The Financial Technology Report

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, giving investment banking and equity research teams access to financial datasets and GPT-6 Astra in one product for preparing analysis, models, and client materials. Built-in content from Daloopa, PitchBook, LSEG News, and Crunchbase covers financial statements, earnings transcripts, and private companies. According to OpenAI, teams can use those datasets without negotiating separate contracts or configuring connectors, reducing the setup required before analysts begin working with the information. Read the full article on The Financial Technology Report.

basys.ai's Amber Nigam Takes On Healthcare's Paperwork Problem Amber Nigam learned the failings of the healthcare system the hard way: as a caregiver. Growing up, he watched his father manage diabetes and the complications that piled on over 10 to 15 years, and he spent those years navigating a maze of paperwork and delayed treatment on his father's behalf. "I got to understand there are so many gaps that exist in the system, not because people are not interested in doing work, people are not lazy. They have a lot of work than they can practically do in a day, but we are not using technology in the right way," he recalled on the Health Biz Talk podcast. The experience took a toll. At one point, Nigam has said, the strain of it brought him close to an anxiety breakdown, even though he knew both technology and healthcare well. It also helped inspire basys.ai, the Boston company he co-founded and now leads as Chief Executive Officer. The company uses agentic AI to take on prior authorization and utilization management, the administrative machinery that slows care down. Nigam believes that much of this work never needed a clinician in the first place. "If we triage well, we essentially can solve 70 to 80% of the problems that are administrative in nature," he said. basys.ai has drawn backing from Mayo Clinic, Eli Lilly, and CareFirst, and trained its models on more than ten million patient records. But Nigam knows that putting AI to work in healthcare comes with risks. He has measured hallucination rates as high as 40% in prior authorization, which is why basys.ai builds its own guardrails and uses additional models to check AI-generated results. "Agentic AI is good, but we need to take it with a grain of salt," he said. What keeps the work honest, in his view, is remembering who it serves. "You'll only consider healthcare a zero-sum game if you're not considering the patient to be at the center of this," he said.

Martin Markiewicz Built an AI That Refuses to Guess Martin Markiewicz calls himself a builder, and the things he has built vary wildly. Before he was fighting financial crime, he worked on hydropower plants that powered communities, and before that, he studied math for the fun of it. His work took him from Poland to Singapore, where in 2015 he co-founded Silent Eight with Michael Wilkowski and Julia Markiewicz. What began in a local accelerator as an AI-powered search tool has grown into a company whose technology now runs inside some of the largest banks in the world. The problem Silent Eight set out to solve is enormous and mostly invisible. "Financial crime is dirty money moving through our global financial system," Markiewicz explained in a Tech in Asia video, and the sheer volume of it defeats human teams. Every day, banks have to sort the customer buying something online from the organization trying to fund an attack, and getting it wrong in either direction carries a cost. Doing that properly, he estimates, would take tens of millions of investigators. "The current setup just does not scale," he said. Hiring ever-larger teams isn't the answer. Silent Eight is developing AI that does the whole job rather than assisting around the edges. Its latest platform, Iris 7, deploys AI agents that carry an investigation from the first alert to a final, automatically applied decision. "We don't want them to be assistants," Markiewicz said, describing a system a bank can trust to own a case from start to finish. The design borrows from the best human investigators, and it is deliberately taught to admit uncertainty and hand a case to a person rather than bluff. In compliance, the stakes leave no room for approximation. "Even $1 is a wrong answer. Zero is the expectation," he said. Since its founding, Silent Eight has drawn partnerships with Standard Chartered, HSBC, and a string of major Gulf banks, raised more than $55 million across several rounds, and reached deployments in over 150 regulated markets. For Markiewicz, the appeal has never changed. It is a very hard problem, and someone has to build the thing that solves it.

Applied Systems entered a new chapter in September 2026 as Graham Blackwell took over as CEO, with the insurance technology company accelerating its push into agentic AI. Applied has rolled out new AI capabilities across the insurance lifecycle this year, including an agentic email-to-quote solution that can turn broker submissions into carrier-ready quotes in minutes. At Applied Net 2026, Blackwell outlined a strategy centered on using connected data and AI to automate more work across agencies, brokers, and carriers. Graham is among the candidates for The Top Financial Technology CEOs of 2026.

Squirro's David Clarke Turns Human Knowledge Into Machine Language David Clarke can distill three decades of work into a single sentence. "We transform human knowledge into machine-readable knowledge," he told an audience at the KM World conference. It is the thread running through his whole career, and in March 2026, it carried him to the top job at Squirro, the Zurich-based enterprise AI company, where he became Chief Executive Officer. Clarke came to Squirro through Synaptica, the taxonomy and ontology company he founded in 2009. His work there focused on the more deliberate, human-led side of knowledge management: organizing information into structures that machines could understand and use. Squirro had taken a different path, growing out of enterprise search and moving early into generative AI. When the two companies merged, those approaches complemented each other well. “You bring the deterministic and the probabilistic together, [and] it produces a very positive result,” Clarke said. He pointed to one project with a global telecommunications company, where adding graph technology helped cut support-ticket resolution times by a factor of 10. Clarke watched clients spend 2024 running pilots, then spend 2025 asking how to scale them. He cautions against taking shortcuts in the early stages. "If you do a quick POC [proof of concept] because it's quick, you will pay that price later," he warned. Precision, security, and privacy at scale, he argues, are what separate a demo from a production system, especially in the heavily regulated banks and financial institutions Squirro serves. And even after three decades in knowledge management, Clarke is still seeing things that surprise him. AI agents can now build taxonomies, something he once thought impossible. "It is a brave new world," he said.

Chime has agreed to acquire Stride Bank, N.A. for $590 million in cash, giving the financial technology company direct ownership of the nationally chartered institution that has supported its banking services for more than seven years. Both boards have unanimously approved the transaction. Stride will become Chime Bank and operate as a wholly owned subsidiary after the transaction closes. Read the full article on The Financial Technology Report.

Iress has appointed Neil Montford as Group Chief Financial Officer, effective November 16, bringing in a finance executive with more than 20 years of international experience across listed technology and financial-services businesses. Montford most recently served as group CFO of Bravura Solutions, where he worked on the software company’s financial and operational turnaround. His responsibilities included improving profitability, strengthening cost controls, and lifting operating performance. Read the full article on The Financial Technology Report.

CME Group has announced three senior appointments across its finance and legal operations, naming Jack Tobin as Chief Financial Officer, John Marchese as General Counsel, and Matthew Render as Chief Accounting Officer. Tobin will become Deputy Chief Financial Officer in November before assuming the CFO position in March 2027. His promotion coincides with current President and CFO Lynne Fitzpatrick’s planned move to CEO. Pictured: Jack Tobin, Chief Financial Officer at CME Group. Read the full article on The Financial Technology Report.

FinMkt's Luan Cox Builds for Where the Market Is Going Luan Cox learned to lose long before she became a founder. A nationally ranked junior tennis player who trained four hours a day, she burned out by 17. But the sport taught her to put a lost point behind her and focus on the next one. "Never give up. Believe in yourself. Forget the past, which could be a minute ago, and find the solution now," she said. Her path into finance began at a movie theater. After watching Wall Street, she decided to study finance. By 1992, she was selling life insurance at Jefferson Pilot, pitching college friends over tequila in Texas bar. She reached President's Club, reserved for the top 2% of the sales force, in her first year. "You don't sell a product. You focus on the problem," she said. Fintech grabbed her in the mid 1990s, right as the internet arrived. Cox helped build the pipes behind online investing at Quote.com, Stockpoint, and Interactive Data Managed Solutions, all of which went on to successful exits. Sshe was licensing market data to E-Trade, Schwab, and Fidelity before the word SaaS existed. Convincing the exchanges to hand over their feeds took some doing, but she showed them the data could be a revenue stream of its own. Cox encountered another reluctant group when she co-founded FinMkt with CTO Sri Goteti. Lenders resisted the idea of a shared marketplace that would put them in direct competition, so she went to the enterprises that controlled the customers and financing volume instead. "We just built to what they want and knew that the lenders would have to come along," she said. Today, Cox leads FinMkt as CEO. The embedded lending and payments company's platform lets enterprises offer point-of-sale financing under their own brands through multiple lenders, serving consumers across the credit spectrum. FinMkt reports funding more than 150,000 consumers and processing over $1 billion annually, with borrower approvals in minutes and merchants funded within 48 hours. Cox says she's built a profitable business on roughly $15 million in funding, but she believes there's still room for the market to catch up. "Stay with it, because the market will come around," she said.

Jonathan Lofthouse joined London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG)-USA as Chief Information Officer of its Data and Analytics division on September 21, placing a longtime banking technology executive in charge of the unit’s AI and engineering capabilities. Lofthouse succeeds Triona O'Keeffe, who is moving to NatWest as Chief Data and Analytics Officer after holding the LSEG position since 2021. His appointment follows a 29-year career at Citi that began through the bank’s IT graduate program in 1997. Pictured: Jonathan Lofthouse, Chief Information Officer at LSEG. Read the full article on The Financial Technology Report.