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Continuous Improvement & Communications

CreatorOS has launched Nutcake, an artificial intelligence assistant for creator marketing, available free to brands and agencies.

The launch marks a shift for the London-based business beyond campaign management software into tools that automate more of the day-to-day work involved in influencer campaigns. Nutcake sits on top of CreatorOS’s existing platform, which has been used to run campaigns for brands including McDonald’s, Three, Crocs, Subway and Channel 4.

Nutcake is designed to handle tasks across strategy, creator discovery, brief writing, project management, contracting, payments and campaign delivery. Brands and agencies can enter campaign objectives, and the system will suggest creator styles and formats, produce a brief, and track workflow through to delivery and performance analysis.

Campaign automation

A central part of the launch is a competitive intelligence tool, available to brands and agencies free from the outset. It tracks creator collaborations in real time and is intended to help marketing teams monitor rival activity as sponsored posts go live.

According to CreatorOS, the data set behind the service already includes more than 500,000 sponsored #ad posts, with 50,000 more added each week, as well as a further 100,000 brand posts. The data is used to identify trends in content formats, hooks and messaging within specific categories.

Alongside the product launch, CreatorOS has made 15,000 vetted UK creator profiles publicly available on the platform. The database is aimed at brands and agencies looking for professional creators and includes direct agent contacts, rate card guidance and additional profile data.

The move reflects broader demand from marketers for tools that reduce manual work in creator campaigns, particularly as brands manage larger rosters of influencers across several platforms. It also places CreatorOS among a growing number of businesses applying artificial intelligence to advertising operations, research and workflow management.

Creator features

The platform also includes features aimed at creators. They can share audience data directly from Meta and TikTok APIs, communicate with brand partners through a WhatsApp integration and send pitches to brands through the platform.

CreatorOS has also added contract guidance tools intended to help creators understand agreement terms and negotiate fairer arrangements. These services are designed to improve the working relationship between brands commissioning campaigns and the people producing the content.

Agency growth

CreatorOS was founded in 2020 by Tim Mitchell and Will Cookson. Since then, it has worked with London agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Lucky Generals and BBH, according to the company.

Mitchell outlined the company’s position on the launch.

“The brands getting the most out of creator marketing are the ones who can move quickly, brief well and manage relationships at scale, and that’s exactly what Nutcake is built to deliver. What makes Nutcake powerful is what’s behind it: a connected ecosystem of brands and creators, years of proprietary data and a platform that has already delivered campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the market,” said Tim Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer, CreatorOS.

“Nutcake is the agentic layer that makes all of that work harder and faster for the people running campaigns day to day. When it writes a brief, identifies a creator or keeps a campaign on track, it’s drawing on something real. That’s what sets it apart,” added Mitchell.

KAREN JOY BACUDO

Finance Editor

Aveni has raised £12 million in a funding round led by PXN Ventures.

Existing investors Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, Puma Growth Partners and Scottish Enterprise also participated.

The Edinburgh-based artificial intelligence fintech will use the money to develop its Unified Assurance Platform and support the launch of Agent Assure and Agent Approve, products aimed at assessing the conduct risk of AI agents that interact with consumers in financial services.

Aveni sells software to banks, wealth managers and financial advisers in the UK. Its existing products include Aveni Assist, used by advisers and operations teams, and Aveni Detect, a compliance monitoring tool.

The new products are intended to address a gap emerging as financial services groups test and deploy so-called agentic AI. Firms are under pressure to demonstrate that customer outcomes remain consistent regardless of whether interactions are handled by staff or software systems.

Aveni argues that oversight of AI agents is becoming a central issue for regulated firms as adoption widens. Agent Assure extends the monitoring approach used in Aveni Detect, allowing companies to review AI agent interactions alongside those handled by humans through a single system.

That structure forms part of what Aveni calls its Unified Assurance Platform, which combines adviser support tools, compliance monitoring and approval workflows for AI agents. The company also uses its own financial services language models, known as FinLLM, built on UK sector data.

Founded in 2018 as a University of Edinburgh start-up, Aveni has focused on wealth management, financial advice and banking. It says it has spent more than seven years developing products and running live deployments in the sector.

The round brings in PXN Ventures as a new lead investor while maintaining support from existing backers, including major financial institutions and Scottish Enterprise.

Joseph Twigg, Chief Executive Officer of Aveni, said the deal would help the company widen its product range as demand for AI oversight tools grows in financial services.

“The continued confidence shown by our existing investors is a powerful endorsement of the direction we’re taking. We have spent seven years building the models, the experience and the regulatory relationships that make us uniquely qualified to solve the hardest problem in AI adoption right now: how do you assure the conduct of an AI agent interacting with a real consumer? Agent Assure is our answer, and this investment accelerates our ability to deliver our full platform at scale,” said Twigg.

PXN Ventures said the investment reflects its growth outlook in AI tools tailored for advisers and regulated customer interactions. The firm invests in businesses across the northern UK, and the deal adds another Scottish company to its portfolio.

“Aveni is fast becoming financial advisers’ go-to tool for helping them leverage AI in a safe and appropriate way. The team now has seven years of live deployments and proprietary models built within the UK financial services sector. Its infrastructure is answering one of the biggest questions in AI adoption: how to manage real client interactions and build trust, so advisers can focus on what they do best. We’re proud to support Aveni through multiple PXN funds, including the Praetura Growth VCT, as it continues its growth journey and demonstrates the world-class fintech capabilities of the north of the UK,” Alastair Moore at PXN Ventures said.

Regulatory focus

Regulators have made clear that firms will be judged on customer outcomes rather than on whether a human or a machine handled an interaction. That places greater emphasis on monitoring systems that can review both channels against the same standards.

Aveni is involved in the Financial Conduct Authority’s Supercharged Sandbox programme and has created an Agent Assurance Expert Council focused on AI governance. It is also working with regulators and industry bodies on standards for AI use in financial services.

Puma Growth Partners, one of the returning investors, said Aveni is well-placed as financial institutions seek clearer controls over AI agents. The investor also pointed to the company’s position within Scotland’s technology sector.

“The impact Aveni is making in deploying AI into UK financial services is already significant, and we continue to see a substantial growth opportunity ahead. With agentic AI adoption accelerating and regulators rightly focused on consistent consumer outcomes, robust assurance for AI agents is rapidly becoming a core requirement for the sector. As a standout example of Scotland’s growing strength as a technology hub, Aveni is well placed to lead this next phase. We are delighted to invest again from our Scotland office to support Joseph, Jamie, Professor Lexi Birch and the wider team as they scale the Unified Assurance Platform and launch Agent Assure,” said Ben Leslie,  Investment Director, Puma Growth Partners.

Lloyds Banking Group also reiterated its backing as both an investor and partner.

“Agentic AI represents a significant opportunity for financial services to enhance customer experience through more personalised interactions. Aveni is helping firms adopt this technology in a safe and responsible way. We’re pleased to continue supporting Aveni’s ongoing development through investment and partnership,” Kirsty Rutter, Fintech Investment Director at Lloyds Banking Group, said.

KAREN JOY BACUDO

Finance Editor

The Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology has launched a national Coalition on Financial Inclusion, starting with the development of a supported payments framework for people who need help managing their money.

Backed by HM Treasury, the initiative brings together banks, fintechs, regulators, charities, consumer groups and people with lived experience. Its first focus is a model that would let individuals make everyday payments while a trusted third party provides oversight and support.

The work is aimed initially at adults with a learning disability, though CFIT believes the model could also be relevant to people with dementia, fluctuating mental health conditions, acquired brain injuries and some neurodivergent people. Many who need help with day-to-day spending currently face a choice between formal legal arrangements and informal methods such as sharing cards, PINs or passwords.

This gap has become a growing concern for financial firms and charities because informal arrangements can expose customers to fraud, financial abuse and loss of control. It also creates liability and visibility issues for institutions with little formal insight into how support is being provided.

Building on Nemo

The coalition builds on work by Project Nemo, a disability inclusion initiative in financial services. Over the past two years, Project Nemo has worked with the learning disability community, charities, regulators and financial institutions to explore how people can retain independence while receiving practical support with payments.

CFIT said 11 million UK adults, or about 19.3% of the adult population, already help someone with digital banking. That suggests a broad market need that extends well beyond the coalition’s initial target group.

CFIT has previously convened coalitions on Open Finance, Digital Company ID, SME Access to Finance and Open Property. This latest programme is its fifth national coalition and reflects a wider policy push around financial inclusion.

A core part of the work will be designing a trust and consent framework that allows a customer to appoint a trusted third party to support payments without removing autonomy or requiring a full Lasting Power of Attorney or similar formal arrangement.

The second workstream will focus on a proof of concept and pilot. The coalition plans to test supported payment journeys in real-world settings and may use Open Banking infrastructure to do so.

Policy backing

The Treasury has linked the work to the Government’s Financial Inclusion Strategy, signalling official interest in moving the issue from research and advocacy into implementation.

“Nobody should be locked out of the chance to build a better future, which is why CFIT’s work is vital in helping to support people manage their money. The Government’s Financial Inclusion Strategy recognised the important contribution Project Nemo has made in highlighting how inclusive design can support greater financial independence, so that people can participate fully in the economy and manage their finances safely and confidently,” Rachel Blake, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, said.

Anna Wallace, Chief Executive Officer of CFIT, said the current system leaves too many consumers without a safe option for everyday support.

 “This Coalition is about tackling a systemic gap in the financial system: today, too many people who need support managing money are forced to rely on unsafe and unscalable workarounds. By bringing together industry, regulators, government and lived experience, we have an opportunity to build practical supported payment solutions that can be implemented safely and consistently across the market. Focusing innovation on underserved consumers will ultimately help create a more inclusive, resilient and trusted financial system for everyone,” said Wallace.

Project Nemo’s founders have argued that the issue has been visible for some time but has lacked an industry-wide structure for delivery. The coalition model is intended to provide that structure by bringing multiple parts of the financial system into a single programme.

“Project Nemo began two years ago with a belief that disability inclusion and accessibility needed to move from the margins to the mainstream of financial services innovation. Since then, through our groundbreaking films, our research report with Nationwide and our codesigned app by CI&T showing what the learning disability community were looking for, we have seen the industry come together in ways we could not have imagined. By combining Project Nemo’s community-led work with CFIT’s coalition delivery model and HM Treasury support, we now have an opportunity to unlock the sticking points to providing better solutions that can make a meaningful difference to people’s everyday lives and ensure that the future of financial services works for everyone,” said Joanne Dewar, Co-Founder of Project Nemo.

For consumers and firms alike, the central question is whether the coalition can produce a regulated model that preserves independence without relying on unsafe informal practices. CFIT said the pilot will gather feedback from consumers, carers and supporters, assess operational feasibility for financial institutions, and identify barriers to wider adoption.