In the days following the announcement that VantageScore 4.0 was suddenly in play for conventional mortgages, FinLocker‘s Brian Vieaux had to burst some bubbles. Most of the 15 to 20 loan officers he spoke to were ecstatic about being able to use the new credit scoring model. Millions of new prospective borrowers could be scored with VantageScore, they said. That’s opportunity in a down market. “I was like, ‘OK, guys, totally agree. If you can wave a magic wand and tomorrow — in your point of sale and your LOS, and the underwriting engines and all the technologies that that talk downstream — this was there and ready, yeah, I think it would open up some interesting opportunities with borrowers. And it will,” Vieaux said. “The other side of it is talking to the owner-operators of these companies, and they’re like, ‘This doesn’t become reality till 2026.’” For about a week, the mortgage industry operated in confusion about what comes next. It wasn’t even clear whether the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) wanted both FICO and VantageScore scores, or if they wanted lenders to choose between the two. FHFA Director Bill Pulte on Tuesday afternoon clarified several key points about Fannie Mae‘s and Freddie Mac‘s embrace of VantageScore, which is collectively owned by the three major credit reporting bureaus — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. The tri-merge credit report will also remain. Pulte said lenders will be able to choose between FICO Classic, introduced in the late 1980s, and VantageScore 4.0. The GSEs will be working to update their Selling Guide policies, but at the moment they are not currently able to purchase mortgages with VantageScore 4.0 credit scores. The agencies will also need to create a new loan level pricing adjustment (LLPA) matrix before it can purchase loans with VantageScore 4.0 credit scores.
Lovart’s generative design platform users enables users to generate up to 40 high-fidelity, premium assets in minutes with just a simple text prompt or a reference image by assessing and analyzing the brand’s requirements, business context, and the target audience
Lovart, a bold AI design and branding Agent, has officially launched its long-awaited generative design platform, exiting Beta with a bold mission: to generate six figure or higher branding and advertising campaigns using nothing more than a single text prompt. Under the hood, Lovart is powered by its proprietary creative reasoning engine, MCoT (Mind Chain of Thought). Going as far as assessing and analyzing the brand’s requirements, business context, and the target audience, its output is on par with top-tier Creative Directors and professional-grade visual assets. With just a simple text prompt or a reference image, users can generate up to 40 high-fidelity, premium assets in only minutes. From branding kits, social posts and storyboards to UI flows and even packaging, Lovart delivers a breadth of output rarely seen in a single platform. But what truly sets it apart is its creative intelligence – the first of its kind to infuse visual outputs with an unexpected, witty, and human-like flair. The Features Redefining Creative Work: ChatCanvas – Lovart’s “ChatCanvas” is an infinite, intelligent canvas that responds to intent through shared visual and dialogue. It is built for true creative collaboration between humans and AI. Multi-agent Co-Creation – Autonomous Design Intelligenc; . Long-Term Recall – . Learns and Predicts Workflow Habits – Advanced Canvas Editing –Top AI Models Under One Roof – As a full-spectrum creative suite, Lovart also supports cross-modal generation across image, video, and audio. Lovart supports top AI models including GPT Image-1, Flux Kontext, VEO3, OpenAI-o3, Gemini Imagen, Kling AI, Hailuo, Tripo AI, Recraft v3, Runway Gen-4, Ideogram 3.0, Rodin, and more.
Flyhomes’ platform enables homebuyers to use equity from their current home toward a down payment by securing a backup offer on their current home before it’s sold, which removes their existing mortgage payments from debt-to-income calculations
Seattle-based real estate FinTech firm Flyhomes has raised $15m in funding to transition from a direct-to-consumer platform to a wholesale financial product provider. The Series D funding round was backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Norwest Venture Partners, Canvas Ventures, Camber Creek, Al Goldstein, and Mark Vadon. Flyhomes, founded in 2016, offers innovative lending solutions that enable homebuyers to purchase their next property before selling their current one. The firm’s core product, “Buy Before You Sell,” is central to its wholesale strategy, which now focuses on partnerships with loan officers and real estate agents. Flyhomes currently holds lending licenses in 40 US states and plans to expand to more.
Productivity app Ocean works with Gmail or Google Workspace accounts allowing users to turn their emails into tasks and action items and helps triage inbox by letting users filter emails by categories like first-timers, persistent pingers, and emails from contacts
A new personal productivity app called Ocean is launching to help you triage your overloaded inbox, take action on your emails by turning them into tasks, and share your availability for meetings with others, all in one app. The app works with Gmail or Google Workspace accounts, allowing users to turn their emails into tasks and action items so they’re not forgotten. To make this work, the app includes its own Task Manager that has access to the user’s email. That means you don’t have to copy or paste information into an external to-do app while instead gaining access to features that go beyond what Google’s task manager offers Gmail users. With Ocean, you can create tasks using rich formatting, set due dates, organize tasks into folders, and link emails to your task’s notes. It can also automatically pull out action items from longer emails for you. You can choose to manage the emails you mean to reply to later by creating a task as well, instead of leaving them unread or applying a label of some sort. For inbox zero enthusiasts, the killer feature will be Ocean’s inbox triage tools. The app lets you filter emails by categories like first-timers, persistent pingers, and emails from your contacts. It can even surface emails that are marked as spam but might belong in your inbox, so you don’t miss anything important. Ocean also offers subscription management tools in addition to the baseline email functions of composing, replying, flagging, archiving, and deleting email. Plus, Ocean offers built-in meeting scheduling tools that let you set your availability based on your pending and booked events. Here, you can set your open times and block others from booking those meetings at the last minute, which is a handy trick. You can also send an automated email invite to meeting recipients, confirm meeting proposals from a web interface, and automatically add confirmed meetings to your calendar.
Jack Henry launches “MyFinancialHealth” on its digital banking platform designed using a configurable free-to-premium model, allowing financial institutions to offer key features at no cost to users, with optional paid upgrades
Jack Henry has launched MyFinancialHealth, allowing over 1,000 banks and credit unions to embed a suite of financial health tools powered by Array. The platform offers a broader suite of embeddable tools, including credit monitoring, identity protection, online subscription management, and federal student loans. The platform is designed using a configurable free-to-premium model, allowing financial institutions to offer key features at no cost to users, with optional paid upgrades for enhanced control and protection. The platform is easily activated through a single configuration, eliminating APIs, onboarding burden, and custom development. The launch aligns with Jack Henry’s mission to deepen the connection between accountholders and their primary financial institutions, reducing financial fragmentation and improving digital engagement. Array reports that users visit its components an average of 2.2 times a month, with many opting for premium services.
Only 32% of shoppers report easy access to customer service in-store, as retailers struggle to balance admin/ work with empowering associates for enhanced engagement
According to a new survey from enterprise software company Jumpmind, 36% of retailers say meeting the demands of hyper-informed customers represents one of the top threats to their business. 99% retailers surveyed said it’s important that store associates can provide product knowledge that surpasses the customer’s own research. Shoppers expect seamless transitions between online browsing and in-store purchasing, and currently, only some retailers believe they are meeting their customers’ needs. 57% retailers say they’re only “okay” at connecting store associates with consumers’ online shopping data, noting that they have “some but not all” information integrated across channels. According to Jumpmind’s survey, store associates are “bogged down” by tasks that prevent them from prioritizing customer engagement. 45% of retailers surveyed say that store employees spend too much time trying to find answers to customer service questions, while 42% say that associates spend too much time on technology support and maintenance. 38% say that administrative tasks are a major time drain for their employees. Retailers noted that critical retail functions such as shipping products from stores (26%), inventory management (24%), and shelf restocking (18%) aren’t getting enough time and attention. 32% of consumers surveyed by Jumpmind say their favorite retailer provides easy access to customer service when they have a problem, which the company says can lead to shoppers switching to a competitor.
Mistral’s AI voice model can listen to and transcribe up to 30 minutes of audio or 40 minutes of audio understanding without switching to a separate mode and offer summarization at less than half the price of comparable APIs
Mistral released an open-sourced voice model that could rival paid voice AI, such as those from ElevenLabs and Hume AI, which the company said bridges the gap between proprietary speech recognition models and the more open, yet error-prone versions. The company said Voxtral “offers state-of-the-art accuracy and native semantic understanding in the open, at less than half the price of comparable APIs.” Voxtral, at a 32K token context, can listen to and transcribe up to 30 minutes of audio or 40 minutes of audio understanding. It offers summarization, meaning the model can answer questions based on the audio content and generate summaries without switching to a separate mode. Users can trigger functions and API calls based on spoken instructions. The model is based on Mistral’s Mistral Small 3.1 and supports multiple languages and can automatically detect languages. Mistral added enterprise features to Voxtral, including private deployment, so that organizations can integrate the model into their own ecosystems. These features also include domain-specific fine-tuning and advanced context and priority access to engineering resources for customers who need help integrating Voxtral into their workflows. Mistral stated that Voxtral outperformed existing voice models, including OpenAI’s Whisper, Gemini 2.5 Flash and Scribe from ElevenLabs. Voxtral presented fewer word errors compared to Whisper, which is currently considered the best automatic speech recognition model available.
Walmart launching ‘super agents’ to help customers through their shopping trips beyond offering product recommendations to do things like reorder items, plan events and using computer vision offer recipe ideas by looking inside a customer’s refrigerator
Walmart is launching a line of “super agents” designed to help customers and workers. These new tools, powered by agentic AI, will soon be the chief way people interact with Walmart. “Agents can help automate and simplify pretty much everything that we do,” Walmart Chief Technology Officer Suresh Kumar said, adding the company decided to debut the agents now because “customers are ready, they are using AI in pretty much everything they do.” The agents will serve as an entry point for every action customers, workers, sellers and suppliers have with the company, replacing a number of existing AI tools. Walmart is counting on AI to fuel its online growth as it aims for eCommerce to make up half of its sales within five years. In June, the company debuted “Sparky,” an AI assistant designed to customers through their shopping trips with product recommendations and budget suggestions based on past behavior. The “super agent” version of Sparky will be able to do things like reorder items, plan events and — using computer vision — offer recipe ideas by looking inside a customer’s refrigerator. Also in the works is an “Associate” super-agent to let workers do things like submit applications for parental leave or let merchants access sales data. There’s also “Marty,” an agent designed for sellers, suppliers and advertisers, and one for developers to build future AI tools.
Amazon beefing up agentic AI infrastructure to be the place where enterprise agents live, not merely where they train; designing products for “non‑human” patrons that “will hit ‘buy’ without a person in the loop”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company now designs products for “non‑human” patrons that “will hit ‘buy’ without a person in the loop.” That shift dominated a call that otherwise could have been a standard victory lap: solid retail trends, a sturdy ad business and double‑digit cloud growth. Following up on a hint dropped during the Q1 earnings concerns about agentic AI architecture, Jassy confirmed that he wants Amazon to be the leader in agentic AI development and infrastructure. And not only can agentic AI plan a trip, reconcile invoices or write code, it also burns through computing power. In May, it open‑sourced “Strands,” a toolkit for creating agents. Last week it rolled out “AgentCore,” a server‑less runtime Jassy called “the industry’s first secure, scalable way to give agents memory, identity and observability.” The clear subtext: AWS aims to be the place where enterprise agents live, not merely where they train. Amazon’s own consumer‑facing device is Alexa+, a Gen AI upgrade now in early access to millions of U.S. households. Jassy called it “much more intelligent than her prior self,” capable of stringing together multi‑step requests like dimming lights, queuing dinner music and adjusting the thermostat. Engagement, he said, is “meaningfully higher,” and over time could unlock new subscription or advertising revenue streams.
SEC wants to supercharge super-apps, by allowing investors to access a wide array of assets and financial services in one place with clear guidelines on how to categorize crypto assets Paul Atkins, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has announced several new initiatives under Project Crypto to modernize rules and regulations. One part of his vision is the development of super-apps that allow investors to access a wide array of assets and financial services in one place. Under Project Crypto, the SEC will issue clear guidelines on how to categorize crypto assets, including what is and is not a security. Super-apps would serve as a one-stop shop where investors could access various digital trading and asset management services, such as buying or selling cryptocurrencies alongside traditional securities within the same account. If this comes to fruition, a brokerage account could give customers more access to digital assets and banking services. There’s nothing in current securities laws to stop SEC-registered trading platforms from listing non-securities. Super-apps have taken off in parts of Asia, such as China’s WeChat, but attempts to replicate the service in North America or Europe have not been successful due to regulatory, cultural, and competition from existing players. If the super-app market can establish itself, several existing crypto exchanges and brokerages could be well positioned to capitalize on shifts in consumer behavior. It may also serve to open decentralized finance (DeFi) applications to more investors. Major cryptocurrency platforms like Coinbase and brokerages like Robinhood are already positioning themselves as super-app market leaders, potentially securing a first-mover advantage. However, the changing digital asset landscape in the U.S. could bring opportunities for investors, such as earning staking rewards, but also raises concerns about increased fraud, theft, and data-protection laws. Investors must do considerable due diligence on both the platform they use and the assets they buy.
Paul Atkins, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has announced several new initiatives under Project Crypto to modernize rules and regulations. One part of his vision is the development of super-apps that allow investors to access a wide array of assets and financial services in one place. Under Project Crypto, the SEC will issue clear guidelines on how to categorize crypto assets, including what is and is not a security. Super-apps would serve as a one-stop shop where investors could access various digital trading and asset management services, such as buying or selling cryptocurrencies alongside traditional securities within the same account. If this comes to fruition, a brokerage account could give customers more access to digital assets and banking services. There’s nothing in current securities laws to stop SEC-registered trading platforms from listing non-securities. Super-apps have taken off in parts of Asia, such as China’s WeChat, but attempts to replicate the service in North America or Europe have not been successful due to regulatory, cultural, and competition from existing players. If the super-app market can establish itself, several existing crypto exchanges and brokerages could be well positioned to capitalize on shifts in consumer behavior. It may also serve to open decentralized finance (DeFi) applications to more investors. Major cryptocurrency platforms like Coinbase and brokerages like Robinhood are already positioning themselves as super-app market leaders, potentially securing a first-mover advantage. However, the changing digital asset landscape in the U.S. could bring opportunities for investors, such as earning staking rewards, but also raises concerns about increased fraud, theft, and data-protection laws. Investors must do considerable due diligence on both the platform they use and the assets they buy.