Startup Rove claims to be the first universal mile loyalty program. Rove’s loyalty program allows airlines to expand the lucrative business of miles to millions more consumers, Co founder Max Morganroth said. But instead of allowing airlines to share fees with credit cards, Rove gives them a way to make money through affiliate marketing with over 7,000 merchants through the Rove shopping extension for Google Chrome. That’s a business model that’s similar to Honey and Rakuten. Morganroth explained that the points earned from shopping can be converted into airline miles, which hold more value than their equivalent in cash. In addition to the affiliate marketing scheme, Rove also offers its users miles for hotel bookings. Users can combine Rove miles earned on hotel bookings with miles from the shopping extension and even credit card miles if they have a card that earns airline points. The startup’s elaborate scheme may seem complicated, but Morganroth says that earning miles through Rove is straightforward, as long as users book hotels on its platform or shop using the Rove shopping extension. When users are ready to book flights with their miles, Rove’s travel portal helps them find the best award flight deals. The startup’s users can book award travel on about 140 carriers because it is often possible to transfer miles of one airline company to its affiliates in another region. “Gen Z wants to travel more than any other demographic, yet they have the least access to the tools like this that actually make it cheaper,” he said. “They no longer have to wait until they’re 28, have five years of credit history, and $700 fee to get one of these cards; they can just download a Chrome extension, book any of their existing travel through us, and they’ll immediately be in the game.”
LendingClub is buying AI-powered spending intelligence platform Cushion that ingests users’ bank transactions and purchase data to help them track their bills, make on-time payments, manage subscriptions, build credit, and monitor BNPL loans
LendingClub announced the acquisition of intellectual property and select talent behind Cushion, an AI-powered spending intelligence platform, providing a natural complement to LendingClub’s suite of mobile financial products and experiences. Cushion’s AI-powered technology ingests users’ bank transactions and purchase information to help them track their bills, make on-time payments, manage subscriptions, build credit, and monitor BNPL loans. Scott Sanborn, CEO of LendingClub said, “Cushion’s technology complements our DebtIQ experience to provide our members with the tools and information they need to take control of their debt and spending. With credit card balances and interest rates at historic highs and consumers seeking ways to keep more of what they earn, the need for our solution has never been greater.” Adopting Cushion’s technology will eventually allow LendingClub to provide much-needed visibility into a consumer’s financial obligations beyond traditional credit monitoring. It builds on LendingClub’s acquisition of Tally in Q4 2024, which will simplify credit card management, help users optimize payments, reduce interest, and improve credit health.
MIT researchers demonstrate the strongest nonlinear light-matter coupling in a quantum system that could help reach the fault-tolerant quantum computing stage with 10X faster operations and readout
MIT researchers have demonstrated what they believe is the strongest nonlinear light-matter coupling ever achieved in a quantum system. Their experiment is a step toward realizing quantum operations and readout that could be performed in a few nanoseconds. The researchers used a novel superconducting circuit architecture to show nonlinear light-matter coupling that is about an order of magnitude stronger than prior demonstrations, which could enable a quantum processor to run about 10 times faster. “This would really eliminate one of the bottlenecks in quantum computing. Usually, you have to measure the results of your computations in between rounds of error correction. This could accelerate how quickly we can reach the fault-tolerant quantum computing stage and be able to get real-world applications and value out of our quantum computers,” says Yufeng “Bright” Ye, lead author of a paper on this research. The new architecture, based on a superconducting “quarton” coupler, achieved coupling strengths roughly ten times higher than previous designs, potentially allowing quantum processors to run ten times faster. Faster readout and operations are critical to reducing errors in quantum computation, which depend on performing error correction within the limited lifespans of qubits. Researchers demonstrated extremely strong nonlinear light-matter coupling in a quantum circuit. Stronger coupling enables faster readout and operations using qubits, which are the fundamental units of information in quantum computing. (Christine Daniloff, MIT)
AI meeting summarization tool Jump AI frees up about 10 hours per week for each advisors
Artificial intelligence-powered offerings in wealth management regularly hammer home one benefit they provide in particular: saved time. “Advisors are saving 10-plus hours per week on average by leveraging AI to streamline their client meeting process,” said Startup Zeplyn CEO Era Jain. “That’s about 500-plus hours per year or 20 new clients they can service per year.” These time savings are primarily spent on business development and relationship building. Solo advisor Kelly Klingaman, founder of Kelly Klingaman Financial Planning, said she wanted to utilize an AI notetaker in her business so she could be more present during client meetings. Having tried out a few AI notetaking tools so far, Klingaman said Fathom is “affordable, easy to use and dynamic” — and it saves her between five and eight hours per week. For Gregory Furer, the founder and CEO of Beratung Advisors, one of the biggest game changers has been the integration of Holistiplan tax planning software. “With AI, we can now analyze a client’s tax return and generate insights in just three minutes — a process that used to take an hour and was prone to human error,” he said. From there, Furer said they create tax modeling for clients in 20 to 30 minutes, compared to the two to three hours it used to take. He said his firm is also leveraging AI within eMoney, its financial planning software, “to instantly calculate the amount of life insurance needed to maintain client-defined success rates and goals.” “This real-time decision support enhances the accuracy and speed of our recommendations,” he said. Like Klingaman, Furer has been utilizing AI for meeting notes; he uses Jump. “As the tool continues to learn our systems and language, it could eventually save five to 10 hours per week of high-value planner time, potentially becoming our most cost-effective AI tool.” Rob Schultz, senior partner and wealth manager at NWF Advisory said he also uses Jump for meeting summarization. “The quality of the notes was significantly better than I ever wrote down during a meeting and it allows me to focus solely on the client in front of me. It saves me time in the post-meeting review, probably 30 minutes per client interaction.” Samuel Flaten, co-founder of Narrow Road Financial Planning said he mainly uses ChatGPT, which he calls a “total game-changer.” In addition to the writing assistance, Flaten said he has also trained a custom GPT with “everything I know as a CFP” to workshop ideas, stress-test strategies and pull in creative alternatives he might not have considered. Across his average weekly schedule of 20 meetings, Schultz said his use of Jump AI frees up about 10 hours. Jain of Zeplyn recommends that firms optimize their scheduling by identifying advisors who successfully use AI to save time, establishing their best practices and training or coaching other advisors.
Eppo, a feature flagging and experimentation platform offers “confidence intervals” to make it easier to understand and interpret the results of a randomized app experiments and different versions of apps and models
Datadog has acquired Eppo, a feature-flagging and experimentation platform. Despite the demand for tools that let developers experiment with different versions of apps, the infrastructure required for product analytics remains relatively complex to build. Beyond data pipelines and statistical methods, experimentation infrastructure relies on analytics workflows often sourced from difficult-to-configure cloud environments. Eppo will continue supporting existing customers and bringing on new ones under the brand “Eppo by Datadog.” Eppo offers “confidence intervals” to make it easier to understand and interpret the results of a randomized app experiment. The platform supports experimentation with AI and machine learning models, leveraging techniques to perform live experiments that show whether one model is outperforming another. Eppo co-founder and CEO Che Sharma said “With Datadog, we are uniting product analytics, feature management, AI, and experimentation capabilities for businesses to reduce risk, learn quickly, and ship high-quality products.” For Datadog, the Eppo buy could bolster the company’s current product analytics solutions. “The use of multiple AI models increases the complexity of deploying applications in production,” Michael Whetten, VP of Product at Datadog, said. “Experimentation solves this correlation and measurement problem, enabling teams to compare multiple models side-by-side, determine user engagement against cost tradeoffs, and ultimately build AI products that deliver measurable value.”
dLocal’s platform enables PayPal Enterprise Payments, previously known as Braintree, cto easily accept cards and process local and alternative payment methods across Latin America, EMEA, and APAC markets
dLocal, a cross-border payment platform for emerging markets, has expanded partnership with PayPal to offer businesses access to payment processing and local payment methods in more than 40 new untapped emerging markets. By leveraging dLocal’s platform, global customers of PayPal Enterprise Payments, previously known as Braintree, can now easily accept cards and process local and alternative payment methods across Latin America, EMEA, and APAC markets without needing to establish local entities. dLocal’s platform will handle both B2B and B2C payment flows, making it easy for businesses to connect with local customers and suppliers. As a result, merchants will gain access to a number of potential benefits including: Access to new, global customers: Integration will provide businesses with quick access to new global customers without having to establish a local entity or pay cross-border fees. Lessen tech debt and complexity: Businesses looking to process in these new markets can leverage their existing PayPal Braintree’s integration – and their stored cards – to process locally with minimal engineering and integration resources required. Increased authorization rates; and One source of truth: Businesses will have access to one single platform to manage local and international payments.
Marqeta’s processing volumes surge 27% on card issuance; that non-Block TPV grew at 2x faster than Block TPV
Marqeta’s first quarter results surged across several metrics as new and existing card issuance programs grew on a global stage across debit and credit channels, and the company’s platform gains a tailwind as it enables new BNPL and embedded finance offerings. Total processing volume (TPV) of $84 billion was up by 27%. Forward looking guidance looks for net revenue growth in the range of 13% to 15%. Mike Milotich, interim CEO and CFO, said that net revenue growth of 18% to $139 million. Beyond Block (the company’s largest customer at 45% of Marqeta revenues), Milotich said that non-Block TPV grew at 2x faster than Block TPV, “fueled by a wide range of customers across several use cases. Consistent with the last several quarters, financial services, lending including buy now, pay later, and expense management drove the bulk of our TPV growth.” Lending and expense management TPV continued to grow over 30% “and both accelerated a bit from last quarter,” given a boost by the combination of Klarna’s migration to the Marqeta platform in Europe, and “our BNPL customers benefiting from the increased adoption of Pay Anywhere card solution and distribution through wallets, both are supported in part by newly available flexible network credentials and strong user growth among SMB lending solutions.” He also said that despite a challenging macro environment, there has not been a spending shift across the platform, telling analysts, “Breaking down the spend by low, medium and high discretionary TPV based on merchant category reveals no meaningful shift in the mix of spending in Q1 versus the past several quarters.”
Barracuda Networks’s multimodal AI simultaneously correlates and analyzes diverse text and visual data types including URLs, documents, images, QR codes and more to offer more adaptive defense against zero-day attacks
Barracuda Networks unveiled new threat detection capabilities fueled by multimodal AI that deliver context-aware protection against emerging attacks. The new capabilities give Barracuda’s platform the ability to protect against attacks with accuracy and speed by simultaneously correlating and analyzing diverse text and visual data types – including URLs, documents, images, QR codes and more. The new capabilities introduce a new integration with multimodal AI, technology that synthesizes and interprets numerous data streams in various formats, with ML classifiers and a purpose-built sandbox engine. Doing so delivers a faster, smarter and more adaptive defense layer that detects more than three times as many malicious files at eight times the speed of previous models. The capabilities significantly strengthen Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection, which provides layered security across the Barracuda platform. The new capabilities also enhance Barracuda LinkProtect, which inspects URLs for hidden threats, malicious scripts, suspicious redirects and other attacks using a virtual sandbox and secure, isolated browser environment. By incorporating multimodal AI, Barracuda can now detect not only known threat signatures but also subtle anomalies across multiple content formats that may indicate novel or zero-day attacks. The capability is particularly useful at a time when threat actors continue to blend social engineering, image-based lures and malicious links into more convincing and evasive campaigns.
Edward Jones partners CAIS to enable HNWIs and advisors to manage alt investments in addition to mutual funds and ETFs through unified managed accounts while also letting them do intelligent rebalancing, overall tax management, tax transitions
Edward Jones plans to provide a variety of private investment options through a deal with CAIS, which provides technology designed to unlock alternative investments for advisors and their clients. The service will be offered starting on May 5 through a business line called Edward Jones Generations, which is open to investors with $10 million or more in assets, but will eventually be extended to more of the firm’s clientele. Russ Tipper, principal and head of products at Edward Jones, said it’s too early to say what the criteria for investing in alternatives will eventually be set at. Rather than choosing a fixed investable asset threshold for all accounts, Edward Jones is more likely to look at every client’s portfolio individually and decide if alts have a place. “We’re going to make sure it’s an appropriate portion of a client’s portfolio, which could be as little as zero to as high as 20% depending on the objective they’re trying to solve for.” Edward Jones has roughly 9 million clients but doesn’t say how many have more than $10 million in investable assets.
Google enables launching AI Mode with one-tap search on Android and iOS that does away with the homepage; adds slick animation with color glows to encompass entire screen for iOS
Besides the widget shortcut, Google is making AI Mode faster to access with one-tap search on Android and iOS. Previously, launching AI Mode from the shortcut beneath the Search bar in the Google app or widget would bring you to an introductory homepage. You’d then have to touch the “Ask AI Mode” field before you could start typing. Opening AI Mode now immediately takes you to the input box with the keyboard open. The header just shows the ‘G’ logo (and close button), while the suggested queries carousel disappears after you enter text for a minimalist look. With the previous homepage no longer available, you cannot quickly access conversation history. Google tells us to soon expect direct access from the text field. One-tap AI Mode access is live on both Google for Android and iOS. On the latter platform, Google has introduced a very slick animation. Tapping the AI Mode button will expand the usual Search field to encompass your entire screen as the keyboard pops up. As this occurs, there’s a four-color glow around the expanding perimeter that looks very nice. It fades out just as everything settles, while closing AI Mode also results in a visual effect. There’s no equivalent animation on Android right now, but there are other colorful touches.