Latest news with #AzureAIFoundry
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
FNZ Announces Strategic Partnership with Microsoft to Accelerate the Transformation of the Wealth Management Industry
FNZ and Microsoft have entered a global, five-year strategic partnership to accelerate digital transformation across the wealth management industry. The partnership strengthens FNZ's global platform by enhancing its AI, automation and cloud capabilities. The goal is to drive value for financial institutions and their clients by enhancing operational efficiency, accelerating innovation and increasing speed to market. The collaboration includes co-innovation, joint go-to-market initiatives and the development of new AI-powered digital wealth solutions. LONDON, July 28, 2025 /CNW/ -- FNZ, a leading end-to-end wealth management platform has today announced a global, five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to transform the wealth management industry through technology, innovation and AI-driven digital solutions. The partnership combines FNZ's industry-leading technology, wealth management expertise and global reach with Microsoft's advanced AI capabilities, cloud infrastructure and engineering excellence. By integrating Microsoft Azure AI Foundry at the heart of its platform, FNZ is redefining how financial institutions, advisors and their clients interact by delivering more personalized, intelligent and resilient digital wealth management experiences. This collaboration with Microsoft accelerates this transformation by helping FNZ bring new solutions to market faster, enhance client outcomes, boost advisor productivity and drive innovation across industry. With more than 650 financial institution partners, over 26 million end investors and close to $2 trillion in assets under administration, FNZ brings scale to the partnership. This provides access to one of the largest wealth management data sets in the world, enabling the powerful application of AI, cloud technologies and analytics to deliver deeper insights, greater personalization and better outcomes for advisors, clients and institutions alike. Partnership Highlights Through the partnership, FNZ will work with Microsoft to deliver advanced AI tools, drive new technology development and collaborate on joint go-to-market initiatives, including: Creating a next-generation advisor and investor experience: FNZ will integrate Azure AI Foundry capabilities, including Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models, into its market-leading platform to provide enhanced personalization, greater efficiency and a next-generation user experience. Innovative applications for data and analytics: FNZ will utilize Microsoft Fabric to strengthen its data and analytics capabilities, delivering deeper insights tailored to the unique needs of wealth managers and advisors. Co-development and joint engineering: FNZ will develop new digital wealth solutions by embedding Azure AI Foundry into FNZ's global platform. Joint engineering teams will accelerate product innovation, enhance platform intelligence, and deliver secure, scalable services that strengthen risk management, compliance and resilience. FNZ will also deploy GitHub Copilot across its engineering teams to boost developer productivity and innovation. Resilience and scalability: By combining FNZ's market-leading platform and delivery capabilities with Microsoft's technologies and tooling, the partnership will help create more resilient, scalable and industrial-strength solutions for financial institutions. Enhancing operational efficiency: FNZ will also deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot and intelligent agents to support middle- and back-office processes. Global joint go-to-market: FNZ will collaborate with Microsoft on joint go-to-market activities, including the development and deployment of modular wealth solutions through multiple channels, including the Microsoft Marketplace, alongside coordinated global marketing initiatives and joint participation in industry events. Roman Regelman, Group President, FNZ, said: "FNZ has always been at the forefront of innovation in wealth-management technology. Partnering with Microsoft allows us to accelerate our AI-led roadmap and enhances our ability to deliver personalized, intelligent and resilient solutions to our clients, strengthening our position of leadership." "Together, we are not just upgrading technology. We are setting a new standard for how wealth management is delivered. Partnering with Microsoft further advances our mission to open up wealth, by making investing more accessible to more people worldwide." Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Financial Services, Microsoft, said: "Our partnership brings together Microsoft's AI and cloud technologies with FNZ's global platform and expertise in wealth management to deliver insights that will lead to more impactful and personalized experiences for advisors and their clients. Together, we're helping financial institutions lead as Frontier Firms by reimagining their operations through agentic AI, accelerating innovation, and unlocking new value across the wealth management ecosystem." FNZ is backed by some of the world's largest institutional shareholders, including Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (La Caisse), Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Generation Investment Management and Motive Partners. CONTACT: fnz@ View original content: SOURCE FNZ; MICROSOFT View original content: Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Cision Canada
14 hours ago
- Business
- Cision Canada
FNZ Announces Strategic Partnership with Microsoft to Accelerate the Transformation of the Wealth Management Industry
FNZ and Microsoft have entered a global, five-year strategic partnership to accelerate digital transformation across the wealth management industry. The partnership strengthens FNZ's global platform by enhancing its AI, automation and cloud capabilities. The goal is to drive value for financial institutions and their clients by enhancing operational efficiency, accelerating innovation and increasing speed to market. The collaboration includes co-innovation, joint go-to-market initiatives and the development of new AI-powered digital wealth solutions. LONDON, July 28, 2025 /CNW/ -- FNZ, a leading end-to-end wealth management platform has today announced a global, five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to transform the wealth management industry through technology, innovation and AI-driven digital solutions. The partnership combines FNZ's industry-leading technology, wealth management expertise and global reach with Microsoft's advanced AI capabilities, cloud infrastructure and engineering excellence. By integrating Microsoft Azure AI Foundry at the heart of its platform, FNZ is redefining how financial institutions, advisors and their clients interact by delivering more personalized, intelligent and resilient digital wealth management experiences. This collaboration with Microsoft accelerates this transformation by helping FNZ bring new solutions to market faster, enhance client outcomes, boost advisor productivity and drive innovation across industry. With more than 650 financial institution partners, over 26 million end investors and close to $2 trillion in assets under administration, FNZ brings scale to the partnership. This provides access to one of the largest wealth management data sets in the world, enabling the powerful application of AI, cloud technologies and analytics to deliver deeper insights, greater personalization and better outcomes for advisors, clients and institutions alike. Partnership Highlights Through the partnership, FNZ will work with Microsoft to deliver advanced AI tools, drive new technology development and collaborate on joint go-to-market initiatives, including: Creating a next-generation advisor and investor experience: FNZ will integrate Azure AI Foundry capabilities, including Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models, into its market-leading platform to provide enhanced personalization, greater efficiency and a next-generation user experience. Innovative applications for data and analytics: FNZ will utilize Microsoft Fabric to strengthen its data and analytics capabilities, delivering deeper insights tailored to the unique needs of wealth managers and advisors. Co-development and joint engineering: FNZ will develop new digital wealth solutions by embedding Azure AI Foundry into FNZ's global platform. Joint engineering teams will accelerate product innovation, enhance platform intelligence, and deliver secure, scalable services that strengthen risk management, compliance and resilience. FNZ will also deploy GitHub Copilot across its engineering teams to boost developer productivity and innovation. Resilience and scalability: By combining FNZ's market-leading platform and delivery capabilities with Microsoft's technologies and tooling, the partnership will help create more resilient, scalable and industrial-strength solutions for financial institutions. Enhancing operational efficiency: FNZ will also deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot and intelligent agents to support middle- and back-office processes. Global joint go-to-market: FNZ will collaborate with Microsoft on joint go-to-market activities, including the development and deployment of modular wealth solutions through multiple channels, including the Microsoft Marketplace, alongside coordinated global marketing initiatives and joint participation in industry events. Roman Regelman, Group President, FNZ, said:"FNZ has always been at the forefront of innovation in wealth-management technology. Partnering with Microsoft allows us to accelerate our AI-led roadmap and enhances our ability to deliver personalized, intelligent and resilient solutions to our clients, strengthening our position of leadership." "Together, we are not just upgrading technology. We are setting a new standard for how wealth management is delivered. Partnering with Microsoft further advances our mission to open up wealth, by making investing more accessible to more people worldwide." Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Financial Services, Microsoft, said:"Our partnership brings together Microsoft's AI and cloud technologies with FNZ's global platform and expertise in wealth management to deliver insights that will lead to more impactful and personalized experiences for advisors and their clients. Together, we're helping financial institutions lead as Frontier Firms by reimagining their operations through agentic AI, accelerating innovation, and unlocking new value across the wealth management ecosystem." FNZ is backed by some of the world's largest institutional shareholders, including Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (La Caisse), Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Generation Investment Management and Motive Partners.
Indian Express
11-07-2025
- Indian Express
Microsoft launches a new AI model, Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning, with 10 times faster responses
Microsoft has unveiled its newest AI model in the Phi family, Phi-mini-flash-reasoning. The Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning is an open, small language model (SLM) designed to retain high reasoning efficiency for edge devices, mobile applications, and other resource-constrained environments. The SLM is a compact AI model engineered for fast, on-device logical reasoning. 'This new model follows Phi-4-mini but is built on a new hybrid architecture that achieves up to 10 times higher throughput and a 2 to 3 times average reduction in latency, enabling significantly faster inference without sacrificing reasoning performance. Ready to power real-world solutions that demand efficiency and flexibility,' said Microsoft. The new model is inspired by its family member Phi-4-mini but is made for better performance. Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning is built on a new hybrid architecture that provides a throughput 10 times faster than its predecessor. It also reduced the average latency by two or three times, which enables a significantly faster inference without sacrificing the reasoning. The model is available on the NVIDIA API Catalog, Azure AI Foundry, and Hugging Face today. For organised, mathematically oriented reasoning tasks, the 3.8 billion parameter open model is optimised on high-quality synthetic data while maintaining support for a 64k token context length. In contrast to previous Phi models, Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning presents a new 'decoder-hybrid-decoder' architecture called SambaY, which combines a revolutionary Gated Memory Unit (GMU), sliding window attention, and state-space models (Mamba) to improve long-context performance and decrease decoding complexity. Microsoft claims that this configuration enables the model to add costly attention layers with lightweight GMUs while maintaining linear prefill calculation time. As a result, inference efficiency is much increased, which makes it suitable for usage on a single GPU or in latency-sensitive applications like adaptive learning apps and real-time teaching tools. Microsoft shared that the SLM Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning outperforms a model twice its size in tasks such as AIME24/25 and Math500 by providing a faster response time on the VLLM inference framework. With safety features including supervised fine-tuning (SFT), direct preference optimization (DPO), and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the release is in line with Microsoft's larger campaign for ethical AI. The business points out that all Phi models adhere to its fundamental values of openness, confidentiality, and inclusivity.
Business Wire
08-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Novata Announces Collaboration with Microsoft to Scale Sustainability Solutions for SMEs Globally
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Novata, the private markets' sustainability management partner, today announced a collaboration with Microsoft. Novata will leverage Microsoft Azure AI Foundry - including Azure AI Search - and Microsoft Fabric to unlock new efficiencies and capabilities in its sustainability solutions, data management and reporting process for businesses globally, giving small and mid-sized Microsoft customers and supply chain partners access to Novata's pioneering sustainability technology solutions. Collaboration Highlights: Expand Access to Novata's Platform: Microsoft will become a key sales partner for Novata across its SME channel, making it easier for businesses to access Novata's platform and solutions, including the Carbon Navigator. Co-Develop AI Technology: Novata and Microsoft will co-develop a range of AI-powered tools to simplify sustainability data collection and reporting for clients, as well as drive value creation. Strengthen Supply Chain Reporting: Novata will help Microsoft suppliers meet their climate reporting obligations, providing companies with the tools needed to track, manage, and report sustainability metrics with greater accuracy, efficiency and affordability. 'We are excited to deepen our relationship with Microsoft, a company that has not only revolutionized productivity but has also been a leader in addressing the climate crisis and leveraging AI for good,' said Alex Friedman, CEO and Co-Founder of Novata. 'This collaboration expands our global reach and strengthens our commitment to providing trusted technology that simplifies sustainability data management, helping companies unlock growth opportunities and enhance their resilience in a rapidly changing world.' Since its commercial launch in April 2022, Novata has experienced significant global demand for its all-in-one solution for sustainability data management, carbon accounting, regulatory reporting, and advisory services. Novata's platform is trusted and used by hundreds of GPs in private equity, growth equity, private credit, and venture capital, and more than 10,000 companies in all major geographies. Novata's clients manage over $12 trillion in assets. "We believe that addressing climate change is both a responsibility and an important business opportunity," said Jeremy Pitman, Director of Partner Development, Digital Natives and ISVs – Tech for Social Impact at Microsoft. "Our collaboration with Novata will enable a key segment of our clients to seamlessly and affordably integrate cutting-edge sustainability technology into their operations, empowering them to reduce their carbon footprints and meet their emissions goals.' Novata has been a portfolio company of Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund (CIF) since 2023, reinforcing the alignment of Novata's mission with Microsoft's commitment to advancing sustainability solutions. CIF is dedicated to accelerating the development and deployment of new climate innovations through both equity and debt capital. As a certified B-Corp and Public Benefit Corporation, Novata is on a mission to empower private markets to achieve a more sustainable and inclusive form of capitalism. To learn more about the collaboration, visit Novata's website and follow Novata on LinkedIn to keep up with the company's latest news and insights. About Novata Novata is the private markets' sustainability management partner. We empower hundreds of investment firms and over 10,000 companies to achieve their sustainability goals with our trusted data management platform and advisory practice—because it's good for business and it's good for the planet. Learn more at
Mint
07-07-2025
- Business
- Mint
Are firms wasting their money on AI agents?
Next Story Leslie D'Monte Most firms are still trying out AI agents, hailed by Big Tech as game changers. Analysts warn that many of these may be scrapped within two years as they hide high costs, uncertain returns, and weak risk controls. Can firms unlock value through human-AI agent teamwork? Google and Microsoft recently called AI agents the next big shift, unveiling Project Mariner, Gemini tools, Azure AI Foundry and NLWeb. Gift this article Why is Big Tech bullish on AI agents? Unlike basic chatbots, AI agents are autonomous systems that can plan, reason and complete complex multi-step tasks with minimal input—such as coding, data analysis and generating reports. Developers use them across IT, customer support, and enterprise workflows. Google and Microsoft recently called AI agents the next big shift, unveiling Project Mariner, Gemini tools, Azure AI Foundry and NLWeb. Salesforce, Amazon, IBM, and Meta are also building these platforms to automate workflows and enhance productivity. Nasscom has said 46% of firms are experimenting with AI agents, mainly in IT. Also read | Global poverty: How to deal with funding cuts What should firms be wary of? Many so-called agentic use cases today can be done with simpler tools, says Gartner, which predicts over 40% of such projects will be scrapped by 2027 due to high costs, vague value or weak risk controls. It adds that of thousands of vendors, only about 130 are seen as credible; and many engage in 'agent washing"—rebranding chatbots, robotic process automation (RPA), or assistants as agents without real autonomy. Most current systems also lack the maturity to deliver complex outcomes or sustained return on investment (ROI). Nasscom echoes this, noting 62% of enterprises are only doing in-house agent testing. Also read | How India's $12 bn R&D push could reshape its tech future How big is the market for AI agents? The global AI agents market, valued at $5.4 billion in 2024, is pegged to touch $50.3 billion by 2030, per Grand View Research. North America led with 40.1% revenue share, while Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing region. Machine learning, single-agent systems, and ready-to-deploy agents dominated through tech, system type, and deployment model, respectively. Also read | Shades of grey: Inside the world of pre-IPO trading How can companies unlock real value? AI agent adoption is hindered by privacy concerns, regulation gaps, and limited focus on talent readiness. Integration with legacy enterprise software remains complex and costly. Regardless, Gartner predicts 15% of daily work decisions will be made autonomously by agentic AI by 2028, up from 0% in 2024. It also urges agentic AI-use only when the returns are clear. Nasscom sees strong potential in real-time decision-making and agility. Key focus areas include data governance and AI risk protocols. Also read | China's economy beats the gloom. Can it do more? Can humans make AI agents more effective? Though AI agents are designed to be autonomous, Nasscom's recent study of over 100 global enterprises reveals how businesses are transitioning from early-stage GenAI applications towards more goal-oriented, human-plus, AI agentic systems. It believes that to scale responsibly, enterprises must prioritize human-AI collaboration, trust and data readiness. Nasscom adds that most (77%) firms adopt AI agents with a 'human-in-the-loop" approach, reflecting the need for oversight and contextual judgment. Also read | Residential sales: Where have all the buyers gone? Topics You May Be Interested In Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
