Clarity Money, the personal finance app, has reportedly raised $11 million in venture capital funding, which it will use to expand its team and offerings.
According to a report, RRE Ventures and Citi Ventures led the Series B round of funding. With the latest round of funding Clarity Money has raised a total of $14.5 million in venture capital funding.
“In just 90 days, over 100,000 people have seen the power of Clarity Money. This additional financing enables us to expand our team and capabilities, at a time when consumers need a financial advocate more than ever,” Adam Dell, founder and CEO of Clarity Money, said in the report. Since launching in January of this year, Clarity Money says it analyzed more than $10 billion in transactions and saved customers an average of $300 by taking advantage of the app’s subscription cancellation feature.
“The future of financial services will be transformed by those who can successfully leverage APIs to connect consumers with best-of-breed providers,” says Luis Valdich, Citi Ventures MD, in the same release. “Citi Ventures is pleased to support Clarity Money, which is committed to responsible finance and empowering consumers via APIs with actionable insights and third-party products that can help improve their financial health.”
Since its launch in January 2017, Clarity Money claims to have analyzed over $10 billion in transactions and has saved, on average, $300 per customer who have taken advantage of the app’s subscription cancellation service. Venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur Dell announced in October Clarity Money, a new personal finance mobile app that acts as consumers’ advocate. Clarity Money ushers in a new era of mobile personal finance management apps that use artificial intelligence and data science to help consumers make smarter financial decisions. Consumers can now have a single mobile app that improves all aspects of their financial life, from getting a lower interest rate credit card to lowering bills.
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) promises to improve operational efficiencies and the customer experience offered by enterprises.
The advanced technology is finding applications in loan underwriting and fraud detection, and now it’s moving across borders.
TerraPay Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Ram Sundaram told PYMNTS as part of the “What’s Next in Payments” series focused on exploring AI’s use in banking and by FinTechs that automated decision making and streamlined processes will continue to transform global money movement, especially as faster payments gain ground in cross-border transactions. That’s the inexorable trend, but as Sundaram put it, there’s still room, and a necessity, to have some human interaction in the mix.
In terms of global fund flows, TerraPay’s single connection ties more than 3.7 billion mobile wallets together across 200 sending and 144 receiving countries, touching 7.5 billion bank accounts. As one might imagine, coordinating and enabling the transactions is complex.
“Obviously, in the best-case scenario, everything goes smoothly, but when things are not going smoothly, that’s when the customer queries come in,” Sundaram said.
It’s no easy task to find out straight away where a transaction is, as analysts and representatives at the company have to look at logs and query partner systems.
“A lot of that work is done manually,” said Sundaram, who added that the agents “know the corridors and the markets that they are working in, but it still takes some time.”
TerraPay is using AI models with machine learning to bolster customer support and automate tasks as financial institutions (TerraPay’s client base) send payments in real time, and those payments are processed into local markets’ beneficiary banks.
“We still don’t trust [AI models] to let them respond to the customer straight away, but we can do the analysis, and then that gets reviewed by an agent who decides if [information] is accurate or not and then sends it off,” Sundaram said.
The same principles are guiding AI models and company practices to improve technical and security operations, analyzing and categorizing anomalous transactions and automating integrations with partner firms.
“Compliance is an issue where there is a lot of review needed of the alerts, and we are using [AI models] to speed up those processes,” Sundaram said.
Asked by PYMNTS about how agentic AI can be harnessed, he said: “In financial services, you can’t take chances on technology like this, which has the freedom to go wrong. You have to be careful about making sure that it’s 100% reliable before we can let things run entirely by automation.”
Agentic AI also remains pricey. For example, OpenAI is charging $20,000 a month for its specialized agents. However, Sundaram said the industry will become commoditized quickly, which will lower prices, and some open-source offerings are capable.
“There’s a fire hose of news about breakthroughs and new ideas and new ways of doing things that are coming out on a daily basis,” he said.
Data underpins it all, and Sundaram told PYMNTS that no matter what the application, the information fed into the models must be clean. Most organizations have a range of data sitting in different intra-company silos, and those silos need to come down.
In addition, the data must be structured so that it is accessible and can be synthesized by the models. Many firms may have more than 1,000 software-as-a-service (SaaS) resources to which they are subscribed but are not accurately tracked or monitored.
“Every database is separated, each one sitting somewhere else,” he said.
The days of stitching together those separate SaaS offerings to run an enterprise are ending, he said, and we’re headed to a future when data is collected in one place.
AI models and agentic AI “are extensions of what we’ve always valued at TerraPay, which means building the most efficient infrastructure possible in order to make sure that transactions are processed safely, quickly and affordably,” Sundaram told PYMNTS. “We see AI and [AI models] as powerful tools that help us scale all this very quickly while making sure we build more and more efficiency into the system.”
