 

Video has become one of the most-consumed types of online content, and advisors are increasingly turning to it to connect in a more authentic way with the individuals and families they serve. The challenge is that those videos often remain confined to social platforms, where they may generate engagement but do little to improve a firm’s visibility in Google or AI search. 

With the integration between WealthReach and SageContent, every video an advisor produces can now be instantly published to the firm’s website along with content that Google and AI models can crawl, index and cite. Instead of creating a video for a single social platform, advisors create one piece of content that becomes a complete website asset designed to keep working long after it is published. 

Zeplyn, the AI operating system for wealth management, today announced a new integration with Schwab Advisor Center®, the Schwab Advisor Services platform, that expands the reach of Zeplyn Agent Nexus into two of the industry’s most important workflows: account opening and meeting preparation. The integration enables Zeplyn’s AI agents to automatically complete Schwab’s digital account-opening workflow while incorporating live Schwab holdings and transactions into Zeplyn’s AI-powered client briefs. 

Account opening and meeting preparation are two of the most time-consuming workflows in wealth management. Advisors routinely move between meetings, CRM records, documents, planning software, and custodian platforms to gather information before they can act. Zeplyn’s new Schwab integration eliminates much of that manual work by consolidating those steps within Zeplyn. 

With a single request, advisors can ask Zeplyn to open a Schwab account. Zeplyn gathers client information already available across meetings, emails, CRM records, and documents, initiates the digital account open workflow, completing all relevant fields automatically, and returns a finished draft for human review and submission. What traditionally required hours of manual work can now begin before a client meeting has even ended. Early pilots showed Not-In-Good-Order (NIGO) submissions declined by approximately 80%, helping firms accelerate onboarding while reducing costly rework.