Top Innovations
VC Lightspeed changes its regulatory status to a RIA, to enable investing more capital into assets beyond direct startup equity including public and secondary shares, as well as cryptocurrencies
Lightspeed Venture Partners, has changed…
Stripe’s services can now natively run on Verifone payment devices, to support commerce use cases such as self-service checkout and tableside ordering
Through this partnership, Stripe services…
Salesforce new pricing model gives companies a more attractive way to pay for non-conversational and internal uses of the AI agents by charging them about 10 cents per “action”
Salesforce is unveiling a new…
Key News
Pega launches agents for workflow and decisioning design that can instantly create out-of-the-box conversational agents from any workflow
Pegasystems unveiled Pega Predictable AI™…
HomeLight’s new ‘Buy Before You Sell’ financing taps into high levels of home equity and apply it for a down payment through a 0% interest loan
Rising mortgage rates have created…
An offer of subscription management made 13% of trial users to upgrade to a leading bank’s fee-based premium account for continued access
The “subscription economy” has exploded,…
Agree.com’s AI-powered e-signature platform is different from competitors because it includes invoicing generation and payment processing
Agree.com says its AI-powered e-signature…
LMArena, the company behind AI testing service Chatbot Arena, has raised $100 million in initialj funding, marking one of the largest seed rounds in the AI sector to date. LMArena operates as a neutral benchmarking platform that enables users to compare large language models through head-to-head matchups. It works by allowing users to submit prompts and evaluate anonymous responses from different models, selecting the best reply. The result is that the service offers a crowdsourced comparison method and unbiased rankings that reflect actual, real-world user preferences. By not favoring any specific company or model, the platform has attracted participation from nearly every major company and lab that is developing large language models, giving it industry-wide relevance and legitimacy. The company’s platform has become the main and arguably one of the best ways for both researchers and commercial AI developers to compare models. Major AI companies, including OpenAI, Google LLC and Anthropic PBC submit their models to LMArena to showcase performance and gather community feedback. LMArena’s ability to generate detailed performance comparisons without the need for direct integration into third-party systems makes it highly scalable.
OpenAI is rolling out a set of significant updates to its newish Responses API, aiming to make it easier for developers and enterprises to build intelligent, action-oriented agentic applications. The Responses API provides visibility into model decisions, access to real-time data, and integration capabilities that allowed agents to retrieve, reason over, and act on information. A key addition in this update is support for remote MCP servers. Developers can now connect OpenAI’s models to external tools and services such as Stripe, Shopify, and Twilio using only a few lines of code. This capability enables the creation of agents that can take actions and interact with systems users already depend on. To support this evolving ecosystem, OpenAI has joined the MCP steering committee. The update brings new built-in tools to the Responses API that enhance what agents can do within a single API call. A variant of OpenAI’s hit GPT-4o native image generation model is now available through the API under the model name “gpt-image-1.” It includes potentially helpful and fairly impressive new features like real-time streaming previews and multi-turn refinement. This enables developers to build applications that can produce and edit images dynamically in response to user input. Additionally, the Code Interpreter tool is now integrated into the Responses API, allowing models to handle data analysis, complex math, and logic-based tasks within their reasoning processes. The tool helps improve model performance across various technical benchmarks and allows for more sophisticated agent behavior. The file search functionality has also been upgraded. Developers can now perform searches across multiple vector stores and apply attribute-based filtering to retrieve only the most relevant content. This improves the precision of information agents use, enhancing their ability to answer complex questions and operate within large knowledge domains. Background mode allows for long-running asynchronous tasks, addressing issues of timeouts or network interruptions during intensive reasoning. Reasoning summaries, a new addition, offer natural-language explanations of the model’s internal thought process, helping with debugging and transparency. Encrypted reasoning items provide an additional privacy layer for Zero Data Retention customers. These allow models to reuse previous reasoning steps without storing any data on OpenAI servers, improving both security and efficiency.
AI startup Mistral announced a new AI model focused on coding: Devstral. Devstral, which Mistral says was developed in partnership with AI company All Hands AI, is openly available under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially without restriction. Mistral claims that Devstral outperforms other open models like Google’s Gemma 3 27B and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s V3 on SWE-Bench Verified, a benchmark measuring coding skills. “Devstral excels at using tools to explore codebases, editing multiple files and power[ing] software engineering agents,” writes Mistral. “[I]t runs over code agent scaffolds such as OpenHands or SWE-Agent, which define the interface between the model and the test cases […] Devstral is light enough to run on a single [Nvidia] RTX 4090 or a Mac with 32GB RAM, making it an ideal choice for local deployment and on-device use.” Devstral, which Mistral is calling a “research preview,” can be downloaded from AI development platforms, including Hugging Face, and also tapped through Mistral’s API. It’s priced at $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.3 per million output tokens, tokens being the raw bits of data that AI models work with. Devstral isn’t a small model per se, but it’s on the smaller side at 24 billion parameters.
Accenture in collaboration with Dell Technologies and NVIDIA, is providing an AI solution built on Dell Technologies infrastructure with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software. This helps organizations – particularly those within regulated industries or those with substantial investments in on-premises infrastructure – capitalize on the burgeoning opportunities of agentic AI. This collaboration extends the reach of the Accenture AI Refinery™ platform, bringing agentic AI capabilities with a one-click deployment to Dell’s high-performance, NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure, helping companies realize value more quickly and reduce total cost of ownership. Accenture will further facilitate AI deployment with NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design, a guide for organizations to build on-premise AI factories leveraging NVIDIA Blackwell and a broad ecosystem of AI partners. The solution helps organizations rapidly scale AI in private, on-prem environments. It provides support for key requirements, including data sovereignty and compliance to help meet regulatory and data residency mandates; resiliency and high availability to meet business continuity requirements, security and privacy controls needed for air-gapped environments or restricted network zones; ultra-low latency for real-time uses cases like manufacturing or healthcare imagining; and edge or offline use cases critical for remote, disconnected environments where reliable internet access is limited or unavailable. Preconfigured packages integrate Accenture’s AI Refinery and the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, which includes NVIDIA Enterprise AI software, streamlining data transfer and indexing to empower data-driven agentic insights. This unified, full-stack solution helps to accelerate enterprise AI transformation by enabling rapid service prototyping with modular, reusable frameworks, automated workflows, and dynamic cloud-to-edge orchestration.
NordVPN has launched post-quantum encryption (PQE) support for all its VPN applications. The first iteration of post-quantum cryptography was implemented on the NordVPN Linux application last year. In 2025, NordVPN also rolled out its PQE feature for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, including Android TV and tvOS. The PQE upgrade integrates quantum-resistant algorithms into NordLynx, the company’s high-speed VPN protocol based on WireGuard, and complies with NIST’s latest cryptographic standards. In September 2024, NordVPN released a Linux app update with the first post-quantum cryptography upgrade for the Nordlynx protocol — a high-performance VPN protocol known for its extreme speed and security, based on WireGuard. The upgraded protocol complied with the latest National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards for post-quantum encryption and protected Linux users from quantum decryption, while also collecting essential performance metrics, such as impact on connection speeds and latency. NordVPN’s early Linux deployment allowed the company to collect performance data to optimize encryption transitions without degrading user experience, enabling a seamless rollout across all platforms.
Virtana announced the launch of Virtana AI Factory Observability (AIFO), a powerful new capability that extends Virtana’s full-stack observability platform to the unique demands of AI infrastructure. With deep, real-time insights into everything from GPU utilization and training bottlenecks to power consumption and cost drivers, AIFO enables enterprises to turn complex, compute-intensive AI environments into scalable, efficient, and accountable operations. This launch strengthens Virtana’s position as the industry’s broadest and deepest observability platform, spanning AI, infrastructure, and applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Virtana’s AI Factory Observability (AIFO) helps enterprises treat AI infrastructure with the same level of visibility, discipline, and accountability as traditional IT. As an official NVIDIA partner, Virtana integrates natively with NVIDIA GPU platforms to deliver in-depth telemetry, including memory utilization, thermal behavior, and power metrics, providing precise, vendor-validated insight into the most performance-critical components of the AI Factory. This deep integration delivers accurate, actionable intelligence at enterprise scale. Virtana AI Factory Observability (AIFO) is purpose-built to meet the demands of AI operations. It continuously collects telemetry across GPUs, CPUs, memory, network, and storage and then correlates that data with training and inference pipelines to provide clear and actionable insights. Core capabilities include: GPU Performance Monitoring; Distributed Training Visibility; Infrastructure-to-AI Mapping; Power and Cost Analytics; Root Cause Analysis. AIFO is already delivering measurable results in production AI environments across multiple industries. Operational outcomes include: 40% reduction in idle GPU time, improving resource utilization and reducing infrastructure costs; 60% faster mean time to resolution (MTTR) for AI-related incidents; 50% decrease in false alerts, reducing operational noise and accelerating response; 15% improvement in power efficiency, supporting sustainability goals.
Glean, the Work AI platform, announced a strategic technology partnership with Palo Alto Networks to further secure and accelerate the use of AI agents in the enterprise. With new integrations to Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS and Prisma Access Browser and AI Access, Glean customers gain enhanced visibility and control over how AI agents operate and interact with sensitive enterprise data – enabling rapid innovation without sacrificing trust, security, or compliance. Glean is purpose-built to solve the challenges of deploying AI at scale in the enterprise. From day one, it was architected with enterprise-grade security at its core: enforcing source-level permissions, isolating customer data, and integrating tightly with identity systems. That foundation has since evolved to include proactive guardrails for agent behavior, continuous governance scanning, and an open ecosystem of security partners. Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS is the world’s most comprehensive AI security platform that is designed to protect the entire enterprise AI ecosystem, providing Model Scanning, Posture Management, AI Red Teaming, Runtime Security, and Agent Security. The new integration of Prisma AIRS with Glean’s platform will offer: Secure AI adoption at scale with Runtime Security; Confident cloud data governance Posture Management; Zero-compromise security.
Software supply chain company JFrog announced a new strategic partnership with Nvidia Corp. to power what the company calls the next era of enterprise AI. Under the partnership, JFrog’s platform will serve as the central software artifact repository and secure model registry within Nvidia’s recently unveiled Enterprise AI Factory. The initiative is designed to help enterprises build, deploy and manage next-generation AI workloads, including agentic and physical AI applications, in a secure and scalable environment. The integration between JFrog and Nvidia will allow users to gain secure and governed visibility into all software components, including ML models and engines. The components can be scanned for vulnerabilities, versioned and tracked across the entire software development lifecycle. Users will also benefit from end-to-end artifact and model management, with the ability to seamlessly pull, upload and host AI models, datasets and containers. The integration includes full support for Nvidia NIMs and other assets optimized for the Enterprise AI Factory architecture. By using JFrog Artifactory, organizations can eliminate the need to access components from external sources, improving both performance and security. The integration includes the ability for the JFrog Platform to run natively on Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell architecture to help reduce latency and process tasks with unparalleled performance, efficiency and scale. Additionally, the integration is expected to support a wide range of AI-enabled enterprise applications, agentic and physical AI workflows, autonomous decision-making and real-time data analysis across various industries, including financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, retail, media and manufacturing.
What follows is a look at the Gen Z-focused offerings from Navy Federal and four other banks and fintechs. 1) Navy Federal Credit Union recently adopted a consumer-permissioned data reporting product through a partnership with fintech Bloom Credit. The credit union said it has integrated Bloom’s product as a checking account feature as part of a handful of updates to its offerings. The partnership gives Navy Federal’s customers the option to report up to five existing payments, including rent and utility payments, from their checking accounts to TransUnion, one of the three main credit reporting bureaus. Justin Zeidman, vice president of strategy at Navy Federal, told that through this product, rent payments can be treated as credit history in a way similar to mortgage payments. “It allows the credit bureaus to see and track the responsible behavior of consumers who would have otherwise been completely invisible to the bureaus,” Zeidman said. He added that this product is especially relevant for Navy Federal’s users — people who are serving or have served in the armed forces — because many enlisted military members join at a young age, before they have developed a credit history. 2) Jack Dorsey’s payments and commerce company Block is hoping to expand its peer-to-peer payments platform Cash App to more Gen Z consumers, while at the same time increasing the penetration of its small-dollar lending product, Cash App Borrow. Gen Z consumers are an important segment of Block’s customer base and one that it has also targeted with its buy now/pay later product, Afterpay. The FDIC’s decision to allow Block to originate and service its own loans, which are made through its Square Financial Services unit, doubled the total addressable market of customers on its network it can offer its loans to and improved unit economics, according to the company.
Slash is a fintech company that offers business banking accounts tailored to specific entrepreneurs’ needs. The company provides business checking accounts with funds held at FDIC-insured banks, detailed spending analytics dashboards, free or low-cost wire and ACH transfers, easy access to lending options, and unlimited virtual cards. These cards can be configured with specific spending limits, merchants, and merchant categories to prevent unauthorized or erroneous employee purchases. Slash also offers add-ons built for particular industries, such as an app store for banking, designed to address the unique pain points of different types of businesses. For example, marketing agencies can create virtual accounts for each client, allowing both parties to see the remaining balance and trigger automatic billing for more marketing funds. Slash also enables businesses to restrict cards to fuel purchases and ties each transaction to a specific driver or vehicle. The company also offers an API for custom dashboards, trigger payments through internal systems, or automatically transfer funds to vendors when goods are sold.
Monzo is still synonymous with its neon debit cards, extensive use of emojis, and free spending abroad. But it’s no longer just trying to be cool; it’s trying to become a major financial institution. That shift, from an upstart fintech beloved by millennials into a mature, sustainable business, is what makes this year a likely turning point. Despite signs that Monzo is preparing to go public – along with new reports that something is in the works – Monzo CEO TS Anil wouldn’t confirm that Monzo is listing this year. He suggested the building blocks are in place, though: profitability, product breadth, and just the right amount of AI. The numbers help tell the story. Monzo posted its first annual profit last year. In its 2024 annual report, it claimed 9.3 million personal account holders and more than 400,000 business customers. It’s also no longer reliant on interchange fees and overdrafts; lending, subscriptions, and business banking are now meaningful revenue streams. All this comes after a period marked by regulatory scrutiny and leadership turnover, developments that forced the company to grow up fast. It has also become more disciplined about its growing product lineup. Monzo’s customers can now invest in mutual funds powered by BlackRock, for example, and track their existing mortgages from other lenders in their Monzo app. When questioned about U.S. expansion and the competitive landscape, Anil downplayed the challenge. “I think there are a few universal truths that apply,” he said. “Most people feel anxiety about their money, and that anxiety is independent of affluence . . . The second thing that holds true is that the incumbent industry has been built off of arbitraging customers and leveraging, in some fashion, customers’ ignorance. Those are the insights that are helping us create the best features that would make sense in the U.S.; that’s the way we intend to double down.”
Jenius Bank has surpassed $2 billion in deposits by focusing on “evolved banking” — providing personalized financial insights through account aggregation while eliminating fees to help customers gain financial confidence and make better decisions. John Rosenfeld, President of Jenius Bank, a division of SMBC MANUBANK said, “We developed two concepts within a paradigm, if you will, where there’s core banking, which is what every bank does, allows you to put money with them, allows you to go online, see how much you have, see how much you’re earning, allows you to move money in and out, review your statements, read your terms and conditions, all that stuff that every bank does. We call that core banking. We developed the concept of evolved banking, which encompasses everything beyond core features that not every bank offers. And we grouped all this into something we call the Jenius views. So, if you download our mobile app, you’ll find this tab at the bottom. And within this space, you’re able to link your accounts from other banks, other brokerages. You can view credit cards and your entire financial picture in one place. Again, this allows the consumer to give us access to their other information, enabling us to consolidate and provide them with valuable insights. While there are some banks that are doing this, what we call aggregation services, many of them are doing it to gain a view of the customer’s financial situation and then potentially use that information to try to figure out what else they can sell them. We took a different approach. We said, what if we used all that information to actually give customers insights and help them avoid fees, making smarter and more confident financial decisions? Now, why would a bank do such a thing that’s not necessarily going to bolster their profits? We thought about this and concluded that if we could establish a new level of trust with consumers, the next time they have a financial need, we hope they’ll come back to us first. The idea that money is such an emotional driver that it has nothing to do with how much you make or don’t make, but rather whether you are making good decisions. With the capabilities that are evolving in the data space and analytics and machine learning and AI, if a consumer gives someone full access to every penny that they have and not access to move the money, but access to the information, think of how much you can do with technology to identify those things that you may not have noticed. The lack of fees on our savings or a loan product was really driven by wanting to create something better and more compelling than what’s available in the industry. We created a bank that’s incredibly efficient because we don’t have buildings, we don’t have paper, we don’t mail things. So, we don’t spend any money on postage. The target was really what we call high-potential digital optimizers. And we call it that because high potential means they’re going somewhere and are ambitious. They want to progress in building a better lifestyle and achieving more.
Supermicro introduced its Data Center Building Block Solutions, designed to simplify the deployment of liquid-cooled AI infrastructure. The offering includes servers, storage, networking, racks, liquid cooling systems, software, services, and support. As an expansion of Supermicro’s System Building Block Solutions, DCBBS adopts a standardized, yet flexible solution architecture, vastly expanded in scope to handle the most demanding AI data center training and inference workloads, enabling easier data center planning, buildout, and operation – all while reducing cost. “Supermicro’s DCBBS enables clients to easily construct data center infrastructure with the fastest time-to-market and time-to-online advantage, deploying as quickly as three months,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “With our total solution coverage, including designing data center layouts and network topologies, power and battery backup-units, DCBBS simplifies and accelerates AI data center buildouts leading to reduced costs and improved quality.” DCBBS offers packages of pre-validated data center-level scalable units, including a 256-node AI Factory DCBBS scalable unit, designed to alleviate the burden of prolonged data center design by providing a streamlined package of floor plans, rack elevations, bill of materials, and more. Supermicro provides comprehensive first-party services to ensure project success, starting from consultation to on-site deployment and continued on-site support. DCBBS is customizable at the system-level, rack cluster-level, and data center-level to meet virtually any project requirements. Along with DLC-2 technology, DCBBS also helps customers save up to 40% power, reducing 60% data center footprint, and decreasing 40% water consumption, all of which leads to 20% lower TCO. Solutions from Supermicro include up to 256 Liquid Cooled 4U Supermicro NVIDIA HGX system nodes, each system equipped with 8 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs (2,048 GPUs in total), interconnected with up to 800Gb/s NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand or NVIDIA Spectrum X Ethernet networking platform. The compute fabric is supported by elastically scalable tiered storage with high-performance PCIe Gen5 NVMe, TCO optimized Data Lake nodes, and resilient management system nodes for continuous uninterrupted operation.
Ataccama has released Ataccama ONE data trust platform v16.1. This new version introduces powerful data lineage and connectivity capabilities, including enhanced diagram export for audit and compliance use cases and improved lineage visualization tools. It also expands pushdown processing for cloud platforms, such as Azure Synapse and Google BigQuery. With these updates, Ataccama helps organizations more easily operationalize automated lineage, govern data across complex environments, and deliver trusted insights at scale. The Ataccama ONE data trust platform closes the data trust gap by giving organizations a comprehensive and portable view of how data moves, transforms, and impacts downstream systems. New capabilities make it easier to manage lineage across environments, including exporting diagrams for audits, preserving historical lineage states, and migrating metadata to support governance workflows and system changes. Teams can go beyond static data views to track sensitive information, audit its handling, and build confidence with point-in-time documentation. Expanded pushdown processing allows organizations to analyze data directly within cloud platforms like Azure Synapse and BigQuery, reducing movement, improving performance, and maintaining governance at scale. These updates enable teams to act faster, meet regulatory requirements, and confidently deliver trusted insights. New capabilities in v16.1: Automated lineage and audit snapshots; Enhanced visibility and collaboration; Cloud-native data processing; Support for big data workloads; Enhanced connectivity and flexibility.
Starburst Data is unveiling a suite of enhancements intended to make it easier for enterprises to develop and apply artificial intelligence models. Starburst’s updates are focused on enabling what it calls an AI “lakeside,” in which companies can use data where it already lives without needing to copy it into a centralized repository. Starburst defines a lakeside as a staging ground for AI, or an area adjacent to the data lakehouse where data is the most complete, cost-efficient and governed. The company’s new Lakeside AI architecture combines AI-ready tools with an open data lakehouse model. It allows companies to experiment with, train and deploy AI systems while keeping sensitive or regulated data in place. Starburst AI Workflows accelerates AI application development by making it easier to transform unstructured data into vector embeddings, a machine learning technique that turns data into numerical representations that capture the meaning and relationships between different data points without requiring explicit keywords. Workflows manage prompts and models with SQL and enforce governance policies. Starburst said these capabilities are fully contained within its platform and require no external data pipelines. Data is stored on Apache Iceberg tables with connectors available for a variety of third-party vector databases. Basically, this means users can build AI features that rely on unstructured or semi-structured sources like emails, documents and logs without having to move data or stitch together multiple tools. The Starburst AI Agent is a built-in natural language interface that allows users to talk to their data using natural language. It automatically scans for sensitive data such as names, email addresses and other personally identifiable information at the column level and tags it so access policies can be applied. That reduces the need for manual checks and helps organizations enforce privacy rules more consistently. A new Starburst data catalog replaces the aging Hive metastore and provides better support for the Iceberg data format that is rapidly becoming the standard for cloud data lakes. The new catalog supports both legacy Hive data and Iceberg tables. To improve performance across large-scale deployments, Starburst is also introducing a native ODBC Driver that improves connection speed and reliability with business intelligence tools such as Salesforce Inc.’s Tableau and Microsoft Corp.’s Power BI.
Elastic announced that Elasticsearch integrates with the new NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design to provide a recommended vector database for enterprises to build and deploy their own on-premises AI factories. Elastic will use NVIDIA cuVS to create a new Elasticsearch plugin that will accelerate vector search index build times and queries. NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated designs enable Elastic customers to unlock faster, more relevant insights from their data. Elasticsearch is used throughout the industry for vector search and AI applications, with a thriving open source community. Elastic’s investment to accelerate vector search on GPUs builds upon previous longstanding efforts to optimize its vector database performance through hardware-accelerated CPU SIMD instructions, new vector data compression innovations like Better Binary Quantization and making Filtered HNSW faster. With Elasticsearch and the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory reference design, enterprises can unlock deeper insights and deliver more relevant, real-time information to AI agents and generative AI applications.
Qlik announced the launch of Qlik Open Lakehouse, a fully managed Apache Iceberg solution built into Qlik Talend Cloud. Designed for enterprises under pressure to scale faster and spend less, Qlik Open Lakehouse delivers real-time ingestion, automated optimization, and multi-engine interoperability — without vendor lock-in or operational overhead. Qlik Open Lakehouse offers a new path: a fully managed lakehouse architecture powered by Apache Iceberg that delivers 2.5x–5x faster query performance and up to 50% lower infrastructure costs, while maintaining full compatibility with the most widely used analytics and machine learning engines. Qlik Open Lakehouse combines real-time ingestion, intelligent optimization, and true ecosystem interoperability in a single, fully managed platform: Real-time ingestion at enterprise scale; Intelligent Iceberg optimization, fully automated; Open by design, interoperable by default; Your compute, your cloud, your rules; One platform, end to end. As AI workloads demand faster access to broader, fresher datasets, open formats like Apache Iceberg are becoming the new foundation. Qlik Open Lakehouse responds to this shift by making it effortless to build and manage Iceberg-based architectures — without the need for custom code or pipeline babysitting. It also runs within the customer’s own AWS environment, ensuring data privacy, cost control, and full operational visibility.
AU10TIX has launched continuous risk monitoring as part of its advanced AML solution. Driven by customer demand, this powerful capability delivers real-time risk insights across the full customer lifecycle—empowering businesses to detect behavioral anomalies and emerging threats as they arise. AU10TIX’s continuous monitoring capability proactively scans top data sources including global sanctions lists, politically exposed person (PEP) databases, and adverse media in real time to detect anomalies as they emerge. The system dynamically adjusts screening intensity based on customer risk profiles and business requirements—supporting KYC and KYB processes while ensuring adherence to evolving global regulations. AU10TIX’s AML solution features a proprietary decision-making mechanism, customizable workflows, and a user-friendly dashboard to streamline risk management and due diligence processes. The new capability provides: Real-time fraud and money laundering alerts; Adaptive risk scoring, continuously recalibrated based on real-time data and changing user behavior; Flexible thresholding tailored to customer risk levels; Coverage across 240+ countries and 1,600 government sites; A unified dashboard for identity verification and AML results; and Seamless KYC + KYB support in a single compliance flow
With enterprise agentic automation fast becoming a reality, CIAM providers are racing to address the unique requirements posed by autonomous AI agents. To authenticate and interact with a third-party B2B application on behalf of a human user, AI agents need programmatic and persistent access, typically requiring token-based authentication and complex OAuth flows. Frontegg’s recently released Frontegg.ai takes an end-to-end approach, delivering out-of-the-box solutions for advanced use cases that require the integration of multiple B2B applications. The AI agent and all required third-party integrations can be created and configured in the Frontegg.ai dashboard in just a few minutes. The code for the authentication interface is automatically generated for both web and mobile applications and the platform handles the creation, refreshing, and deletion of all OAuth access tokens. This end-to-end authentication and authorization functionality can be integrated into the agent code with just a few lines. One of the innovative products being developed using Frontegg.ai is an analytics support agent that intelligently creates visualizations from source data, based on the requirements of different business personas and communicates them on a regular basis. The idea is that rather than manually visiting a portal to configure dashboards, users will interact with the AI agent outside of the portal as an intelligent analytics assistant. Some of the CIAM providers that support identity and access management for AI agents include: 1) Auth0’s Auth for gen AI enables multiple accounts for third-party applications to be linked into a single, unified profile. Users only need to authenticate once to authorize an AI agent to interact with all of the connected applications connected to their accounts.
Foxit, a leading provider of innovative PDF and eSignature products and services, helping knowledge workers to increase their productivity and do more with documents, today announced the launch of Smart Redact Server, a powerful new AI-driven platform built to automate the redaction of sensitive data at scale across enterprise environments. Designed for organizations that manage large volumes of regulated content, the solution enables legal, financial, healthcare, and compliance teams to detect and redact classified, personally identifiable (PII), and other sensitive information quickly, accurately, and securely. Smart Redact Server equips teams tasked with data privacy and regulatory compliance, including (but not limited to) enterprise administrators, legal and compliance departments, financial institutions, and healthcare organizations with a fast, reliable, and scalable way to identify and redact sensitive content, whether it’s personally identifiable information (PII), financial records, or protected health data. Building on the success of Foxit’s Smart Redact feature within its flagship PDF Editor+ platform, Smart Redact Server extends these capabilities beyond individual documents to an enterprise-grade, cloud-native solution. This new offering leverages the proven redaction technology of PDF Editor+ and enhances it with robust features, including batch document processing, scheduled compliance scans, multi-cloud integration, and team collaboration tools. Key Features:
- AI-powered detection and redaction of PII, financial, legal, and medical data with over 99% accuracy
- Batch processing and scheduled scans to automate compliance workflows and reduce manual effort
- Support for 47 file types, including PDF, DOCX, scanned images, HTML, JSON, XML, and more
- Cloud-native SaaS platform with integration across OneDrive,
ServiceLink has enhanced its EXOS Close technology including new options for online and in-branch closings in addition to an instant in-platform determination of remote closing eligibility, assessing state and county acceptance requirements and, with lender approval, automatically giving borrowers who are eligible the immediate option to schedule their closing online. The addition of this unique in-branch scheduling selection and built-in automated remote online notarization (RON) eligibility determination allows lenders to schedule 100% of their closings through EXOS. The inclusion of an in-branch scheduling option is pioneering technology in the industry – no other provider but ServiceLink offers the ability for a lender to schedule in-branch closings. This new option will greatly aid with home equity and refinance transactions, increasing efficiency and transparency in the process. Access to the RON eligibility determination also will empower lenders to easily adopt and scale eSignings and extend the option to their borrowers to self-schedule their own RON closing event. No other solution provides real time calendaring functionality, with direct access to the availability of the most qualified notaries in the country, that empowers borrowers to schedule their own closing appointments for the exact date and time and now, location, of their choosing.
Qualified, the agentic marketing platform with the world’s leading AI SDR agent, will unveil Spotlight, the industry’s first observation layer for agentic marketing. Spotlight offers customers a new contextual view of Piper the AI SDR Agent. B2B marketers can now see AI transparency in action, including how Piper thinks, reasons, and strategizes for every unique buyer, as she autonomously generates pipeline at scale. This innovation ensures trust and confidence as marketers integrate AI agents into their teams and workflows. No two user Spotlights are the same—Piper formulates a unique game plan for every buyer, executing hundreds of thousands of strategies simultaneously to maximize conversion. Qualified’s first-of-its-kind Agentic Marketing Platform helps marketers leverage agents to drive scalable pipeline generation. At its center sits Piper the AI SDR Agent, who engages with and converts all qualified leads, autonomously and at scale. With Spotlight, marketers can observe: Lead Context: Piper the AI SDR Agent understands each lead—who they are, which role they hold, and where they are in the buying journey—informing tailored selling experiences. Account Context: Piper understands key account data—their segment, buying committee, and level of intent—delivering an account-based sales motion; Piper rolls lead and account data into one unified view, helping her sell to the whole buyer versus separate leads and accounts. Behavior Monitoring: Piper tracks how buyers are engaging across the website, email inbox, and online, and adjusts her strategy accordingly. Goals and Guardrails: Piper operates toward specific goals for each unique buyer and within the guardrails outlined by marketing, working towards targets of meetings booked and pipeline generated.
Startup Siro has secured $50 million in a Series B round led by SignalFire with participation from Dick Costolo and Adam Bain’s VC firm 01 Advisors. Siro transcribes sales meetings via an app. Features include a company-wide dashboard where sales folks can submit successful calls and sort them by engagement from peers, allowing other reps to listen to top calls and get insights about improving on-ground sales visits. Siro trains models for specific industry verticals — for example, for HVAC sales coaching. The company also uses a general-purpose model to gauge how a salesperson is building rapport and handling rejections. Wayne Hu, a partner at SignalFire, said that the VC firm always wants to invest in companies that have a strong business advantage in data for particular segments. “Siro’s solution is helping digitize the ‘dark matter’ of offline conversations comprising field sales engagements, which has broad extensibility across verticals and depth in downstream actions that can be instrumented from this data, such as customer and product insights,” he told.
Onboarding is a critical metric in software companies, often overlooked in discussions about annual recurring revenue (ARR), churn, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (LTV). It is the first step in the customer journey and defines every subsequent experience. A great onboarding experience can reinforce customers’ decisions, while a confusing one can erode trust. Great onboarding creates upstream value, as it leads to expansion, retention, and referrals. Positive customer metrics are often downstream of onboarding, such as expansion, retention, and referrals. Companies should regularly report onboarding performance in leadership meetings and board decks, as it is an important leading indicator of customer health, revenue growth, and operational efficiency. Some onboarding metrics suggested by the author include Time To First Value, Onboarding Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Outcome Achievement, and Onboarding Risks. These metrics are not vanity metrics but early warning systems for potential issues. Onboarding should be a cross-functional effort that spans product, sales, marketing, and leadership. Product needs to ensure an intuitive experience, sales set realistic expectations, marketing supports post-sale engagement, and leadership invests in tools, processes, and people to make it work at scale. Ignoring onboarding can lead to wasted CAC, delayed launches, and dissatisfied customers. Companies that nail onboarding often see faster time to revenue recognition, higher net retention, new champions, and use cases. Treating onboarding like a mirror can help companies identify misalignment, friction, and missed opportunities. By investing in onboarding, companies can become growth engines and revenue levers, leading to better financial outcomes.
Following the web redesign and other changes, Google is introducing a new prompt bar for the Gemini app on Android and iOS. Gemini is going from a pill-shaped text field to a rounded rectangle (even before you enter text). Underneath the “Ask Gemini” field, you get a row of actions, starting with the ‘plus’ menu that’s now much shorter. You just get Camera, Gallery, Files, and Drive in this bottom sheet. Next up are pill-shaped buttons for “Research” and “Canvas.” Tap the three-dot icon in a circle to see those items in list form with brief descriptions, as well as “Video” (Veo 2 generation). Chips will stay highlighted upon tap. Deep Research: Get in-depth reports; Canvas: Create docs and code; Video: Generate with Veo. If you open the model picker, Google has removed Deep Research and Veo 2 (for Advanced subscribers). They are better thought of as Gemini capabilities than general-purpose models, with the new chips having the benefit of being always visible. As such, the menu is now down to four models: 2.0 Flash: Fast all-around help; 2.5 Flash (preview): Our next reasoning model built for speed; 2.5 Pro (preview): Reasoning, math & code; Personalization (preview): Based on your Search history. The voice input microphone and Gemini Live button round out this prompt bar redesign. Overall, it’s not as minimalist as before, but allows Google to introduce more features and matches the web UI. It’s also rolling out to the Gemini app for iPhone and iPad. Google is using this redesign to switch to standard iOS menus.
Research from Affirm suggests that consumers are increasingly using such payment methods as a way to manage their cashflow. This aligns with separate data from Bankrate, which shows that BNPL usage is not primarily among those who can’t afford their purchases, but remains relatively consistent across all income levels. According to Bankrate, 31% of respondents in both the highest and lowest annual household income brackets have used BNPL at least once. The Affirm study found that over half of U.S. consumers believe that longer-term payments with clear terms help them make smarter financial decisions for larger purchases. Evidence shows these plans are becoming just another payment option, depending on how well they align with consumers’ shopping habits. Nearly two-thirds of pay-over-time users say they value interest-free payment offers as much as, or more than, traditional discounts. Affirm found that more than half of respondents avoided certain payment methods due to concerns over hidden fees like late charges and interest. Nearly all respondents said it’s important for financial institutions to provide transparent terms without hidden fees. Only recently have BNPL lenders been required to follow some of the same rules as credit card companies, including clearer disclosures and the right to dispute charges. Last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued an interpretive rule subjecting the industry to regulations currently governing credit card products, requiring BNPL vendors to provide periodic statements much like their credit card counterparts. Given the current administration’s rollback of many CFPB initiatives, it is unclear how long that regulation will remain in force.
Global travel retailer WHSmith and CPG company Nestle are promoting a bottled water brand via an experiential retail media campaign. The activation includes full-store takeovers at 10 WHSmith airport locations, as well as a complete terminal takeover and an interactive basketball arcade experience at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport. The three-week campaign kicked in May 2025 with WH Smith store takeovers by Nestle at 10 U.S. airports, including LaGuardia, Newark Liberty International, Palm Springs International, Orlando International, and Phoenix Sky Harbor. Shoppers at participating will engage with Nestlé Essentia branding through a variety of touchpoints, including the retailer’s WHS Media retail media network in-store digital screens and audio, front-of-store pop-up displays, floor decals, and other creative placements throughout the stores. The campaign also includes a full terminal takeover of LaGuardia’s Terminal E, beginning May 15. Travelers see Nestlé Essentia branding throughout the terminal, and can play a branded version of Pop-A-Shot, the basketball arcade game, fully wrapped in Nestlé Essentia creative.
Urban Outfitters is launching a new omnichannel platform, including pop-up activations, designed to support Gen Z students throughout their college careers. Known as “UO Haul,” the effort will include products, citywide pop-ups, strategic brand partnerships, and surprise giveaways. UO Haul kicked off in New York City with a citywide scavenger hunt that let participants follow clues to discover a fleet of glass-walled trucks, each transformed into a Gen Z dorm room and styled to reflect a distinct aesthetic. Select winners were invited to a special performance by global girl group Katseye. Phase two of UO Haul launches in June 2025 with “Special Delivery,” a month-long initiative celebrating recent graduates and inspired by the thousands of letters Urban Outfitters receives each year. Urban Outfitters will also team up with the Collegeboxes by UHaul student storage and shipping solution for a back-to-campus contest launching the week of June 9. Three students will win $1,000 in Urban Outfitters products and a move-in experience from Collegeboxes by U-Haul, which includes door-to-door service to handle their move from home to campus. Urban Outfitters says its immersive “UO Haul” experiences are part of a broader strategy to reimagine back-to-campus shopping by blending function, style, and discovery in a way customers won’t find anywhere else.
Clinch, the AI-powered technology company that brings efficiency, productivity, and intelligence to omnichannel advertising, announced an integration of LinkedIn’s Marketing API. This new integration enables advertisers to seamlessly author and preview LinkedIn ads, sync campaigns, and access cross-channel insights alongside other media channels—all from within Flight Control, Clinch’s AI-powered omnichannel advertising platform. “Connecting our Flight Control platform to LinkedIn gives brands and agencies the opportunity to scale not only B2B marketing, but other objectives not directly tied to commerce, like recruiting, education, awareness, and other corporate endeavors,” said Charel MacIntosh, Global Head of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships at Clinch. “Managing all campaigns and distribution channels from one centralized place, and through a singular streamlined workflow, empowers advertisers to maintain faster speed to market with minimal resources, and without sacrificing accuracy or results.” Key Benefits of the Integration: Streamlined Campaign Management; Enhanced Creative Control; Cross-Channel Insights.
South African agri-tech startup SwiftVEE has partnered with Nedbank Agribusiness to streamline access to agricultural inputs through embedded finance. Farmers using PrysWys, SwiftVEE’s online input marketplace, can now access finance directly from Nedbank through the platform. This move signals a growing shift in South African agriculture, where traditional value chains are being reengineered through tech platforms that connect farmers to finance, suppliers, and better pricing. PrysWys allows farmers to request quotes, compare prices, and purchase essentials like fertiliser, livestock feed, seed, and fuel online. The partnership aims to improve affordability and access, particularly for underbanked farmers, as input costs continue to rise. The partnership aligns with broader efforts to digitize and decarbonise agriculture, reducing transport inefficiencies and streamlining procurement. Farmers who use PrysWys through this new model can expect: Access to wholesale input pricing; Platform-based finance options through Nedbank; National delivery and fulfilment; Support from PrysWys’ procurement team.
Celonis introduced a new version of its platform’s Process Intelligence API. The feature makes the data that Celonis collects about a company’s business processes available to artificial intelligence services. Those services, in turn, can use the data for tasks such as finding opportunities to boost efficiency. According to Celonis, the new version of the API includes a relatively simple interface that allows developers to quickly configure what data should be made available to which AI application. In conjunction with the API update, the company detailed that it has integrated a tool called Emporix Orchestration Engine into its platform. The tool was originally developed last year by a German tech firm called Emporix. It uses the data that Celonis collects about its customers’ internal processes to automate repetitive business tasks. Celonis acquired Orchestration Engine from Emporix as part of the product integration initiative. Two other features, Annotation Builder and Process Copilots, were moved into general availability as part of the platform update. Annotation Builder makes unstructured datasets easier to navigate by adding descriptive tags. Process Copilots, in turn, are chatbots that help workers find business information using natural language prompts. That removes the need to manually sift through internal data repositories. Celonis is rolling out the enhancements alongside four so-called Solution Suites. Those are feature bundles geared towards specific use cases that include integrations with external services, prepackaged automation workflows and other components. The Solution Suites are geared toward supply chain, finance, front office and sustainability professionals.
Clearent by Xplor has launched Xplor Capital, an embedded financing solution for software providers and their merchants. This is made possible through a strategic partnership with Parafin, a capital as a service platform specializing in capital solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. The extension allows Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to integrate merchant financing capabilities directly into their software ecosystems. With 67% of US small-business owners planning to pursue funding within the next 12 months, 77% are concerned about accessing capital. Xplor Capital allows software providers to offer pre-approved funding options based on sales data, fueling growth and increasing software platform engagement. Key Benefits of Xplor Capital: Frictionless Financing: Merchants receive pre-approved funding offers based on their sales volume, eliminating lengthy applications and credit checks. Embedded Growth Solution: Software providers can integrate Xplor Capital with a simple API or branded loan widget, increasing the value of their software. Increased Revenue: Businesses using financing can see a revenue boost. Predictable Transparent Repayments: Merchants repay their funding through a one-time fixed fee, and automatic deductions from a fixed percentage of sales, with no late fees or hidden interest.
Salt Security announced the launch of the Salt Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, giving enterprise teams a novel access point of interaction with their API infrastructure, leveraging natural language and artificial intelligence (AI). Built on the open MCP standard, Salt’s MCP Server enables AI agents to discover, understand, and analyze API behavior with contextual awareness and enterprise-grade precision. Salt’s MCP server creates a personal ChatGPT experience for our customers with new capabilities: Contextual API Search: Contextual search across their entire API inventory. API Explainer: Explain the use and functionality of each API in your environment so security teams can be more independent. Posture Gap Contextual Search and Analysis: Allow security teams to identify API posture gaps and misconfigurations in a free-form search. Remediation Guidance: Offers AI-driven, actionable recommendations to mitigate high-risk vulnerabilities.
Passthrough and Aladdin, BlackRock’s technology business, announced a partnership that integrates Passthrough’s digital subscription technology within the eFront platform to offer a unified investor experience. The collaboration enables common clients – from general partners to asset servicers – to digitize their investor onboarding process and deliver scalable investor relations solutions for their clients. Now live, the integration enables eFront users to streamline and automate onboarding and fund closings for their investors. Using Passthrough’s technology, it’s now easier to distribute and execute subscription documents electronically, accelerating subscription workflow and reporting. Over time, the two companies will collaborate further to embed Passthrough’s full onboarding flow – including subscription agreements, tax forms, and AML requests – within eFront’s investor experience. Through this partnership, BlackRock will also leverage Passthrough’s technology to streamline onboarding for clients in its private markets business. Passthrough automates investor onboarding and compliance workflows for private funds. From subscription documents and tax forms to AML and KYC processes, Passthrough eliminates friction for both investors and fund managers. The platform connects directly to CRMs, investor portals, and fund admin systems to provide a seamless, API-first experience across the investor lifecycle.
UBS is using AI models to create video avatars of its analysts to share with clients. Tapping models from OpenAI and Synthesia, UBS has already built virtual versions of around 35 of its 720 analysts, with plans for a wider deployment. The analysts visit a studio where Synthesia captures their likeness and voices. Then, a language model reads the analyst’s reports, generates a script, and turns it into a realistic AI-generated video. The avatars are being deployed to help save analysts time and in response to the rising popularity of short-form videos driven by the likes of TikTok. “There are two drivers for it: the client driver and the efficiency driver…It is helping you scale your video capabilities in a way that clients are asking you for, and ultimately saving you time to do your research and meet with clients,” says Scott Solomon, head, global research technology, UBS. Signing up for an avatar is optional for analysts, while Solomon concedes the technology is not yet perfect, struggling with some accents. However, the bank is looking to ramp up production and put out 5,000 videos a year. “We publish about 50,000 documents a year, [but video production] has been fixed at about 1,000 a year, because that’s basically our studio capacity. But the number of views on those videos has gone up dramatically,” Solomon said.
Betterment, the largest independent digital investment advisor in the U.S., announced the acquisition of Rowboat Advisors, a leading provider of portfolio management software with advanced capabilities in direct indexing, tax optimization, and personalized investing. The acquisition strengthens Betterment’s technology platform and accelerates its roadmap for delivering sophisticated tools to RIAs through Betterment Advisor Solutions. Rowboat Advisors developed a suite of portfolio optimization software purpose-built for investors seeking greater control, transparency, and tax efficiency. Its solutions will be integrated into Betterment Advisor Solutions, the company’s all-in-one custodial platform for modern RIAs, beginning in the second half of 2025. The deal reflects Betterment’s strategic focus on expanding product capabilities for advisor clients and follows a series of product launches earlier this year, including Solo 401(k) plans and securities-backed lines of credit (SBLOCs). Following the acquisition, Kourtidis will join Betterment’s engineering leadership team as Vice President of Portfolio Management, reporting to Chief Technology Officer John Mileham. Advisors can expect the following portfolio management enhancements this year, as well as direct indexing in 2026:
- Expanded single stock support: Manage portfolios across a wider range of securities, building on Betterment’s growing ETF and mutual fund universe.
- Tools for more control and transparency: Run sophisticated simulations and use critical data to trade portfolios.
- Powerful automation and tax management: Optimize portfolios with enhanced rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting, tax-smart portfolio transitions, asset location and intelligent withdrawals.
OneStream, a leading enterprise finance management platform, has announced the release of four SensibleAI ™ capabilities at its Splash 2025 user conference. These solutions are incorporated into the OneStream platform across planning & forecasting, close & consolidations, and reporting & analytics processes. These tools help finance leaders navigate uncertainty, identify risks, run what-if scenarios, uncover more insights, and drive confident decisions in a shorter amount of time. The developments come after OneStream’s Finance Talent Crunch Survey found that while 89% of finance students have enough experience with AI, only 54% of senior professionals do. SensibleAI delivers embedded tools to help automate manual work and free up time for higher-value analysis and decision-making. SensibleAI Agents are AI-powered chat assistants that retrieve data, perform deep analysis, visualize data, and execute tasks. They are embedded directly into the platform, allowing users to use natural language to gain actionable insights across their data and workflows. SensibleAI Studio is a growing library of 30+ plug-and-play, quantitative, and generative AI routines that enable finance teams to detect anomalies, summarize variances, and optimize system performance. SensibleAI Account Reconciliations automate a critical close process, reducing manual effort and improving compliance.
Webull, an online investment platform, announced its collaboration with VISA on the Webull US platform. Visa Direct facilitates account funding as well as the movement of funds directly to eligible cards, bank accounts, and wallets. By integrating with Visa Direct, Webull users based in the United States can quickly transfer money between their Webull brokerage account and external bank accounts. The collaboration with Visa Direct allows Webull to implement a “Deposit” feature, which enables fast access to the market and empowers users to seize investment opportunities. While Automated Clearing House (ACH) and other common methods of moving money may take several days, Visa Direct gives users access to their funds in under a minute. Yanilsa Gonzalez-Ore, SVP, North America Head, Visa Direct said, “With Visa Direct, Webull can give their customers the speed, flexibility and protection they want with real-time payments[1], and deliver a simple, digitized experience to securely manage their funds, so they can confidently invest and trade.”
PayPal and Circle, two U.S. firms that are trying to build what are called financial super apps, are making stablecoins a major piece of how users link to other functions. Both companies made recent deals to expand usage of their own stablecoins while easing access to other financial services. PayPal and Circle are both positioning themselves to capitalize on the increasing popularity of stablecoins as a means to power their super apps. PayPal recently expanded its partnership with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to power free conversions between PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin and traditional money. Coinbase will offer PYUSD to PayPal’s merchant network, making it easier for the stablecoin to be used at the point of sale. It also can drive PayPal’s super app strategy, a long-standing initiative to enable a mobile app to shop at millions of merchants, make payments, access a debit card, use installment credit, pay bills, invest, make P2P transfers, receive paychecks and dozens of other services. The addition of the Xoom remittance and Venmo transfer app, PayPal’s PYUSD and support for stablecoin and cryptocurrency investments at Venmo and PayPal add to that super-app potential.
Google Wallet and Pay had a number of announcements, including some new features (like nearby passes) that end users will benefit from. A redesign for the Google Pay payment sheet adds a dark theme “for a more integrated feel.” We’re already seeing it live on our devices, with Google also adding “richer card art and names” to make card selection faster. Meanwhile, Digital IDs are a big focus for Google Wallet, with their availability helping power other capabilities. With Zero-Knowledge Proof, Google wants to allow “age verification without any possibility to link back to a user’s personal identity.” The company will open-source these libraries. Currently, it’s available to Android apps through the Credential Manager Jetpack Library and mobile web, with desktop Chrome in testing. Google showed off a “seamless experience between Chrome on desktop and your Android device” that involves QR code scanning. Google Wallet is adding Nearby Passes notifications that send users an alert when they’re near a specific location. This can be used by loyalty cards, offers, boarding passes, or event tickets. By highlighting these value-added benefits, such as exclusive offers or upgrade options, you can guide users back to your app or website, creating a dynamic gateway for ongoing user interaction. With an update to Auto Linked Passes, airlines that have loyalty cards for frequent flyer programs can “ automatically push boarding passes to their users’ wallets once they check in for a flight.” Google is also adding passes that can include a picture of the user.
Digital traffic pipeline management startup Gravitee Topco has closed on a $60 million Series C funding round, bringing its total amount raised to date to more than $125 million. The company is the creator of an open-source API management platform that provides developers with the tools they need to easily manage both legacy and newer data streaming protocols. It also provides a wealth of API security tools with its platform. Gravitee’s core offering is split into two products, with the Gravitee API Management tool designed for API publishers, and the Gravitee Access Management offering aimed at the developers who need to use those APIs. Through the two platforms, it provides tools that span API design, access, management, deployment and security. Gravitee can therefore be thought of as a kind of control plane for APIs, which often come with a confusing array of protocols and tools that can quickly overwhelm developers, despite their intention of making life simpler. Companies can deploy Gravitee’s core, open-source offering in the cloud or on-premises, or they can access the premium platform through the startup’s software-as-a-service offering. Its core features include a tool for designing and deploying APIs, mock testing and a dashboard that provides an overview of team’s API deployments. What makes Gravitee different is that it supports both asynchronous and synchronous APIs, meaning APIs that deliver data at a later point in time, and those that deliver data immediately, in real time.
Apple plans to release a new set of AI products and frameworks at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this June, including tools that’ll let third-party developers create software using Apple AI models. Apple’s hope is that expanding its AI tech in this way will draw more attention — and users — as the company looks to catch up with its competitors in the AI space. The new framework will let developers integrate Apple Intelligence across their apps. The company is seeking to first allow developers to use its smaller models. WWDC this year will also reportedly see Apple overhaul its operating systems across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple is also set to release new device-specific capabilities, including one that helps manage battery life, and a new Health app — powered, of course, by AI (although the app reportedly won’t be ready until next year).
Apple’s executives are pushing for Siri to become a proper AI chatbot that scours the web, potentially as a direct competitor to ChatGPT. Such a move could eliminate reliance on OpenAI’s service for responses and keep the queries in-house. A chatbot that Apple has been reportedly testing internally for years has apparently done extremely well in the last six months. Employees claim that the internal bot is on a similar level to responses from ChatGPT. Management has also talked about the possibility of letting the chat bot the option of scouring the Internet and use data from multiple sources to create answers to queries. Refocusing efforts on making Siri work with an Apple chatbot can be beneficial to Apple beyond just making Siri smarter. For a start, a better and more powerful Siri that could answer search queries like ChatGPT could help offset some related costs. Another feature that was announced as coming to Siri but got delayed could also help. The feature of using Siri to work more deeply with apps on an iPhone could let Siri respond to queries and commands by triggering actions in apps on the user’s behalf. Such a feature would keep the App Store relevant and maintain its position as a $20 billion per year business. With the potential for chatbots to take over from apps in terms of general usage by iPhone owners, this functionality could still keep the app economy ticking over.
For the past year or so, opening Google Wallet 3+ minutes after unlocking your phone would result in a “For your security, you need to verify it’s you before paying” message appearing at the top of the app. As such, three minutes from unlock, tap-to-pay transactions don’t work until PIN, pattern, password, fingerprint, face (Class 3 biometric unlock), etc. Recently, Google Wallet has changed or is in the process of testing a new behavior. Now, after three minutes, you cannot even access the app’s homepage with your carousel of cards and list of passes without authentication. Google throws up a splash screen with the Wallet logo up top and system-level “Verify it’s you” sheet to authenticate. Sometimes, we still see the old card prompt at the top instead of the new fullscreen version, but the latter is beginning to appear more frequently. We’re seeing this change with version 25.18 of Google Wallet on both Pixel and Samsung phones. This is quite a security escalation. As our digital wallets contain more and more (including state IDs, passports, home/room and car keys, boarding passes, medical information, etc.), you might not want people with your phone to even know what’s being stored.
Apple’s 20th-anniversary model of iPhone is in development, with screen and battery changes expected for the milestone model. For its 2027 release, which marks the 20th anniversary of the iPhone, the company has started to make preparations for the special smartphone. One of the major updates Apple is planning is the use of an OLED driver display chip (DDI) based on the FinFET’s 3D structure. The chip, which issues instructions to the pixels of the display, is currently produced using a 28-nanometer planar process, with the FinFET switch using a 16-nanometer method instead. The change will help reduce the amount of power consumed by the display, alongside the use of high-luminous efficiency OLED elements. This all-new design will be more power-efficient. Supply chain talks with LG Display and Samsung Display, Apple’s chief screen supply chain partners, are expected soon to discuss the tech changes. This may not be the only display change, as a source says that four-sided bending display technologies are being developed as well as under-display cameras. If they can be commercialized, they can make a big change to how the displays are made, including eliminating the bezel completely. While the new display should reduce power consumption at a time when on-device AI processing such as Apple Intelligence needs even more, there can be more power changes as well. The use of a pure silicon battery is also a prospect. The idea is that the use of 100% silicon as a cathode instead of graphite could considerably increase the energy density, so it can hold more power in the cell. A secondary benefit is an improvement to battery endurance. A battery that is more hardy and deteriorates at a slower rate than current-gen versions, meaning users will have more usage of the entire capacity for longer.
Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, can now connect to GitHub — for users subscribed to the $20-per-month Gemini Advanced plan, that is. Gemini Advanced customers can directly add a public or private codebase on GitHub to Gemini to allow the chatbot to generate and explain code, debug existing code, and more. Users can connect GitHub to Gemini by clicking the “+” button in the prompt bar, selecting “import code,” and pasting a GitHub URL. A word of warning: AI models, including Google’s, still struggle to code quality software. Code-generating AI tends to introduce security vulnerabilities and errors, owing to weaknesses in areas like the ability to understand programming logic. One recent evaluation of Devin, a popular AI coding tool, found that it could only complete three out of 20 programming tests.
Google offered a brief update on the adoption of the RCS (Rich Communication Services) protocol, an upgrade to SMS that offers high-resolution photos and videos, typing indicators, read receipts, improved group chat, and more. The company shared that the messaging standard now supports over a billion messages per day in the U.S. This metric is based on an average of the last 28 days, Google noted. The stat is notable because Google fought for years to get Apple to adopt support for RCS on iOS, allowing for better communication between Android and Apple devices. Unlike with iMessage, group chats with Android users couldn’t be renamed, nor could people be added or removed, and you couldn’t exit when you wanted. That changed with the fall 2024 launch of iOS 18, when Apple finally added RCS support to its Messages app. Though the functionality has been upgraded, Apple still displays RCS chats as green bubbles, hoping to keep the stigma of being an Android user intact. This is particularly important among young people in the U.S., where demand for the blue bubbles has cemented the iPhone as teens’ most popular device.
PlayStation 5 users can now use Apple Pay to complete purchases of games and content on their consoles. They will be presented with a unique code to scan with their iPhone or iPad, which will then prompt the native Apple Pay checkout sheet. Users can choose their card and authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID. Apple added support for this code-based system with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 last year. Apple Pay support is now available on PS5 and is expected to be available on PS4 with a future software update. While not as quick and easy as a one-click purchase, it is a nice improvement for those looking to earn 2% Daily Cash with their Apple Card.
Creator platform Patreon has rolled out an updated version of its app that now allows users to make purchases via the web, in the wake of the Apple-Epic court ruling that forced Apple to allow app developers to include links to alternative forms of payment without being subject to Apple’s commission. Previously, on version 125.4.1 of Patreon’s iOS app, users who wanted to subscribe to a creator’s membership plan would have to do so using Apple’s in-app purchases. In the updated version (version 125.5.0), users now have the option of making a purchase via the web, where they can choose to pay with other payment methods, including credit cards, Venmo, and PayPal, as well as with Apple Pay. The option to use Apple’s own in-app purchases method, meanwhile, is shown only in very small text below the larger, bold “Join” button. This change will likely direct more customers to pay via Patreon’s website instead of through Apple’s in-app purchases. Users who update their app should see the new checkout experience within 24 hours. Patreon also noted creators would now be able to keep more of their money if they didn’t have to pay Apple its commission on purchases.
Google is providing early access to an updated version of its Gemini 2.5 Pro multimodal AI model. Called Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview, the model has “significantly” improved capabilities for coding, especially for interactive web applications. Google said it released the preview model early due to “overwhelming enthusiasm” for the model “so people can start building.” The model was supposed to be unveiled at Google’s I/O developer conference later this month. The updates include enhancing code transformation, code editing and developing of complex agentic workflows. Google said the updates enabled the model to top the chart in the WebDev Arena Leaderboard, which ranks large language models based on their performance in web development. This ranking measures how well a model can build “aesthetically pleasing and functional” web applications. In the arena, AI models compete with each other in front-end UI design and coding contests to earn ELO points. Google said Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview has surpassed the prior version by 147 ELO points. Gemini 2.5 Pro is in third place, after Claude 3.7 Sonnet. OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 came in fourth and Claude 3.5 Sonnet is fifth. Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview also scored well in video understanding, at 84.8% on the VideoMME benchmark, which assesses the capabilities of multimodal models in how well they analyze videos. On WebDev Arena Leaderboard, a third-party metric that ranks models by human preference based on their ability to generate visually appealing and functional web apps, Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (05-06) has now overtaken Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet at the number one spot.
Amazon has rolled out Alexa+, the new version of its voice assistant, to more than 100,000 users so far, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said. Alexa+ will be made available to more users in the coming months, Jassy said. It is now starting to roll out in the U.S. and will be expanded to other countries later this year. The new version of the voice assistant is being made available on an Early Access basis, beginning with customers who sign up to be notified and own an Echo Show 8, 10, 15 or 21 and then expanding to more Echo customers over time. The new voice assistant is free to Prime members and available for $19.99 per month to non-members, Jassy said. He added that Amazon has more than half a billion devices in people’s homes, offices and cars to which Alexa+ will be able to be delivered. Jassy said that the new version is “meaningfully smarter and more capable than its prior self, can both answer virtually any questions and take actions.” He added that users no longer have to say “Alexa” before requesting every action; instead, they only have to say it once and can then have an ongoing conversation with the voice assistant.
Coinbase has integrated Apple Pay as a payment method for Coinbase Onramp, its tool for building onramps into existing apps for fiat-to-crypto purchases. This will make it easier for 60 million U.S. users of Apple Pay to onramp and access popular payment methods. Coinbase Onramp provides a solution for onboarding to crypto, which can take a long time and require users to go through a lengthy know-your-customer (KYC) process. With Apple Pay, getting onchain takes only seconds. Apps already using Coinbase Onramp will automatically see Apple Pay as an option when users make an eligible purchase. This is the latest addition to Coinbase’s offerings, following the acquisition of the Utopia Labs team to accelerate its onchain payments roadmap within Coinbase Wallet. In October, Coinbase announced a money movement partnership with Visa, connecting Coinbase to the Visa Direct network and allowing customers to deposit funds into their accounts via eligible Visa debit cards.
Coinbase has integrated Apple Pay as a payment method for Coinbase Onramp, its tool for building onramps into existing apps for fiat-to-crypto purchases. This will make it easier for 60 million U.S. users of Apple Pay to onramp and access popular payment methods. Coinbase Onramp provides a solution for onboarding to crypto, which can take a long time and require users to go through a lengthy know-your-customer (KYC) process. With Apple Pay, getting onchain takes only seconds. Apps already using Coinbase Onramp will automatically see Apple Pay as an option when users make an eligible purchase. This is the latest addition to Coinbase’s offerings, following the acquisition of the Utopia Labs team to accelerate its onchain payments roadmap within Coinbase Wallet. In October, Coinbase announced a money movement partnership with Visa, connecting Coinbase to the Visa Direct network and allowing customers to deposit funds into their accounts via eligible Visa debit cards.
Google’s ad network has begun showing advertising within the flow of conversations with chatbots — part of Alphabet Inc.’s efforts to keep its edge in digital advertising as generative artificial intelligence takes off. Earlier this year, Google’s AdSense for Search network, which traditionally shows ads within the search results of other websites, expanded to include conversations with chatbots operated by AI startups. Google made the move after conducting tests last year and earlier this year with a handful of startups, including AI search apps iAsk and Liner, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Showing ads alongside its own search results is the heart of Google’s business, bolstered by a business that serves up advertising across much of the web. That empire has come under threat as new entrants like OpenAI and Perplexity AI seek to siphon off the search giant’s audience with products aiming to help users find what they are looking for more quickly. Running experiments with AI startups will allow the company to test the waters for advertising in the relatively new world of AI chats. Generative AI startups are increasingly exploring advertising-based business models to offset the high costs of answering users’ questions with artificial intelligence. For example, before inviting users to ask follow-up questions, iAsk shows ads below its AI-generated responses. In addition to Google, startups such as Koah Labs have begun allowing brands to serve ads to the chatbot audience. AI search startup Perplexity, one of the most prominent players using AI to reshape internet services, establishes relationships directly with brands that want to buy ads on the site, according to a person familiar with the matter. Perplexity allows brands to sponsor follow-up questions to users’ queries.
Google’s ad network has begun showing advertising within the flow of conversations with chatbots — part of Alphabet Inc.’s efforts to keep its edge in digital advertising as generative artificial intelligence takes off. Earlier this year, Google’s AdSense for Search network, which traditionally shows ads within the search results of other websites, expanded to include conversations with chatbots operated by AI startups. Google made the move after conducting tests last year and earlier this year with a handful of startups, including AI search apps iAsk and Liner, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Showing ads alongside its own search results is the heart of Google’s business, bolstered by a business that serves up advertising across much of the web. That empire has come under threat as new entrants like OpenAI and Perplexity AI seek to siphon off the search giant’s audience with products aiming to help users find what they are looking for more quickly. Generative AI startups are increasingly exploring advertising-based business models to offset the high costs of answering users’ questions with artificial intelligence. For example, before inviting users to ask follow-up questions, iAsk shows ads below its AI-generated responses. In addition to Google, startups such as Koah Labs have begun allowing brands to serve ads to the chatbot audience. AI search startup Perplexity, one of the most prominent players using AI to reshape internet services, establishes relationships directly with brands that want to buy ads on the site, according to a person familiar with the matter. Perplexity allows brands to sponsor follow-up questions to users’ queries.
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Kiikenomaga Kikenjigewen Employment and Training Services (KKETS) has launched its Mino-Ayaawin Maamawi program, aimed at increasing access to safe, trauma-informed wellness supports rooted in Indigenous knowledge and traditions. The two-year program, funded by $392,800 from TD Bank Group, includes holistic practices such as mindfulness practices, neuro-decolonization, positive affirmations, journaling, yoga, and healthy eating guidance. The funding supports a broader vision for wellness and education in First Nations communities. The program’s development and effectiveness have been supported by research led by Anita Vaillancourt, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Lakehead University. A survey evaluating the first phase of the pilot program found that 98% of participants found the program beneficial, 72% felt more motivated to apply for jobs, 70% reported increased confidence in job applications, and 72% felt more prepared for the workforce. The Mino-Ayaawin Maamawi program marks an advancement in promoting wellness and employment readiness within First Nations communities.
Monzo has started rolling out a new feature that allows users to cancel a bank transfer shortly after initiating it. The tool, known as ‘Undo Payments,’ offers a configurable delay, ranging from 10 to 60 seconds, before a payment is finalised, during which the sender can halt the transaction. The launch follows internal research by the bank showing that around 30% of UK adults have sent money to the wrong person or entered the incorrect amount in the past year. More than three-quarters of those who made a payment error reportedly realised the mistake within one minute. The Undo Payments feature acts as a brief holding window after a transfer is authorised. During this time, users can reverse the transaction directly from the payment confirmation screen, the home screen, or the specific transaction detail page. If the undo option is selected within the chosen time frame, the funds remain in the user’s account and the intended recipient is not notified of the attempted transfer. The default setting gives a 15-second window, though users can adjust this to 10, 30, or 60 seconds, or disable it entirely. According to Monzo’s data, simple mistakes such as typing errors, often involving an extra zero, were responsible for 68% of misdirected payments.
Panaseer has launched the Cyber Frameworks Catalog, a tool designed to automate compliance management for enterprises operating in regulated industries. The tool provides pre-built dashboards and automated controls to help enterprises monitor and report the performance of security controls against significant cybersecurity frameworks and regulations. Panaseer’s research shows that cybersecurity teams spend close to 60% of their time on manual reporting, leading to inefficiencies, increased operational costs, and an elevated risk of audit failures. The Cyber Frameworks Catalog streamlines these processes by introducing a controls measurement-driven, automation-first methodology. It features over ten dashboards, each mapped to over 200 control metrics connected to various regulatory frameworks. The tool’s analytical capabilities allow teams to investigate the underlying causes of compliance failures, prioritize remediation actions, and potentially prevent regulatory breaches. Panaseer’s Continuous Controls Monitoring platform aggregates and validates security data from various enterprise technology stacks, offering a centralized view for security teams. The company aims to support organizations in continuously measuring the deployment and effectiveness of their security controls, promoting efficient resource allocation and improved prioritization of security actions.
Pinwheel, a fintech company, has partnered with nCino, a leading provider of banking solutions, to become a Preferred Partner for Direct Deposit Switching (DDS). The partnership will integrate Pinwheel’s Consumer Banking Solution with nCino’s Deposit Switch, aiming to improve deposit switch conversion rates. Pinwheel’s solution, powered by over 1,800 payroll platforms, covers 100% of U.S. workers paid via direct deposit. The PreMatch authentication paradigm, introduced in late 2023, has transformed the DDS experience, allowing users to authenticate and execute an instant switch with a simple one-time passcode. Pinwheel’s PreMatch authentication paradigm has transformed the DDS experience into a seamless, 2-click process, helping banks and credit unions meet their innovation and growth goals. The partnership will help banks and credit unions modernize their operations and enhance customer experiences.
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