The 2026 Tearsheet AI Innovation Awards: Recognizing the Builders of AI-Powered Finance

AI is moving from a promising capability to a core layer of financial services infrastructure, with banks, fintechs, and technology providers racing to turn experimentation into meaningful applications.

The Tearsheet AI Innovation Awards recognize the organizations using AI to rethink products, processes, customer interactions, and the broader future of finance.

This year’s winners represent the companies moving beyond the hype — applying AI in ways that create tangible value and shape where financial services go next.

2026 Winners of the AI Innovation Awards

Best Chatbot: Fifth Third Bank

Fifth Third Bank earns the Best Chatbot Award for transforming its AI assistant from a traditional support bot into a conversational entry point for digital banking. Jeanie, embedded within the bank’s mobile app used by more than 2.4 million monthly customers, helps users complete more than 150 banking tasks through natural-language interactions, from replacing a debit card and disputing transactions to sending money and finding a banker. The results have been measurable: intent recognition has improved from roughly 20% to 90%, while self-service resolution has climbed from 3% to 42%, enabling more customers to resolve issues without changing channels. Fifth Third has also expanded Jeanie’s Spanish-language self-service capabilities, making the experience more accessible to a broader customer base. Rather than treating AI as a standalone feature, the bank has woven it into the core customer journey, creating a simpler, more intuitive digital banking experience while laying the groundwork for more agentic interactions in the future.

Data Innovation Award: Plaid

Plaid wins the Data Innovation Award for redefining how financial data is transformed into actionable intelligence across lending, fraud prevention, and financial decision-making. The company has built AI foundation models and network intelligence that interpret real-time financial behaviour across its ecosystem of more than 12,000 financial institutions and 9,000 apps, enabling more accurate credit, fraud, and payment risk decisions. Its transaction foundation model improved income classification accuracy by 48%, its sequential model reduced credit default risk by 13.6% at the same approval rate, while LendScore, Plaid’s real-time cash flow-based credit risk score, reduced lending risk by 41% without sacrificing approvals. By building an intelligence layer on top of financial data, Plaid is enabling institutions to make faster, fairer, and more accurate decisions.

AI Startup of the Year: Titan

Titan wins the AI Startup of the Year Award for building AI specifically for the realities of regulated banking. The company has developed a banking-native AI platform that combines domain-specific models, a proprietary banking context layer, and governed AI agents to automate workflows across risk, compliance, underwriting, and operations while maintaining auditability and regulatory oversight. Since emerging from stealth in late 2025, Titan has tripled its annual recurring revenue as financial institutions increasingly replace ungoverned AI tools with a platform designed to be explainable, traceable, and examiner-ready, demonstrating that AI adoption in banking requires not just intelligence, but governance.

AI Company of the Year: Casap 

Casap takes home the AI Company of the Year Award for applying agentic AI to one of the most operationally complex challenges in financial services: payment disputes and first-party fraud. Rather than simply routing cases, the platform automates the entire dispute lifecycle – from claim intake and evidence gathering to fraud detection, chargeback filing, and customer communications – while maintaining regulatory compliance and a fully auditable record of every decision. At Chartway Federal Credit Union, average dispute resolution times dropped from up to 90 days to 12 days, per-claim costs fell nearly 90%, write-offs declined 72%, and chargeback win rates improved 95%. Founded in 2023 by former Robinhood and Chime product leaders, Casap has brought advanced, enterprise-grade AI capabilities to credit unions, regional banks, and fintechs, showing how agentic AI can fundamentally modernize complex banking operations.

Best Alternative Data Provider: Carpe

Carpe wins the Best Alternative Data Provider Award for helping insurers make faster, more informed underwriting decisions with AI-driven intelligence built specifically for small commercial insurance. The platform continuously analyzes signals from company websites, review platforms, social media, and commercial sources to build a real-time view of more than 50 million businesses, covering roughly 90% of insurable U.S. small businesses. Insurers have reduced underwriting touches by 20%, cut review times by 15-30 minutes per application, lowered adverse selection by 40%, and improved loss ratios by 1.5 points. By embedding real-time alternative data directly into underwriting workflows, Carpe gives carriers a more accurate picture of business risk, helping them quote faster, segment more precisely, and improve underwriting performance without compromising risk discipline.

Best Use of Agentic AI: Intuit

Intuit wins the Best Use of Agentic AI Award for turning QuickBooks into a connected intelligence layer that functions as an autonomous financial operating system for small businesses. Powered by Intuit Intelligence, embedded AI agents work across accounting, payroll, payments, invoicing, cash flow, and tax to proactively execute end-to-end workflows, helping businesses get paid faster, simplify compliance, and reduce manual work, all while human experts ensure quality. Users save an average of 13 hours per month; AI-powered invoicing helps businesses get paid four days faster, and the Accounting Agent cuts reconciliation time by 66% while improving accuracy. By embedding autonomous AI across core financial workflows, Intuit has shown that agentic AI is evolving from a productivity tool into an operating layer that gives businesses the clarity, control, and confidence to run and grow, with the ability to run parts of a business actively.

AI Product of the Year: Cascading AI

Cascading AI (Casca) wins the AI Product of the Year Award for reimagining small business lending with an AI-native loan origination platform. The platform embeds AI agents across the lending process, automating more than 100 manual steps, analyzing thousands of pages of financial documents in minutes, and performing over 40 credit and KYB checks while keeping humans in the loop. As a result, banks have automated up to 90% of lending workflows, reduced loan processing times from months to as little as one to four days, and increased lead conversions. By transforming one of banking’s most manual and time-intensive processes, Casca is making small business lending faster, more scalable, and more accessible.

Best AI Fraud & Risk Management Solution: SEON

SEON wins the Best AI Fraud & Risk Management Solution Award for rethinking fraud prevention around unified intelligence. Instead of layering AI onto fragmented systems, SEON brings together more than 900 real-time risk signals, explainable AI, fraud and AML workflows, and an open MCP architecture into a single platform, giving risk teams the context to catch AI-generated fraud and support both human and agentic risk decisions without adding friction to the customer experience. Its explainable AI cuts fraud investigations by more than 50%, while customers like TurboTenant have reduced payment fraud alerts requiring manual review by 80% while uncovering account takeover patterns their previous systems missed. By creating a shared intelligence layer for fraud and compliance, SEON is helping fintechs, eCommerce, and betting and gaming organizations make faster, more informed risk decisions in an increasingly AI-driven landscape.

Congratulations to this year’s finalists across the AI Innovation Awards categories:

• Best Alternative Data Provider: Plaid
• AI Startup of the Year: F2
• Best Use of Agentic AI: nCino and Lili
• AI Product of the Year: Intuit and Lili
• Best AI Fraud & Risk Management Solution: Plaid and Carpe
• Data Innovation Award: Teachers Federal Credit Union and Shield Financial Compliance