AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 9/4/26

ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), an original innovator in global payments technology, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cranium Ventures, a privately held developer of cloud-native card payment switching technology. The technology will be added to ACI Connetic for Cards, which ACI launched in March 2026. 

ACI Connetic is the platform behind ACI’s intelligent payments orchestration strategy, introduced in 2025 as the industry’s first unified cloud-native platform bringing account-to-account payments, card payments and AI-powered fraud prevention onto a single architecture. ACI’s acquiring, issuing, ATM and self-service banking solutions process more than 300 billion card transactions annually. The acquisition accelerates ACI’s existing Connetic for Cards roadmap, bringing planned card switching capabilities to market sooner. 

Purchase transactions on the global card networks are projected to reach more than 1.1 trillion in 2029, a 43 percent increase over 2024. At the same time, institutions are running more payment rails in parallel, and card authorization at many banks and processors still relies on architecture designed before cloud computing was an option. A common modernization approach has been to wrap an existing switch in new interfaces rather than rebuild what runs underneath. ACI built ACI Connetic to address that directly. 

Ai Global Solutions (AiGS), a leading provider of intelligent automation and AI-driven business solutions, today announced the launch of its Financial Services Practice.  Drawing on AiGS’s more than 20 years of experience in financial services, the dedicated practice will help banks, mortgage lenders, consumer finance companies, and private equity firms modernize operations and responsibly integrate artificial intelligence into their most important business processes. 

The practice will support clients across the full transformation lifecycle, including process discovery, use-case prioritization, solution design, implementation, systems integration, and governance.  AiGS’s expertise spans core business processes including customer onboarding, know-your-customer (KYC), loan origination, client servicing, compliance and audit workflows, as well as investment and portfolio operations. 

AiGS takes a model-flexible approach, supporting organizations that already have preferred large language model providers as well as those seeking to use multiple models based on the requirements of each use case.  After evaluating accuracy, security, privacy, explainability, performance, and cost, AiGS combines the appropriate models—including Anthropic’s Claude models, OpenAI’s GPT models, and other advanced AI models—with enterprise data, intelligent document processing, workflow automation, AI agents, business applications, and human review. 

Altruist today announced a new AI-powered financial planning agent within Hazel, its transformative AI platform. 

The all-in-one offering builds bespoke financial plans that encompass six critical workflows: retirement planning, investment optimization, cash flow analysis, estate planning, tax strategy, and insurance and risk. 

Historically, each of these tasks have taken advisors hours to complete. Hazel’s new agent can now provide comprehensive, advisor-ready financial plans in minutes. 

The AmeriFlex Group® (or “the firm”), an advisor-owned hybrid RIA recognized for its planning-first approach and succession solutions, today announced it has developed a proprietary AI-enabled program that analyzes hundreds of firms and creates comprehensive profiles of each in the time it once took to review a single practice. The program, called Scout, is currently being tested in five key markets for The AmeriFlex Group® and will be rolled out nationally next year. 

Built in part with Anthropic’s Claude AI solution, the team applies this tool to a variety of public and proprietary data sources to develop a profile of firms that may need support with long-term succession planning. Using these profiles, The AmeriFlex Group’s succession specialists can more efficiently initiate conversations and engagement with more practices, while freeing them up to ensure a personalized and smooth transition. 

By leveraging this program, along with other growth initiatives, The AmeriFlex Group® expects to expand its advisor ranks by 100 advisors in the next 24 months. Earlier this year, the firm announced it welcomed 18 advisors to the platform, representing more than $1.7 billion in total client assets in the first half of 2026. In January, the firm announced it had secured a strategic minority investment from its broker-dealer partner, Cambridge Investment Research.  

Amplify Technology, LLC (“Amplify”), the AI-native RIA growth platform built on data lake architecture, today announced that Brookwood Investment Group (“Brookwood”), a Phoenix-based registered investment advisor, has partnered with Amplify to create the Brookwood Intelligence Platform,™  a unified technology foundation that brings data, investment intelligence, portfolio management, trading, account servicing, and advisor workflows together across the firm. 

Founded by Kimberley and Robert Raimondo, Brookwood Investment Group has grown from $515 million to more than $1.5 billion in assets in the past two years, and now serves more than 75 advisors and 6,200 clients. The firm is advancing a Professional Advisor Partnership model designed to give entrepreneurial financial advisors the independence to exercise their own judgment while surrounding them with the expertise, infrastructure, technology, and collective intelligence of a larger institution. 

Brookwood had long envisioned a more connected technology environment, but as the firm grew, the limitations of its fragmented infrastructure became increasingly apparent. Advisors and staff were working across disconnected systems and piecing together information from multiple places, taking time away from serving clients and higher-value work. Amplify offered the connected infrastructure Brookwood needed to bring its data and workflows together, and provided a foundation for continued innovation as the firm scales. 

AssetMark, a leading wealth management platform for financial advisors, today introduced Talk TracksSM, an AI-powered feature available now in the AssetMark Advisor Portal that transforms complex portfolio information into clear, client-ready insights on demand. The launch is the latest step in a broader pipeline of AI-enabled capabilities AssetMark plans to introduce across the advisor lifecycle. 

As portfolios become more personalized and client expectations rise — including clients increasingly consulting AI on basic financial questions — advisors are being asked to address a broader range of questions across an increasingly varied set of client portfolios and needs. Talk TracksSM is designed to equip advisors for that new reality by bringing relevant portfolio and market context together quickly, helping them respond with clarity and confidence. The result is more informed conversations that reinforce the advisor’s value and help them deliver the kind of personalized guidance clients increasingly expect. 

Talk TracksSM synthesizes client portfolio data, market context, performance activity and relevant news to generate personalized talking points. It appears as a side panel in the Advisor Portal, where advisors can review portfolio snapshot summaries; market and macroeconomic context tied to client holdings; sector-level explanations; and tax-savings insights for accounts enabled with Tax Management Services. Each insight can be expanded for additional detail, giving advisors control over how deeply they explore and apply the information. 

april, the only embedded, year-round tax platform built to power smarter financial decisions, today announced expanded capabilities within its Integrated Tax Platform that provide wealth management firms with access to personalized tax planning insights, informed by client-authorized IRS tax data. By combining tax transcript data with april’s proprietary, IRS-approved tax engine, firms can gain a more complete view of a client’s financial picture and identify opportunities for precise, tax-optimized financial planning. 

The new tax data capabilities reflect growing demand from advisory firms seeking to move beyond traditional tax preparation and incorporate tax intelligence into onboarding, financial planning and ongoing client management strategies. With access to historical tax data, advisors can better understand complex financial situations and uncover planning opportunities related to events such as equity compensation, concentrated stock positions, Roth conversions and estimated tax payments. As the only company that combines large-scale tax preparation with AI-powered tax planning, april transforms IRS tax data into accurate, personalized insights that advisors can use throughout the year. 

With client consent, april securely retrieves IRS tax data and processes it through the company’s tax engine, which filed more than 1.4 million federal and state tax returns in 2026. Firms can access tax data and planning insights directly within their existing software and advisor workflows, enabling deeper customization and adoption without adding another point solution to the technology stack. These capabilities will be available through april’s Integrated Tax Platform, providing firms with a ready-to-deploy solution that requires minimal implementation effort. 

Avantos, an artificial intelligence (AI)-native financial technology company providing an operating system designed to reimagine how financial institutions onboard and service clients, today announced an expansion of its wealth management business with the appointments of Hemang Bhojani as Head of Wealth Solutions and Thomas Moore as Head of Wealth Go-to-Market. 

Bhojani will lead the development and expansion of Avantos’ wealth solutions, with a focus on helping firms unlock growth through AI-powered client intelligence, next-best-action recommendations and deeper engagement across wealth, retirement, insurance and other lines of business. Moore will lead go-to-market strategy and strategic partnerships for the company’s wealth business, helping firms realize measurable value from AI while building the relationships and partnerships that support Avantos’ continued growth across wealth management. 

The appointments build on Avantos’ growing momentum in wealth management and across the broader financial services industry as traditional boundaries between wealth, retirement, workplace benefits and insurance continue to blur. Avantos helps firms establish a unified view of the client relationship through a knowledge graph that establishes context around client relationships, linking products, service teams, workflows and service expectations in a single system. This shared context enables AI agents and human teams to identify opportunities, coordinate work and deliver more personalized experiences across business lines. 

Caddi today launched an AI agent that builds and governs a firm’s AI agents, aimed at the industries with the largest back offices: wealth management firms, law firms and insurance companies. 

Back-office work was never left manual because it was boring. It was left manual because it is hard to specify. Filing an executed contract sounds like one step; in practice it is a decision tree. Did both parties sign? Is this the executed copy or another draft? The real process is the happy path plus forty exceptions, most living only in the head of whoever has done the job longest. Past attempts wrote a specification, built against it, and discovered the exceptions in production one incident at a time. 

Few operations leaders can say which processes run across their firm, how often, or at what cost. Caddi’s agent reads the systems a firm already runs and surfaces the processes that repeat, ranked by frequency and cost. The first decision is which process to automate, made against observed activity rather than a hunch. 

Corgi Insurance, the AI-native, full-stack financial infrastructure company, today announced the appointment of McArn Bennett as Head of Public Policy and Corporate Affairs. Bennett will lead Corgi’s federal policy strategy and engagement with policymakers and regulators as AI reshapes insurance and financial services. 

Bennett brings more than 15 years of experience spanning public policy, law, government affairs, financial services, and strategic communications. Before joining Corgi, he founded Marshwood Policy & Strategy, advising clients on federal and state financial services policy and regulatory engagement. He previously spent seven and a half years on the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, most recently as Senior Counsel on the Subcommittee on Capital Markets. 

During his time on the Committee, Bennett helped develop the capital formation agenda, led legislative and oversight programs, and worked closely with the SEC, financial regulators, congressional leadership, and industry stakeholders. Earlier, he served as Legislative Counsel to Congressman Tom Rice (SC) and worked in political affairs and stakeholder communications at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

CyberCube, the leading provider of cyber risk analytics, today unveils six new AI Event Families and a new I2T2 framework, providing carriers, brokers, and risk managers with a practical way to think about and evaluate AI-driven loss. 

The I2T2 framework addresses AI risk in a way that remains applicable to cyber insurance, while also reflecting the wider array of insurance risks now possible. The framework sets out four dimensions through which AI affects insurance risk: Information, Intelligence, Tactics, and Technology. 

CyberCube’s framework is set out in “Machine State of Mind: A Framework for Quantifying AI-Driven Insurance Risk”, examining how artificial intelligence is reshaping risk across the insurance industry. 

Deloitte announced today that it has acquired substantially all of the assets of Wavicle Data Solutions, a top-tier data and AI engineering organization with a market-leading Databricks practice. This acquisition accelerates Deloitte’s already robust capability to help clients build AI-ready data foundations that power enterprise AI at scale, as well as positions Deloitte as a leading enterprise orchestrator for Databricks. 

The Wavicle organization brings deep knowledge managing Databricks on all major hyperscalers, in addition to possessing industry-specific data engineering skills in areas such as consumer goods, manufacturing, financial services, life sciences and healthcare. Deloitte clients will benefit from these industry-specific skills as well as from accelerated engineering delivery at scale, as forward deployed engineers will help build these custom, industry-specific solutions within a Databricks-centric multi-alliance portfolio.  

Deloitte’s Databricks business builds on a long-standing alliance relationship unifying data, analytics and AI. At the “Data + AI Summit,” Deloitte was named a 2026 Databricks Partner Award winner in three categories for Consulting and System Integrators: North America Partner of the Year (regulated and unregulated industries), Banking Partner of the Year and Public Sector SLED Partner of the Year. These awards reflect a demonstrated collaboration delivering secure, measurable results across highly-regulated industries and signal the next phase of collaboration.  

Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) today announced an evolution in how the firm brings value to market, aligning its capabilities around Integrated Solutions to help organizations tackle their most complex enterprise challenges in an AI-driven world. Each Integrated Solution brings together cross-functional resources, AI platforms and methodologies, proprietary data and intelligence to drive end-to-end transformation at speed and scale. The shift reflects growing demand from boards and C-suites for solutions that can turn opportunities into economic outcomes delivered with confidence. 

EY Integrated Solutions portfolio sits at the intersection of domain expertise, data and AI. Designed around specific issues common across enterprise organizations, these solutions will help clients unlock value trapped within functions and across ecosystems, while driving new business outcomes that capitalize on sector convergence such as decentralized power grids, intelligent edge ecosystems and resilient supply chain networks. 

The Integrated Solutions portfolio builds on EY modern foundational solutions across advanced technology capabilities, managed services, risk-focused governance, assurance, tax, strategy and transactions and more. The solutions will be tailored by industry sector, leveraging EY leading sector and domain expertise, and will also be supported by the ey.ai The Reimagination Engine – an open, dynamic AI-led system that helps clients implement AI across the business to realize value. 

FP Alpha, an AI-powered advanced financial planning platform, today announced significant enhancements to its Tax Projector tool designed to make sophisticated, forward-looking tax planning easier and more accessible for financial advisors. 

The enhancements include Tax Projector Scenario Insights, which enables advisors to generate FP Alpha’s NextGen Tax Insights based on future client scenarios rather than relying solely on historical tax returns, and the Tax Projector Agent, an AI-powered experience that allows advisors to build and optimize tax scenarios using natural-language prompts. 

Together, the capabilities expand FP Alpha’s ability to help advisors move beyond identifying tax-planning opportunities to more easily modeling potential decisions, understanding their implications and identifying actionable strategies for clients. 

Fundraise Up, the fundraising platform used by thousands of nonprofits globally, today launched the AI Visibility Assessment, a free tool that shows nonprofits how AI assistants currently understand and represent their organization. 

The launch is the first practical application of Fundraise Up’s Agentic Giving product suite, introduced in July to describe the shift from donors navigating websites and donation forms themselves to delegating more of discovery, evaluation and giving through AI assistants. 

Organic search traffic to nonprofit websites has fallen approximately 35% year-over-year, while AI-referred traffic has grown roughly 1,000%. Donors are beginning to ask AI assistants which organizations address the causes they care about – often receiving an answer without ever visiting a nonprofit website. 

GoFundMe Pro today announced an expansion of its recurring giving solution, designed to help nonprofits drive more predictable revenue, deepen donor relationships, and grow long-term impact. Built on GoFundMe Intelligence and informed by insights from one of the world’s largest giving data sets, the new capabilities help nonprofits create smarter, more strategic donor experiences that sustain support over time. 

The expanded solution introduces three new capabilities that nonprofits can choose to activate: smart retries, which automatically retry certain failed recurring payments based on the rationale for the decline and have achieved an average success rate of more than 30% among early adopters, based on internal data; targeted donor lists, which help nonprofits identify which of their own supporters are most likely to start or increase a recurring contribution based on each nonprofit’s own donor data and insights derived from a matched donor’s activity on the GoFundMe consumer platform; and personalized upgrade links, which make it easy for donors to increase their impact. 

Across the nonprofit sector, support from recurring donors is estimated to be worth five to seven times more than support from one-time donors. On GoFundMe Pro, monthly recurring gifts are 60% higher than the industry average*, and recurring donors deliver 10 times higher lifetime value compared to one-time donors. Notably, GoFundMe Pro saw a 25% increase in the number of new recurring giving plans started on GivingTuesday, underscoring the opportunity for nonprofits to turn moments of generosity into sustained support. 

Today, Google Cloud unveiled Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services, a purpose-built agentic AI solution engineered for financial professionals. This solution includes a Google-managed Financial Research agent, more than 50 new skills with specialized agentic instructions for financial roles and workflows, enterprise data connectors, an expanding third-party agent ecosystem, and the foundational Gemini Enterprise platform. 

Initially available in preview for the capital markets and corporate banking industries, Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services is already being used by global financial institutions like CME Group and Deutsche Bank, a key design partner for the Financial Research agent. This launch builds on the rapidly growing momentum of Gemini Enterprise with many leading financial institutions like BNY, Citi Wealth, Lloyds Banking Group, Macquarie Bank, and Signal Iduna using it to equip their workforce with advanced, agentic workflow tools to drive growth and efficiency. 

Announced today, Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services and Legal are the first in a series of specialized, packaged industry solutions built on top of the secure, fully-governed Gemini Enterprise platform. Each industry solution delivers out-of-the-box, domain-specific, purpose-built AI capabilities, which may include tailored agents, specialized skills that provide simple shortcuts to manage a variety of workflows, data connectors, and model optimizations tailored for a specific industry.  

Grimes & Company (“Grimes”), a full-service registered investment advisory (RIA) firm managing approximately $7 billion in assets, today announced the addition of the tax practice of Stevens and Ciccone Associates, PC, a Needham, Massachusetts-based CPA firm. The firm also announced the appointment of veteran wealth management executive Andrew Hamil as chief operating officer, reinforcing Grimes’ commitment to expanding its capabilities as it continues to grow nationally. 

The acquisition adds approximately 800 tax clients and an experienced team of professionals to Grimes, introducing in-house tax planning and advisory capabilities that complement the firm’s existing financial planning and investment management services. The firm will continue to support advisors’ and clients’ existing relationships with outside tax professionals while offering an additional resource for clients whose planning needs warrant integrated tax expertise. As part of the transition, Stevens and Ciccone Associates will begin operating as S&C Tax Advisors, while the team continues building and maintaining its longstanding relationships with existing advisors, clients and referral partners, reinforcing the collaborative approach that has been central to the practice’s success. 

Alongside the acquisition, Grimes welcomes Hamil, who brings more than 20 years of leadership experience across wealth management, trust services and estate planning. He previously served as president and chairman of Wealth Enhancement Trust Services and as president and chair of Fidelity Personal Trust Company, FSB. Earlier in his career, he held senior leadership roles within Bank of America’s trust division and began his career practicing law in Boston. As chief operating officer, Hamil will oversee Grimes’ financial planning, insurance, tax, business operations, data and artificial intelligence (AI), and growth teams while helping drive future acquisitions, expand trust services and further operationalize the firm’s capabilities at scale. 

Intellectus Partners today announced the launch of a dedicated Client Engagement team, a new function designed to transform how clients experience and engage with the firm across its people, technology, investment capabilities, services and broader ecosystem. The initiative represents the next stage of a strategy Intellectus has been building for years: combining increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence with an even higher standard of personal service, judgment and human engagement. 

Intellectus calls that philosophy Human Touch AI. The new Client Engagement team builds on Intellectus’ multi-year investment in artificial intelligence and digital advisory technology. That work has included the development and subsequent spinout of Intellebox.ai, the AI platform that provides the technological foundation for much of this new Client Engagement model, as well as continued internal development of IntellectusIQ and other proprietary AI capabilities across the Intellectus platform. 

Together, these technologies are allowing Intellectus to rethink not only how advice is delivered, but how a wealth and investment firm can engage with, understand and serve its clients. Importantly, the mandate extends well beyond technology. Intellectus serves a community of ultra-high-net-worth entrepreneurs, founders, executives and significant families whose financial lives often span operating companies, concentrated wealth, private investments and complex family structures. 

International General Insurance Holdings Ltd. (“IGI” or the “Company”) (NASDAQ: IGIC), the international specialty insurance and reinsurance group, today announced the launch of Bermuda-based Cipher Underwriting Ltd. (“Cipher”), a specialty treaty reinsurance managing general agent (MGA) established to provide dedicated cyber treaty underwriting expertise and solutions on a global basis. The commencement of Cipher’s operations remains subject to applicable regulatory approvals, including the registration and licensing of Cipher by the Bermuda Monetary Authority. 

Led by reinsurance specialist Ari Chatterjee, Cipher has been created to address the increasing demand for specialty cyber treaty reinsurance capabilities as cyber risk continues to evolve across businesses, economies and critical infrastructure worldwide. Mr. Chatterjee has more than 20 years of industry experience with over a decade of cyber reinsurance experience including setting market standards on data and policy wordings. 

The launch of Cipher represents an important milestone in IGI’s strategy to expand its specialty reinsurance capabilities through the development of focused underwriting platforms in attractive and growing markets. 

Leelyn Smith, an integrated advisory firm serving families and business owners across the country, today announced the appointment of John Renaldi as Chief AI Officer. 

Renaldi brings a technology leadership background that is rare in the wealth management industry. He held VP and GM roles at Google and Motorola, where he led engineering, design, and product teams, and he oversaw early Gen AI-enabled capabilities. He holds ten patents spanning machine learning, software, and hardware, and co-founded Jiobit, a wearable technology startup that was acquired by Life360 (NASDAQ: LIF) in 2021. He currently serves as a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering where John developed and teaches the Applied AI curriculum, as well as the University of Illinois’s Grainger School of Engineering, and advises companies in the use of Generative AI including Netgear, Realtor.com, Life360, PayNearMe, and Techstars. 

That combination of hands-on technical depth and applied business leadership is exactly what led Leelyn Smith to create this role, to expand its integrated model where wealth management, tax strategy and execution, financial planning, accounting, and CFO services operate as one coordinated practice. 

Magnifact®, a pioneer in DataIntelligent℠ solutions for the insurance industry, today announced the successful production deployment of its AgentVizion™ API Services platform at The Standard, a leading provider of workplace benefits, connecting Financial Independence Group (FIG) as the carrier’s inaugural distribution partner through the Insured Retirement Institute’s (IRI) Digital First for Annuities (DFA) Application Status and Activity Status APIs. The deployment establishes a reusable, standards-based digital foundation that enables real-time visibility into pending annuity business while simplifying future distributor onboarding. 

The production deployment implements the IRI DFA Application Status and Activity Status APIs, enabling advisors and operations teams to receive standardized, real-time updates throughout the pending annuity lifecycle. The initiative reflects the industry’s transition away from manual case inquiries and proprietary integrations toward open, interoperable connectivity. 

As one of the earliest implementation partners supporting the IRI DFA framework, Magnifact continues to work alongside carriers, distributors, and industry organizations to advance the adoption of the IRI DFA standards across the insurance ecosystem. Rather than deploying a custom integration for a single distributor, The Standard has established a repeatable digital platform that can rapidly support additional distribution partners using the same architecture. 

Merit Financial Advisors (“Merit”), a Georgia-based financial advisory firm specializing in financial planning and wealth management solutions for high-net-worth individuals and families and those navigating life transitions, today announced the appointment of John Rajes as Chief Technology Officer, further strengthening the firm’s executive leadership team as Merit continues to invest in the people, technology and infrastructure needed to support its rapid national expansion. 

With more than $30.1 billion in assets across more than 55 offices nationwide, Merit has become one of the wealth management industry’s most active growth firms, completing 61 acquisitions to date, including nine partnerships in 2026. Rajes’ appointment reflects Merit’s broader strategy of building the leadership structure and enterprise capabilities necessary to support that growth while continuing to enhance the experience for its advisors and clients. 

Rajes, who joined Merit on July 13, will oversee the firm’s enterprise technology strategy, including technology architecture, integrations, data, artificial intelligence and the continued development of a more unified digital experience for Merit’s advisors and employees. 

Osaic, Inc. (“Osaic”), one of the nation’s largest providers of wealth management strategies, today announced the appointment of veteran technology executive Sayee Bellamkonda as Chief AI & Technology Officer. Bellamkonda will lead Osaic’s advisor- and client-facing technology, AI, and cybersecurity strategies and will join the firm’s executive committee, reporting to CEO Jamie Price. 

Bellamkonda’s recruitment marks a strategic investment in Osaic’s integrated technology capabilities as the firm advances its short- and long-term technology and AI roadmap. In his role, he will focus on strengthening the technology, data and AI infrastructure to further increase advisor and employee productivity, improve client outcomes and create greater scalability across the enterprise. Bellamkonda will work across the organization to enhance these capabilities and build on the technology initiatives already underway at Osaic, supporting the firm’s commitment to enabling financial professionals to achieve success on their terms. 

Prior to joining Osaic, Bellamkonda held executive roles at Vialto Partners, CBRE, Ameriprise Financial and American Express, where he led large-scale digital, data, technology and innovation initiatives across global organizations. At Vialto, he served as executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer, and led the effort to build the company’s global technology organization following its separation from PwC. Throughout his career, he has led global technology teams and organizations spanning digital products, enterprise data, AI, cybersecurity, cloud transformation and innovation. 

PayToMe.co, a Silicon Valley AI and financial technology company, today announced the continued global expansion of its AI-powered commerce platform, connecting FinTech, commerce, logistics and travel through an integrated ecosystem serving consumers and enterprises in the United States and international markets. 

Businesses and consumers operate in a world where money, commerce, goods and people move continuously, yet the technology supporting those activities remains fragmented across payments, financial operations, customer engagement, fulfillment, logistics and service. PayToMe.co connects that journey through technology designed to make complex transactions simpler, faster and more intelligent. 

The company is accelerating enterprise adoption, strategic relationships and international reach while continuing to advance AI, automation, embedded FinTech and enterprise APIs. 

Penguin Ai, a healthcare-native artificial intelligence company, today announced that its Intelligent Medical Coding and Intelligent Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) solutions are now available in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

Undercoding, preventable denials, and slow manual review erode provider margins and delay reimbursement. Penguin Ai’s Intelligent Medical Coding solution identifies and validates codes across 72,000+ ICD-10 codes, reducing undercoding while keeping pace with regulatory change. Its Intelligent RCM solution extends that automation across the revenue cycle — claims scrubbing and billing review that prevents denials before they occur, intelligent denial triage with auto-generated appeal letters, and chart summarization that accelerates review. Every output includes Glassbox reasoning, a human-readable rationale for each recommendation. Human review is configurable on every workflow. 

Customers can now access Penguin Ai’s Intelligent Medical Coding and Intelligent RCM solutions directly within AWS Marketplace. Because the solutions deploy inside the customer’s own AWS account and governance perimeter, clinical and billing data never leave the provider’s environment, and no new business associate agreement is required. 

Practifi today announced the launch of Practifi Sentir (“Sentir”), an intelligent CRM that is AI-native by design and built on the same enterprise-grade foundation firms already trust. With Sentir, client work lives in one place with clear ownership, so advisors can reliably follow up and strengthen client relationships. The system automatically briefs users on the state of every account, prepares work, recommends next steps, and draws in relevant context from outside the CRM, ensuring advisors walk into every interaction informed and ready to act. 

Sentir’s built-in AI capabilities work across every client record, workflow, and interaction, proactively surfacing what advisors need rather than just storing what they enter, with every insight and action linked to trusted records within the CRM. Advisors can act with confidence knowing nothing happens without human review. Importantly, all of the Sentir functionality runs inside the same enterprise-grade security, permissions, and compliance model of Practifi, ensuring nothing new has to be configured, reviewed, or trusted separately. 

The existing Practifi system will now be known as Practifi Naya (“Naya”), Practifi’s configurable wealth management CRM built around each advisory firm’s workflows and business model. It continues to give firms an operational foundation to run efficiently, with the flexibility to build on it as their practices grow and goals change, and will still be available commercially to both existing and new users. 

Rocket Money, part of Rocket Companies (NYSE: RKT), today launched Rowan, an AI agent that goes beyond analysis, monitoring consumer’s finances and even acting on their behalf, all through simple text messaging. 

Powered by Anthropic, Rowan watches spending around the clock. When it spots a way to save, it sends a text. The consumer replies in plain language and Rowan handles the rest. It can renegotiate recurring bills, cancel subscriptions and even create automated savings transfers.   

Most personal finance apps are passive, showing a dashboard that leaves the real work up to the consumer. Rowan does the work for them. 

Sardine, the leading agentic risk platform to fight financial crime, today announced that it has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Financial Crime Management Solutions, Q3 2026. 

Financial crime is increasingly connected. Fraud, identity, AML, scams, mule activity, account takeover, payment risk, and merchant risk often appear as parts of the same behavior, while many organizations still manage them across separate systems, data, and teams. 

Sardine was built around a more connected approach. Its platform brings together identity, device, behavioral, transaction, and network intelligence across fraud and AML, with AI agents working across that foundation to investigate patterns, surface anomalies, improve controls, and automate repetitive operational work. 

Scienaptic AI, a global leader in AI powered credit decisioning technology, announced today that Financial Center First Credit Union has gone live on its AI platform. This deployment is automating the credit union’s lending operations, delivering faster loan decisions, and responsibly expanding fair access to credit across its membership. Importantly, all these advancements have been achieved while ensuring fairness, inclusivity, and compliance with regulatory standards, which are integral to the Scienaptic AI platform. 

Founded more than 70 years ago to serve military personnel and civilians at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Financial Center began with 227 loans and $29,000 in deposits and has grown into a trusted financial partner for members across greater Indianapolis, Kokomo, Muncie, and beyond. Guided by a mission of inclusive banking and lifelong financial wellness, the credit union pairs everyday banking with free financial education resources, coaching, and community programs that help members build confidence and momentum toward what comes next. 

TaxRock, an AI-native IRS intelligence company, today announced the launch of its consumer platform, extending its IRS intelligence infrastructure directly to individuals and business owners managing their own IRS accounts. 

For decades, the challenge for taxpayers has not simply been access to information. It has been turning fragmented and highly technical IRS information into an understanding of what is happening, why it matters and what to do next. Taxpayers have largely faced two choices: navigate that complexity on their own or turn to professional help that can cost thousands of dollars. 

The launch comes at a pivotal moment for taxpayers. As the IRS increasingly uses AI and advanced technology to strengthen enforcement and collections, taxpayers are facing a more sophisticated system with less human support available to help them navigate it. 

Transaction Network Services (TNS), a global leader in managed network and payment solutions, has revealed a significant investment to its extensive acceptance and payment orchestration platform designed to help businesses increase payment acceptance, lower transaction costs and reduce the complexity of managing payments across multiple channels and markets. 

TNS’s continued commitment brings in-person and online payment acceptance, orchestration, security, visibility and optimization together in one connected platform, which now offers and supports the latest next-generation Android-based unattended payment terminals. 

The latest evolution extends TNS’s payment orchestration offering into the physical environments where payments reliability matters most. The next-generation Android-based unattended payment terminals are purpose-built for self-service needs, such as parking, EV, transportation, vending, laundromats, self-service kiosks and checkouts, where payments often happen without staff nearby. The terminals come with TNS’s payment application ready to run, allowing operators to accept payments without building and maintaining their own payment application, managing certification requirements or taking on the PCI compliance burden typically associated with payment terminal deployments. 

Vanguard and Altruist, an AI-forward wealth technology and custody platform serving financial advisors, announced today that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Vanguard will acquire Altruist. 

Altruist combines a purpose-built platform, specialized talent, established advisor relationships, and deep expertise translating advice into better workflows and experiences. Under Vanguard’s ownership, Altruist will be even better positioned to help advisors across the industry serve more clients, improve investors’ outcomes, and bring high-quality financial advice to more people. 

Vanguard first invested in Altruist in 2020 to bring greater competition to the registered investment advisor (RIA) custody space, to make advice more accessible, and to deliver better outcomes for investors. 

Vertice AI, the leading provider of AI-powered growth solutions for community financial institutions, today announced the launch of Vertice OPTIMIZE, a first-of-its-kind solution that links a financial institution’s growth goals directly to marketing execution. The newest module in the Vertice solution portfolio empowers community financial institutions of all sizes to engage and grow account holders more efficiently and effectively. 

OPTIMIZE creates a closed-loop growth engine that connects institutional objectives, mathematical optimization, predictive intelligence, and automated campaign execution in a single workflow. After receiving an institution’s growth goals, the solution automatically builds an optimized campaign calendar, selects the audiences most likely to respond, and generates compliant, personalized content to turn a financial institution’s strategic priorities into actionable marketing. 

Users can establish specific growth objectives, whether increasing auto loans, growing deposits, deepening relationships, or improving retention. The optimization engine then combines those goals with account-level propensity scores to develop a comprehensive, multi-month campaign strategy. It determines which campaigns to run, when to launch them, and which individuals should receive each message, while accounting for real-world constraints such as customer fatigue, channel capacity, campaign saturation, and compliance requirements. 

WealthReach, an AI-powered organic growth platform built for registered investment advisors (RIAs) and wealth management firms, today announced a partnership with VastAdvisor, the governed AI organic growth operating system for wealth management firms. Through the partnership, WealthReach identifies previously anonymous visitors to a RIA’s website, as well as those actively searching for topics related to the firm’s services online, and then automatically exports these contacts into VastAdvisor’s platform. VastAdvisor helps RIAs and wealth enterprises define and target their ideal client profiles (ICPs) through paid digital media channels. These firms can utilize WealthReach’s warm leads to further define ICPs that are visiting their site for retargeting.  

Traditional advisor marketing has treated organic visibility and paid advertising as separate initiatives, run by different teams or vendors with little coordination between them. A firm might invest in search engine optimization (SEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) to rank on Google and AI answer engines, while separately buying ads aimed at broad, generic audiences. The WealthReach and VastAdvisor partnership connects those efforts, allowing firms to direct paid spend toward in-market prospects who have demonstrated interest in relevant financial topics and match the firm’s ideal client profile while constantly learning from past campaign efforts.  

Advisors have traditionally relied on word-of-mouth referrals and purchased leads, which may not capture the in-market prospects a firm doesn’t yet know about. Purchased leads may also be sold to multiple competing firms, forcing advisors to compete for prospects they do not own. Together, WealthReach and VastAdvisor give RIAs another path: building audiences from their own organic visibility and intent signals, then using those audiences to inform paid acquisition. 

Harbourfront Wealth Group (“Harbourfront Wealth”), a leading Canadian independent management firm, and Zocks, the privacy-first AI platform for financial services, today announced Zocks is available to Harbourfront Wealth’s entire advisor network following a successful pilot. This also marks a milestone market expansion for Zocks, with Harbourfront Wealth as its largest enterprise customer in Canada to date. 

With Zocks, Harbourfront Wealth advisors can now automate many of the operational tasks that surround client meetings, including note-taking, email follow-ups and CRM updates. Zocks captures relevant details from conversations, turns them into structured client data, and securely syncs that information across connected systems, including financial planning software and contact management systems. Client data is stored in Canada, supporting the privacy, compliance, and data residency expectations of Canadian wealth management firms. 

Harbourfront Wealth took Zocks from pilot to firm-wide availability in roughly 90 days, demonstrating strong momentum and enterprise scalability. As of August 12, more than 2,900 client meetings have been processed and an estimated 2,000+ hours of administrative time have been returned to advisors — the equivalent of at least one additional client meeting per advisor every week. With more time and capacity, advisors are deepening client relationships, pursuing new opportunities, and growing their business.