Finance, Banking & Insurance

Troy, Mich. – September 28, 2026 -- North, a U.S. fintech processing more than $100 billion in annual transaction volume, has launched Embedded Checkout, a native payment integration now live in the Webflow Marketplace. The tool embeds North's payment infrastructure directly into Webflow's visual design canvas, eliminating the need to redirect shoppers to external checkout pages during the final stage of a purchase.

Charlotte – September 28, 2026 -- Huntington National Bank will install its name atop the One South office tower in uptown Charlotte and expand its regional headquarters to four full floors, doubling its footprint in the building as it deepens its commitment to North Carolina and South Carolina.

Huntington doubles its footprint at One South tower

Huntington will occupy the entire 39th and 40th floors of the 40-story building at 101 S. Tryon St., adding to two floors it already holds and bringing its total presence to four full floors. The bank opened its regional headquarters at One South in 2023 and now houses several hundred colleagues there and across the greater Charlotte area, spanning multiple business segments and operational functions.

New Orleans – September 28, 2026 -- Novogradac will convene community development entities, investors, developers and advisors at The Roosevelt New Orleans on Oct. 22-23 for its 2026 Fall New Markets Tax Credit Conference, focused on how NMTC financing is being deployed for housing-related development amid tightening market conditions.

Conference agenda targets compliance and allocation strategy

Sessions will cover the state of the NMTC program, an investor panel on market perspectives, an NMTC compliance overview, and how CDEs, investors and sponsors are positioning for current and future allocation cycles. Organizers say increased regulatory scrutiny is reshaping compliance expectations for program participants.

New York – September 28, 2026 -- Eighty-four percent of global wealth management firms say their operating models need a fundamental redesign to capture AI's full value, yet fewer than 10% report being prepared for that shift, according to a new HCLTech study.

The report, titled "Hidden In Pl(AI)n Sight," is based on a synthetic research methodology surveying 1,066 AI personas modeled on senior wealth management decision-makers across 17 global markets. It was produced in partnership with research firm Evidenza.

Adoption outpaces agentic AI deployment by a wide margin

While 98% of leadership teams in the sector are actively pursuing an AI agenda, only slightly more than 7% are building agentic AI capabilities, the study found. HCLTech attributes the gap to firms funding AI primarily for efficiency gains rather than structural transformation.

San Francisco – – September 28, 2026 -- Fulcrum has launched a certificate workflow that turns an emailed request into a complete, endorsement-ready certificate in under a minute, built on the same policy data the platform already uses for policy checking and proposal generation.

Fulcrum reads the policy instead of filling a template

The workflow parses the inbound request and any attached contract, compares the demanded coverage against what the client's policy actually provides, and flags requests the policy cannot satisfy before an account manager commits to anything. It locates the relevant endorsement forms inside the policy itself, pulls them, sorts them by the situation they apply to, and attaches them, using description-of-operations language the agency has already approved and shaped to each client's preferences. Account managers review and approve every certificate before it issues.

Denver – September 28, 2026 -- Vertafore has launched its Velocity Document Intelligence Agent, an AI tool that cut document research time by up to 90% in early testing, reducing tasks that took 20 minutes to just two minutes.

AI agent automates research across insurance documents

Available within Vertafore's ImageRight platform, the Document Intelligence Agent lets agency, MGA, and carrier teams ask questions in natural language to search across Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, images, and emails. The tool synthesizes answers with document- and page-level source citations, using contextual meaning rather than keyword matching to surface relevant information.

Boston – September 28, 2026 -- John Hancock has expanded its protection insurance portfolio, enhancing its Protection Indexed Universal Life solution (Protection IUL 26) and its term life insurance suite to give financial professionals more tools for addressing clients' long-term planning needs.

Longevity Preparedness Index shows US adults score just 60 out of 100

John Hancock's 2025 Longevity Preparedness Index, developed with the MIT AgeLab, found that U.S. adults averaged only 60 out of 100 in overall preparedness for longer lives. The study, based on a representative sample of 1,307 Americans surveyed between May 14 and June 5, 2025, found planning needs extend across health, care, housing, community, and major life transitions—beyond a single financial goal.

SAN FRANCISCO – September 28, 2026 -- More than 4 in 5 adults in the United States (85%) and United Kingdom (86%) say cost-of-living pressures have stopped them from donating or donating more over the past six months, according to a new Harris Poll survey of over 3,000 adults commissioned by nonprofit lender Kiva.

Despite the squeeze, 77% of U.S. and 80% of UK adults still gave money in some form during the same period, the survey found. The data lands against a backdrop tracked by Giving USA, which recorded record total charitable giving of $617.20 billion even as individual donors' share of that total slid from roughly 80% in past decades to 64% today.

Phoenix – September 28, 2026 -- Paze will replace PayPal as the Official Jersey Patch Partner of the Phoenix Suns starting with the 2026-27 NBA season, under a multi-year deal announced by the team and Early Warning Services, LLC, the Arizona-based company behind Paze and Zelle.

Paze logo takes upper-left jersey position previously held by PayPal

The Paze logo will appear on the upper left side of all Suns uniforms once the new season tips off. Suns and Phoenix Mercury CEO Josh Bartelstein said the patch process was competitive, with Early Warning selected for its Arizona roots and payments history spanning Zelle to Paze.

Boston – September 28, 2026 -- Duck Creek has made Agentic First Notice of Loss (FNOL) available to early access customers, an AI-driven tool designed to automate claims intake across digital, voice-to-text, and mobile channels.

Agentic AI agents verify coverage and flag anomalies before an adjuster opens the file

Built on the Duck Creek Agentic AI Platform, the solution uses orchestrated AI agents to capture, validate, enrich, and route claims in real time. From the first description of a loss, the system verifies coverage, assesses injury and legal severity, and cross-references reported circumstances, images, and policy data to surface inconsistencies without manual data entry.