AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 11/13/26

Connecting everything and running it with artificial intelligence is just risky enough to kill us. 

In case that wasn't warning enough, we're going to hit AI with the hate fist this week and talk about some of the dangers of the Internet of Things (IoT). 

Welcome to AI & Finance, where we have a good list of headlines to get through this week, but first, we're going to talk about cybersecurity a bit. 

Imagine your editor has tattooed the words "Love" and "Hate" on his knuckles. You, dear readers, may have noticed that our introductions to this column come in two different flavors—the love fist and the hate fist. In the first one, which we'll call the love fist, we wax ebullient about the growth of AI or the cool new things it can do for us. We enjoy hitting AI with the love fist.  

This week, you're getting the hate fist, where we talk about all the dangerous things AI adoption is exposing us to, or the risks of investing in AI, or the AI backlash. 

In the internet of things, where we're connecting not just our personal computers, but the electronics inside our televisions, refrigerators, cars, dishwashers, stoves, baby monitors, insulin pumps and pacemakers to the internet and each other, we're opening up a Pandora's box of risk. 

Though we only address it occasionally, cybersecurity is at the heart of all that we write about. If the technological tools we use to hold, move, invest, measure and report our financial lives aren't secure, they're worthless to us.  

Cybersecurity and cyber-vulnerability are just another front in the battle between malicious, criminal actors and law-abiding society. The front moves back and forth as technology advances—sometimes it moves in the direction of security and in the favor of law-abiding people, at other times it moves back towards malicious elements. 

The most recent news cycle, to us, portrays a contest where malice has the upper hand. Let's start with the theft of $6.3 billion of funds from crypto exchange Binance at the end of October. Early analysis attributes the attack, most of which took place across a 20-minute period, to North Korean hackers. Keep in mind that security is crypto's entire value proposition—while blockchains have not been breached (yet), if we can't keep cryptocurrency secure ourselves except via extraordinary means, what is it really worth? 

Then, more concerning to us, is the recent string of cyberattacks on European supermarkets. Over the past five weeks, grocers in France, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Luxembourg, Finland, Ireland, Estonia and Portugal have been the victims of a coordinated attack targeting their internet-linked freezer and refrigeration systems. The attacks are programming coolers and freezers to raise their temperatures as high as 122°F, spoiling tons of food and in some cases causing fires. These attacks are already spilling over into U.S. interests, including military bases. The French are laying the blame for these breaches on Iranian hackers. 

This isn't the first internet of things cyberattack, and at the rate the world is going, it won't be the last. As it turns out, there's more to cybercrime than effective asymmetric warfare. Malicious actors have been using the internet of things as an attack vector for at least a decade, starting with the 2016 Mirai attack. 

Mirai infected internet-connected devices such as security cameras, digital video recorders and home routers, exploiting weak security protections and commonly used default usernames and passwords to assemble an army compromised devices called a "botnet." Attackers then used a Mirai-powered botnet to flood Dyn, a major provider of Domain Name System (DNS) services, with enormous volumes of malicious traffic, disrupting access to popular websites and services including Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, GitHub and PayPal across the United States and parts of Europe. The attack occurred in multiple waves, temporarily overwhelming Dyn's infrastructure and preventing users from reaching websites even when the websites' own servers remained operational.  

Clearly, attackers can still exploit vulnerabilities in everyday consumer technology to produce widespread economic disruption. Even ten years later. 

Which brings us back to Korea. The other Korea, this time, as South Korea's financial sector experienced AI-assisted cyberattacks affecting approximately 16 financial institutions, including Daishin Securities and Mirae Asset Global Investments, exposing an estimated 100,000 customer records.  

AI infrastructure providers were breached, too. In a hack of Fireworks AI, attackers accessed account information, billing records, authentication secrets and AI-related datasets. 

Governments, too, have been hacked over the past two months. It seems like no one is safe and that no one can reliably protect digital assets—meaning digital assets in general, not just digital financial assets. Everyone and everything online is vulnerable. 

Cybersecurity professionals and researchers are finding a trove of IoT and AI-related vulnerabilities. Google just took down a botnet involving Android television sets. New vulnerabilities were disclosed in widely used software like Ivanti Connect Secure, Cisco ASA and Firepower Threat Defense, GitLab, PHP, Node.js and VMware. 

We're left with the impression that businesses are in a rush to connect literally everything to the internet—including our finances—without first figuring out how to truly keep our stuff safe. 

It's not that security isn't on the mind of the technology industry or it's customers, it's that the image of tech right now is one of an industry forgoing security in the name of progress, and that's not really progress when it comes to wealth and finance. 

Across the economy, technologists know serious security problems still exist and new ones are being introduced, but they are still  gung-ho about moving everything to the cloud, connecting every part of our lives and the economy to the cloud, and permitting AI to manage all of it.  

Are we ready? The news over the past five weeks says we are not, not until the cybersecurity battlelines move back in favor of the good guys. 

And we're supposed to be the technology enthusiasts! 

Let's get to our headlines...

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73 Strings 

73 Strings, the AI-powered valuation and portfolio intelligence platform for alternative asset managers, today announced the launch of Extraction Agent, a new agentic AI solution that automates financial data extraction and mapping through a multi-agent AI workflow that learns from previous user corrections to reduce repetitive manual work and accelerate recurring portfolio reporting. 

For alternative asset managers overseeing portfolios of companies with varying reporting formats, financial data collection remains a significant operational burden. Investment teams must navigate inconsistent financial statements, spreadsheets and quarterly reports to identify, extract and reconcile critical performance metrics. These challenges compound across reporting cycles, as teams repeatedly address the same formatting inconsistencies and data mapping issues. 

Built into 73 Extract, Extraction Agent uses a coordinated multi-agent AI workflow comprised of specialized agents, orchestrated through an intelligent agent orchestrator. Working together, the concierge agent, intake agent, extraction agent, mapping agent and validation capabilities manage the end-to-end process, from document intake and recognition through financial data extraction, mapping, validation and review. 

Alkami Technology 

Alkami Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: ALKT) ("Alkami"), a digital sales and service platform provider for financial institutions in the U.S., today announced that Fidelity Bank is live with MANTL Loan Origination in less than three months after kickoff, unifying consumer loan origination across physical and digital banking channels to deliver a faster, more streamlined experience for borrowers and employees. Fidelity Bank is now originating personal loans and vehicle loans through MANTL. 

As an existing Alkami Digital Banking customer, Fidelity Bank expanded its relationship with Alkami by implementing MANTL Loan Origination to modernize consumer lending. As the bank evaluated a new loan origination system, it prioritized automation and operational efficiency while also seeking the ability to deliver a connected online borrowing experience for the first time. By replacing siloed legacy systems with MANTL Loan Origination, Fidelity Bank streamlined underwriting, fraud prevention, and credit decisioning while creating a seamless lending experience regardless of where borrowers choose to apply. 

With MANTL Loan Origination, Fidelity Bank can automate decisioning, enable straight-through processing, and reduce manual work through configurable workflows, integrated identity verification, and intelligent credit decisioning. These capabilities give branch teams more time to build relationships instead of entering data, while enabling Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and underwriting teams to work more efficiently and confidently, ultimately accelerating loan processing. 

Anthropic  

Getting answers about your money no longer means opening every banking app and doing the math yourself. With Personal Finance in Claude, you can securely connect your bank and card accounts and ask in your own words. Access is read-only, and Personal Finance can’t move, manage, or invest your money.  

Claude gives you answers in everyday language, from your balances and transactions, and explains any term that's new to you. Like the rest of Claude, Personal Finance has no ads or sponsored recommendations, and it doesn’t offer credit cards, loans, or savings accounts of its own, so your money questions get a straight answer.  

Personal Finance starts rolling out in beta this week, on the Pro, Max, and Ultra plans in the US.  

Arch  

Arch, the infrastructure layer for private markets, today announced a multi-year partnership with Mercer Advisors, Inc. (“Mercer Advisors”), a national wealth management and financial planning firm, powering scale in private markets management while reducing operational risk. Since their work began in early 2025, Mercer Advisors has saved more than 7,000 hours a year, reducing the operational cost of managing client alternative investments by 40%. Arch’s enhanced alts data management platform will continue to support Mercer Advisors’ portfolio monitoring, liquidity planning, and workflow tracking, including the tracking of capital calls and distributions and the delivery of private markets insights.  

Mercer Advisors has grown from $18 billion in client assets in 2020 to $114 billion today. Growth in Mercer Advisors’ high-net-worth business, along with rising client adoption of alternative investments, has made scalable tools essential to serving families with private holdings.  

Arch addresses this challenge by collecting documents from fund admin portals, then routing structured data and insights to the downstream teams and systems for action. Leveraging Arch, K-1s are collected and made available to each client’s CPA, capital calls are actioned, reporting data is sent to reporting systems, and insights are delivered  

Avalara 

Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, today announced the launch of Avalara Intelligent Tax Classification (AITC), an AI-powered platform designed to automate and streamline the classification of product catalogs to tax and compliance codes. Trained on more than 3 billion items across 8,000 brands, AITC delivers more accurate, confidence-scored tax code recommendations, role-based approval workflows, and a robust audit trail to help businesses eliminate downstream calculation errors and accelerate time-to-market for new products. 

Product tax classification remains one of the most labor-intensive and error-prone steps in indirect tax compliance for growing mid-market and enterprise businesses. Companies managing high-volume SKU catalogs often rely on spreadsheets, disconnected portals, and email threads to map products to jurisdiction-specific tax rules. 

AITC launches with support for Avalara tax codes, with additional classification outputs on the roadmap, including Harmonized System (HS) Codes for cross-border trade, Amazon Product Tax Codes, UNSPSC classifications, Google Product Codes, Stripe Product Tax Codes, and custom taxonomies, all planned to be delivered through the same platform. 

Benzinga  

Benzinga, a leading provider of real-time financial news and market intelligence, today highlighted its continued commitment to supporting the rapidly growing ecosystem of AI-powered financial applications, with tradeInsightAI among the latest platforms leveraging Benzinga content to enhance market intelligence and decision-making.  

As artificial intelligence reshapes how investors, analysts, and institutions consume information, demand for trusted, real-time financial data continues to grow. Through its APIs and data licensing solutions, Benzinga provides the news, corporate communications, and market intelligence that power a growing range of AI-driven products and workflows across the financial industry.  

The relationship with tradeInsightAI reflects a broader trend of AI-native companies incorporating high-quality financial data into their platforms to generate insights, identify market-moving developments, and help users navigate increasingly complex information environments. By integrating Benzinga's real-time financial news and corporate communications content, tradeInsightAI is further strengthening its AI-powered analysis capabilities and expanding the intelligence available to its users. 

Bitdefender 

Bitdefender, a global cybersecurity leader, today announced Bitdefender Web Sage, an AI-powered browser extension that helps consumers identify, understand, and avoid online risks as they browse. In the AI era, scams increasingly hide in everyday browsing, from search results and sponsored ads to convincing phishing pages and fake stores built to steal personal and financial data. Web Sage is designed to help protect and guide consumers at every click. 

Scams and online fraud have overtaken traditional malware as the top threat to consumers, with cybercriminals focusing their schemes on the browsing experience. In a survey of 7,000 consumers worldwide, one in seven reported falling victim to an online scam over the last 12 months, and 21% were scammed through an online ad. 

Bitdefender Web Sage is a standalone browser extension for Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Safari, and Brave that requires no complicated setup and has no noticeable impact on system performance. Working quietly in the background, it checks and correlates each page against Bitdefender's real-time global threat intelligence. Premium capabilities layer on advanced AI-powered analysis that evaluates page behavior and content, including domains, URLs, and scripts, to detect emerging scams and sophisticated fraud that have not yet reached traditional blocklists. 

Datavault AI 

Datavault AI Inc. (“Datavault” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: DVLT) today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Brett Moyer as Chief Executive Officer and President, Kimberly Briskey as Chair of the Board, Sri Peruvemba as Vice Chair of the Board, Teri Gallo as Chief Operating Officer, Stanley Mbugua as Chief Financial Officer and Christopher R. Hardt as Chair of the Audit Committee, effective immediately. Mr. Moyer succeeds Nathaniel Bradley, who was removed as Chief Executive Officer and President on November 1, 2026. Mr. Bradley remains a member of the Board. Sonia Choi, formerly an executive with the Company, is no longer with the Company, and is not authorized to act on its behalf. 

Ms. Gallo brings extensive experience building, transforming and scaling digital technology businesses. Mr. Mbugua succeeds Mr. Moyer as Chief Financial Officer and will lead the Company's financial operations. 

Ms. Briskey, who previously served as Chair of the Audit Committee, will assume the role of Chair of the Board. Mr. Peruvemba, an existing director, will serve as Vice Chair, bringing more than 35 years of technology industry leadership and expertise in global commercialization and strategic partnerships. Mr. Hardt, a Certified Public Accountant and former PwC partner with extensive experience in financial reporting, SEC compliance and corporate governance, will succeed Ms. Briskey as Chair of the Audit Committee. These appointments reinforce the Board’s commitment to independent oversight, financial accountability and strong corporate governance. 

dub  

dub, America's premier social investing platform powering more than $2 billion in trades, today announced the launch of Arlo, an AI investing assistant available within the dub app. Arlo is built on dub's proprietary investing technology, engineered to execute a realtime multi-factor investment analysis with actionable insights, revolutionizing the legacy advisory industry.  

With Arlo, the entire decision-making process is fully traceable end to end, creating a level of transparency dub believes sets Arlo apart in the AI investing space. Arlo upends the traditional advisory experience by making actionable information accessible to the retail audience.  

The investment management space has long been a function of wealth, much like trading itself was once largely out of reach until personal technology revolutionized an entire industry. Arlo brings that technology to investment management, giving customers access to the kind of actionable insights they would typically turn to a financial advisor for. In doing so, dub believes Arlo can replicate many of the functions investors have traditionally paid for, opening access to services typically out of reach for hundreds of millions of Americans. dub sees this as a broader shift in consumer finance, making sophisticated investment knowledge available to a far wider audience and narrowing a gap that has historically been defined by wealth.  

Edward Jones  

Edward Jones continued to build on its growth momentum in Q3 2026, reflecting the strength of its client relationships, increasing demand for personalized financial advice and disciplined investments in the firm's future.  

Edward Jones introduced Digital Managed Solutions™, an investment advisory platform initially available to a small group of associates as part of the firm's development of a future hybrid advice offering. Designed for investors earlier in their financial journeys, the offering will combine self-service digital tools with access to human guidance. Broader availability is planned for mid-2027.  

The firm announced development of an AI-powered, end-to-end retirement plan management tool in collaboration with Aboon, and Retirement Plan Advisory Group (RPAG®), part of Great Gray Group. The Retirement Plan Management Center will roll out to Edward Jones financial advisors in 2027 and will better enable advisors to serve business owners with workplace retirement plans.   

Farther  

Farther today announced the addition of Kai Conragan as Vice President, Head of UX, and Allan Smith as Vice President of Product. Based in California, Conragan and Smith will lead the continuous upgrade of Farther’s proprietary Intelligent Wealth Platform, enhancing a product experience that frees advisors to better serve their client base.   

Kai Conragan joins Farther from Google, where he spent 15 years on UX for Google Search, building a global team that scaled Search to one of the most widely used software products in the world as it evolved from desktop to mobile to AI. During his tenure at the company, Conragan helped launch an array of products including Knowledge Graph, Google News, Gboard, and Gemini in Search.  

In his new role as Farther Vice President, Head of UX, Conragan will implement a “design-first” approach to advance the frontier of usability in intelligent wealth systems.  

FinQuery 

FinQuery, the Intelligent Subledger Platform for financial obligations and capital assets, today announced the appointment of Elliot Smith to Chief Financial Officer and Roshni Jain to Senior Vice President of Product and Strategy. The appointments follow FinQuery’s September acquisition of Innervision, which established FinQuery UK, and its expansion beyond lease accounting into fixed assets and debt management. 

The appointments add to a leadership team that has grown throughout 2026 to include Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Grace, Chief Marketing Officer Jake Fabbri and SVP of Customer Success Mike Gerson. 

Smith brings more than two decades of experience scaling SaaS businesses, leading finance, strategic planning and corporate development at Lucid Software, InsideSales.com and Ancestry.com. At FinQuery, he will oversee finance, accounting, and corporate development. 

Global Payments 

Global Payments Inc. (NYSE: GPN), a leading payment technology and software company that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes worldwide, today announced the expansion of its Adaptive Authentication platform with the addition of Visa Intelligent Data Exchange (IDX) API, helping clients in the U.S. and Canada improve authorization rates, reduce unnecessary customer challenges and optimize payment performance. 

The enhancement enables Global Payments® clients, who are eager to improve approval rates without adding checkout friction, to share richer transaction data with issuers, supporting more informed authorization decisions, helping reduce false declines and maximizing conversion. 

The Global Payments Adaptive Authentication platform’s addition of Visa IDX API extends its suite of intelligent authentication capabilities. Powered by AI, Adaptive Authentication dynamically selects the most effective authentication strategy for each transaction, using capabilities including 3D Secure, Data Only authentication, SCA Exemptions and Visa IDX API. While Adaptive Authentication is available to clients globally, Visa IDX API is initially available for eligible domestic U.S. and Canadian transactions. 

GReminders 

GReminders, a leading AI-powered end-to-end meeting management platform for financial advisors, today announces it is an official Integration with FMG Suite. The partnership deepens how GReminders’ scheduling and automated workflow engine connects with FMG Suite’s website forms, client data, and communication ecosystem. 

FMG Suite is the intelligent growth platform for financial advisors and the firms that support them, powering compliant, organic growth for 80,000+ financial professionals. GReminders and FMG Suite have collaborated with enterprise leaders to map the meeting use cases advisors face daily. The result combines GReminders’ scheduling engine, FMG Suite’s website forms, and MyRepChat’s compliant messaging into an enterprise-ready meeting framework. 

The integration addresses three high-friction moments: Instant prospect-booking, fewer no-shows, and an automated client review cadence. 

Light Frame 

Light Frame, the financial technology company providing modern core banking and portfolio management software for the wealth industry, today announced the successful closing of an oversubscribed $5.1 million Seed financing round. 

The round was led by Fortino Ventures, with participation from Sidekick Partners, Tenity, Chamaeleon, and Altair Capital, alongside existing investors including Rogue Venture Partners, New Stack Ventures, and Studio Alpha. 

The financing comes amid growing institutional adoption of Light Frame's technology across EMEA, where the company is supporting live client operations and expanding its presence in the private banking and wealth management markets. 

Maxio 

Maxio, the billing automation and revenue management platform, and Campfire, the AI-native ERP, today announced a partnership to deliver a modern finance stack built for B2B SaaS and AI companies. With this integration, finance teams that run Campfire can connect to Maxio so customers, invoices, payments and revenue entries move into their books automatically, without any manual entry or custom build. 

Without a connection between billing and the ledger, finance teams move billing data by hand or build and maintain a custom workaround. That means entering the same invoices twice and reconciling more at month-end. Mid-contract upgrades, changing usage and hybrid pricing make all of it more complicated. 

Maxio settles that pricing complexity before it reaches the books, so Campfire starts from finished invoices and revenue entries. Everything syncs to Campfire automatically, so revenue is already in the ledger when the close begins and both systems show the same receivables. 

Maywood  

Lombard Global, Inc., an Austin investment bank focused on technology M&A since 2004, expects a 70%+ increase in deal flow over the next twelve months after deploying Maywood's proactive AI agent, Maverick, across its business development. Maverick has already helped increase the Lombard network by 15+ buyers and sellers per week. For technology founders, that means a banker who already knows the buyers most likely to value their business. For acquirers, it means a banker who understands their strategy and can bring them the right targets early.  

The firms also announced an ongoing partnership to expand Lombard Global's use of Maverick across its sell-side and buy-side business development. The partnership pairs Lombard Global's sector research and deal tracking with Maywood's relationship intelligence.  

When a founder decides to sell, the price and terms depend on reaching the buyers who value the business most. When an acquirer decides to buy, the best targets are often private companies that never run a broad process. Both usually call a banker they already know: one who understands their market, knows the likely buyers or targets, and has stayed in touch. Building those relationships takes years of consistent, well-timed contact with hundreds of companies, and that is hard for a boutique to sustain. Private-market deals in niche technology sectors are hard to see in time. And when live deals fill the week, business development slips and relationships go cold.  

Mercer Advisors  

Mercer Advisors, Inc. (“Mercer Advisors”), a national wealth management and financial planning firm, today announced the acquisition of Fifteenth, an artificial intelligence (AI)-native tax and accounting firm whose proprietary platform is purpose-built for equity compensation and complex tax situations. The transaction reinforces Mercer Advisors commitment to put practical AI and technology to work for clients to better deliver comprehensive, integrated family office services including financial planning, tax planning and preparation, estate planning and investment management.  

Fifteenth's team brings tax expertise from Big Four and other leading firms, paired with a proprietary AI platform built specifically for high-complexity tax work. The firm combines annual tax preparation with year-round planning, helping clients navigate stock option exercises, tender offers, liquidity events and multi-entity filings. Fifteenth has a strong following among employees of Silicon Valley technology firms. Its AI-focused tech builders join Mercer Advisors, as the firm continues to invest in leading talent who want to do meaningful work that bridges financial services and technology.  

Tax services remain in high demand among clients, and Fifteenth’s technology and team add both capacity and capability. More than half of the ultra-high-net-worth clients who join Mercer Advisors are actively seeking tax capabilities as part of a unified offering, a trend the firm attributes to rising wealth complexity and a wave of executive equity and liquidity events across fast-growing companies. Tax professionals now make up roughly one in 10 of the firm’s employees, a share expected to reach one in eight by the end of 2026. Fifteenth’s technology can help those teams support more clients with complex needs, consistent with the firm’s approach of adding high-quality, fiduciary-minded professionals and specialized capabilities that deepen what it can deliver to clients over the long term.  

Mirantis 

Mirantis, delivering Kubernetes-native infrastructure for AI, today announced that it has joined the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) as a Silver Member. FINOS is the financial services vertical of the Linux Foundation. 

Mirantis will contribute open source code and expertise to financial-services-led FINOS initiatives involving cloud-native infrastructure, high-performance computing and AI. One of the first opportunities is supporting 5-Spot, an open source project led by RBC Capital Markets that uses k0smotron, a core component of the open source k0rdent project. 

Also, RBC Capital Markets, and in particular Erick Bourgeois, distinguished technologist, were design partners in the ideation and early development of k0rdent, the open source cluster lifecycle project to which Mirantis is the leading contributor. 

Moment  

Moment, the AI partner for investment management, announces today that Jason Broder, founder and former CEO of SIMON, has become a strategic advisor to the company's leadership.  

Broder founded SIMON in 2012 while at Goldman Sachs, where it became the first technology platform to deliver structured investments to the desktops of financial advisors. In 2018, he led SIMON's spin-off into an independent company backed by a consortium of banks. By 2021, the platform was used by more than 100,000 financial professionals across the country. Broder served as SIMON's CEO until its acquisition by iCapital in 2022, subsequently serving as iCapital's Chief Product Officer. Earlier in his career, he spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs, ultimately becoming a Managing Director and Head of the Private Investor Product Group.  

Nitrogen  

Nitrogen, an AI-powered technology provider for financial advisors, today announced that Osaic, one of the nation's largest providers of wealth management strategies, has approved its entire suite of advisor products, including all Nucleus AI capabilities, for use across its network of financial professionals.  

The approval gives Osaic advisors access to all six Nitrogen products: Risk Center, Research Center, Income Center, Tax Center, Legacy Center, and Insurance Center. Advisors can adopt the products that best fit their practices, with the flexibility to add more capabilities as their needs evolve.  

At the center of Nitrogen's suite is Nucleus, its agentic AI engine that connects products and completes tasks with advisor approval. Osaic advisors can now turn client statements into portfolios, generate retirement income illustrations, and transform tax returns into visual insights. Combined with Nitrogen's trusted analytics and persuasive visuals, these capabilities help advisors showcase the value of their advice in every client meeting.  

Poesis 

Poesis, the AI-native asset manager founded by former Capital Group partner Alex Popa and former Goldman Sachs Global Head of Machine Learning Charles Elkan, today announced its plan to open AI Clarity, its flagship agentic institutional equity strategy, to external capital in early 2027. 

AI Clarity introduces Dual Mandate Equity, Poesis's investment approach with two objectives: participating in equity-market upside while seeking to materially reduce losses in market downturns. 

AI Clarity is an agentic equity strategy focused on U.S. listed large-cap companies. Its operating model puts machine intelligence under human command. The CIO and team are responsible for setting the strategy, risk framework and parameters within which agents conduct research and operate. Agents generate trade proposals by using quantitative models and tools, with each trade subject to human review and approval by the investment team before execution. 

Practifi 

Arvest Wealth Management and Practifi today announced that Arvest Wealth Management has selected Sentir, Practifi’s AI-native wealth management solution, for deployment across its wealth management business. The selection supports Arvest’s efforts as it continues to build elevated experiences and capabilities onto its existing technology foundation, strengthen advisor productivity, and give teams even deeper insights into client relationships. 

With Salesforce already deployed across Arvest Bank’s broader organization, Arvest Wealth Management sought a platform designed around the distinct requirements of its business. Sentir brings specialized wealth management functionality and embedded AI directly into Arvest's Salesforce infrastructure, supporting its enterprise technology strategy while enhancing the daily work of its advisors and operational teams. 

Wealth management relationships often extend across households, businesses, trusts, and other associated entities, with multiple financial accounts and service needs. Sentir’s wealth management data model connects those relationships and accounts with the activities and workflows surrounding them. That structure is designed to help teams preserve client context, understand who is involved in a relationship, and coordinate service across the people responsible for it. 

Prudential Financial 

Prudential Financial, Inc. (NYSE: PRU) today launched Claims Insight Assistant (CIA), a new AI-powered capability designed to help employers more easily understand and track disability and absence claims. 

Available through Prudential’s Benefit Center Employer Portal, Claims Insight Assistant generates concise claim summaries that highlight claim status, recent activity, and next steps, helping employers and benefits administrators respond to employee questions with greater speed and confidence. By transforming complex claim information into clear, easy-to-understand insights, the capability helps simplify claim management and may improve the customer experience. 

Claims Insight Assistant reviews information already contained within Prudential’s claims systems and generates a summary of an individual claim with a single click. The tool does not make claim decisions, determine eligibility, or approve or deny claims (summaries include only claim information employers are already permitted to view). Instead, it helps employers more efficiently navigate available claim information, understand claim activity, and swiftly determine next steps. 

Q2 Holdings 

Q2 Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: QTWO), a leading provider of digital transformation solutions for financial services, today announced that Q2 Assistant has achieved AIUC-1 certification, an independent security, safety, and reliability standard for AI agents, making Q2 the first digital banking provider to achieve AIUC-1 certification, according to AIUC. The certification reflects adversarial technical testing and a third-party audit of the controls behind Q2 Assistant, including data isolation, permissions enforcement, interaction logging, and compliance controls. 

As financial institutions scale AI, only 18% of banking executives say they are confident their AI controls would pass an independent audit. AIUC-1 helps provide that assurance in partnership with Grant Thornton in the U.S., the fifth-largest provider of professional services, tax and advisory services, through a combination of independent controls for auditing and adversarial technical testing. 

The AIUC-1 standard spans six domains: data and privacy, security, safety, reliability, accountability, and societal impact. It also maps to established frameworks including ISO 42001, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the EU AI Act, MITRE ATLAS, and the OWASP Top 10 for LLM and agentic applications. Q2 Assistant was evaluated against real-world AI risks such as prompt injection, jailbreaks, unauthorized actions, data leakage, hallucination, and unsafe tool calls. 

Rain 

Rain, the global payments platform for human and agentic transactions, today introduced Rain Agent Vaults, embedded payment infrastructure that lets an AI agent spend, receive, and send money from a balance its owner funds, within rules the owner sets. A vault is funded by bank transfer, card, or stablecoins, and the agent can only pay or send what is in it. Rain issues a scoped card for each purchase, accepted at 175 million merchant locations in 200 countries and territories, and agents can send funds to local bank accounts in more than 80 countries. 

Today, AI agents can search, compare, and shop, but paying remains a significant challenge. The options available to the companies building them have been a raw card number, which is a standing permission with no limit on what it can be used for, or a third-party wallet, which puts another company's login inside their app, that company's name on their users' statements, and one limit on the whole balance, set in that company's app. Companies enabling agentic experiences want their users to fund a balance once and never be asked again, and they want the relationship, the brand, and the payment to stay in their own product. 

Rain Agent Vaults are built for business and consumer use cases. Rain partners can embed agent vaults within their own apps and platforms, maintaining their own branding and customer relationship. A business can then fund an agent vault from its business bank account, enabling payouts to more than 80 countries around the world once specific rules and circumstances are met. Alternatively, a consumer can load funds directly into the agent vault from their card, set the rules, and a Rain-issued scoped card is created inside those rules for each purchase. The card information is then retired, preventing overspending. 

Teslar Software 

Teslar Software announced today that the company has acquired the patient lending division of Epic River, a Kinective company, to expand Teslar's lending capabilities while preserving an established platform for financial institutions serving the healthcare lending market. 

Kinective integrates with and supports a vast network of partner platforms—including Teslar and other loan origination solutions—offering purpose-built technology to more than 4,300 financial institutions. Following Kinective’s acquisition of Epic River in 2025, which expanded the company’s document workflow capabilities, Teslar and Kinective recognized an opportunity to ensure Epic River’s patient lending platform and customer relationships continued to grow under a team dedicated to lending innovation. 

Existing Epic River customers will continue receiving support while benefiting from Teslar's expertise in lending operations, workflow automation, and technology built specifically for financial institutions. Teslar will invest in extending and enhancing the platform’s capabilities, improving the user experience, and delivering continued innovation for both lenders and borrowers. 

Tradestation Securities  

TradeStation Securities, Inc. (“TradeStation”), the brokerage firm built for active equity and derivatives traders, today announced an integration with QuantWheel*, an options† trading platform for directional and income-focused traders. The integration builds on TradeStation’s reputation for delivering high-end trading technology and reliable brokerage services within an advanced trading ecosystem and underscores the company’s commitment to sophisticated traders.  

Through the integration, TradeStation clients can analyze opportunities, trade, and track positions without leaving QuantWheel. Directional traders can review dealer positioning and live options flow, then find calls, puts, and spreads, while income-focused traders can screen for cash-secured puts, covered calls, and credit spreads and see which positions are near assignment. Orders the trader approves go directly to TradeStation for execution, with spreads and poor man’s covered calls (PMCCs) sent as a single order, and positions sync to QuantWheel’s options journal.  

QuantWheel also offers QW Intelligence, an AI assistant that uses a trader’s positions and cost basis to answer portfolio-related questions and perform recurring checks. The platform supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) and API connectivity with external AI tools and workflows.  

Transient 

Transient, a portfolio company of Nasdaq Ventures and NEXT Investors building a governed AI Operating System for regulated financial markets, today announced the appointment of Clemens Wan to lead its Digital Assets Intelligence business, accelerating the company’s expansion into institutional tokenization and digital financial markets. 

Clemens brings extensive experience spanning traditional financial markets, blockchain infrastructure and digital asset innovation, including leadership roles at Credit Suisse, R3 and Consensys. His appointment strengthens Transient’s ability to help financial institutions navigate the convergence of traditional and digital financial markets. 

As institutional adoption of tokenized assets accelerates, the industry faces a challenge that extends well beyond blockchain infrastructure. Connecting digital assets to existing institutional trading, risk, compliance and operational workflows requires a new layer of intelligence, integration and governance. 

Wealthbox  

Wealthbox, the #1 CRM software platform for financial advisors, today announced that Anand Sheth, founder and former CEO of Pulse360, has joined the company's product team. Anand will work on AI and enterprise features for the large RIAs, broker-dealers, and advisor networks that make up a fast-growing share of Wealthbox's customer base.  

Anand Sheth brings more than two decades of experience in the advisor world, first as an operator and then as a founder. He spent nearly 20 years at Ameriprise Financial in practice management, client service, and compliance roles, and later served as Chief Operations Officer of Confluence Wealth Management Group. In 2019, he founded Pulse360 to automate meeting prep, notes, follow-ups, and compliance records for advisors. The company was a 2021 WealthManagement.com Industry Awards finalist, launched AI-powered note-taking in 2023, and integrated deeply with the leading advisor CRMs, including Wealthbox.  

The hire comes as Wealthbox continues to expand up-market. Long the top-rated and most widely adopted CRM among independent advisors, Wealthbox has in recent years won a growing share of large RIAs, multi-office advisory networks, and enterprise broker-dealer platforms that have moved off legacy CRM systems in favor of a platform purpose-built for financial advisors. The company's AI lineup, including the Wealthbox AI Assistant, AI Notetaker, and AI Agents, has become a central reason enterprise firms choose Wealthbox over bloated, general-purpose alternatives.  

WealthFeed  

WealthFeed, a leading AI-powered end-to-end growth engine for financial advisors, today announced the addition of Form 5500 data to its platform, giving advisors another source of organic growth in the retirement plan market. Advisors can now search more than 780,000 retirement plans and receive alerts when new filings show changes that may signal a business opportunity. Because the plan data sits inside WealthFeed's existing platform, advisors can find warm introductions to plan decision makers and reach out through the same automated outreach they use for individual prospects. The addition extends WealthFeed's money-in-motion intelligence beyond individuals and households to businesses and plan sponsors.  

More wealth advisors are pursuing retirement plan business, often by working with the 401(k) plans sponsored by business owners they already serve. These plans can also provide a path to new individual wealth management clients. According to February 2026 research from FUSE Research Network, 65% of advisors surveyed said converting retirement plan participants into wealth management clients was easier than acquiring clients through traditional marketing or referrals.  

Employers that sponsor retirement plans file Form 5500 annually with the U.S. Department of Labor to report plan assets, participant counts, contributions and benefit payments. Larger plans also disclose certain service providers and their compensation. Although these filings are public, advisors have often analyzed them separately from the tools they use to prospect for individual clients. This separation makes it harder to compare plans and determine which ones to pursue.