Technology

Pioneering Higher Education Technology Firm Stellic Named 2026 Student Success Platform of the Year

Published

1 hour ago

June 11, 2026

Award-winning platform is now helping more than 1 million students navigate complex academic journeys, make informed decisions, and chart clearer pathways to graduation and career success

SAN MATEO, Calif., June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Stellic—the developer of the popular academic planning and degree management platform that now serves more than 1 million students across more than 100 colleges and universities—today announced that it has been selected as winner of the “Student Success Platform of the Year” award by EdTech Breakthrough. The award program, now in its eighth year, recognizes breakthrough educational technology products and companies reshaping how the world learns from K-12 and higher education to corporate L&D and lifelong learning.

“Every student makes hundreds of decisions on the way to a degree, and most of them are harder than they should be,” said Sabih Bin Wasi, co-founder and CEO of Stellic. “The information exists, it’s just not connected in a way students, or staff, can actually use. That’s the problem our team and our partners show up to work on every day. This recognition reflects the real demand for that kind of clarity in higher education, and our dedication to delivering it.”

At a time when more than 40 million Americans have some college but no credential, and student pathways increasingly span multiple institutions, transfer credits, and learning experiences, navigating higher education has become more complex than ever. Students are often asked to make high-stakes academic decisions with information scattered across disconnected systems, creating barriers that can delay progress and derail completion.

Stellic brings critical information together in a student-facing platform that helps learners understand degree requirements, track progress, evaluate transfer credits, identify the right courses and connect with support before small obstacles become significant barriers to completion. The platform helps students make the hundreds of decisions that shape their college experience with greater confidence by providing a clear view of their progress, options, and opportunities, while giving institutions the insights needed to remove barriers and improve outcomes. Stellic’s suite of tools includes Progress for degree management, Care for proactive advising, and Explore for transfer credit evaluation.

Stellic is redefining academic planning and degree management by helping institutions connect the data, decisions, and support systems that shape a student’s path from enrollment through graduation. Colleges and universities are seeing measurable results using the platform.

At Santa Monica College, the platform helped identify more than 5,400 previously unrecognized degrees and certificates, expanding recognition of student achievement. At Carnegie Mellon University, approximately 80% of students use Stellic to navigate degree requirements and academic planning. At Texas Christian University, 90% student adoption has supported more than 40,000 academic planning actions and 23,000 advising appointments, helping create a more connected and proactive advising experience.

Over the past year, more than 14 million interactions moved through the Stellic platform, including 11.5 million student sessions and 2.5 million faculty and staff sessions. Those interactions represent students mapping degree pathways, evaluating transfer credits, selecting courses, tracking progress toward graduation, and making the everyday decisions that determine whether they stay on track.

The recognition caps a year of continued growth and momentum for Stellic. Today, more than 100 colleges and universities—including community colleges, public and private institutions, and leading research universities—rely on Stellic’s platform to help students make informed decisions, navigate degree requirements, and stay on track to completion.

EdTech Breakthrough’s competitive selection process, evaluated by a panel of industry experts, assesses entries across six core criteria—innovation, performance, ease of use, functionality, value, and impact. This year’s award program drew a record number of nominations from innovators across more than 20 countries, with thousands of entries evaluated across categories spanning the full learner lifecycle—from student engagement and classroom management to workforce development, corporate learning, and postsecondary student success.

For more information on how to work with Stellic or request a demo, visit stellic.com.

About Stellic. Stellic is a leading student success and academic planning platform used by over 100 higher education institutions worldwide and more than 1 million students. The company empowers students, advisors, and administrators with modern tools to streamline degree progress, automate transfer evaluations, and make data-informed decisions that drive completion and engagement. Learn more at www.stellic.com.

About EdTech Breakthrough: Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the EdTech Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in educational technology products, companies and people. The EdTech Breakthrough Awards provide a platform for public recognition around the achievements of breakthrough educational technology in categories including remote learning, student engagement, school administration, career preparation, language learning, STEM education and more. For more information, visit EdTechBreakthrough.com.

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SOURCE Stellic

Technology

SmartOrg releases Version 10.x of its Decision Intelligence platform

Published

29 minutes ago

June 11, 2026

New release expands SmartOrg’s Decision Intelligence platform with a cleaner, more configurable experience and new product capabilities.

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — SmartOrg, Inc., a Palo Alto-based provider of Decision Intelligence solutions, today announced the release of version 10.x of its software platform, with its standard products Innovation Navigator® and Portfolio Navigator® now deployed by configuring modules on a newly integrated platform.

“This release is really about giving customers a better experience and more flexibility in how they apply the platform to their specific decision challenges.”

Combined in other ways, these modules support deployments optimized for other contexts.

“This release is really about giving customers a better experience and more flexibility in how they apply the platform to their specific decision challenges,” said David Matheson, President and CEO of SmartOrg. “We’re delighted to see customers using SmartOrg’s Decision Intelligence Platform in more targeted ways, for example in Technology Assessment, Energy Exploration and Drug Discovery. Version 10.x gives them a cleaner, more configurable foundation for doing that work.”

The release includes major updates to Innovation Navigator®, including flexible brainstorming canvases, enhanced Learning Plan modules, and upgraded Discovery Grid visualizations. These enhancements help innovation teams capture ideas, organize learning activities, and focus attention on the uncertainties that matter most.

Portfolio Navigator® also receives significant new capabilities, including a Maturity Matrix, Probability of Success calculator, and portfolio goal analysis. These features help leaders better assess projects, compare them, and support portfolio decisions.

“Version 10.x is part of our ongoing commitment to keeping SmartOrg’s software current, useful, and easier for customers to apply,” said Dave Wachenschwanz, Director of Development at SmartOrg. “The platform has significant upgrades in its user interface, improving consistency and usability.”

To see highlights of the new release, SmartOrg has published a short video overview from its development team that you can watch here: https://bit.ly/4xdA7QY

About SmartOrg

SmartOrg helps innovation, R&D, and strategy teams convert uncertainty to opportunity. Its software products—Innovation Navigator® and Portfolio Navigator®—apply quantitative methods to prioritize learning, build confidence in the business case, and guide investment decisions at both the project and portfolio levels to help organizations meet their growth objectives.

Media Contact

Doug Williams, SmartOrg, Inc., 1 3399270834, dwilliams@smartorg.com, https://smartorg.com

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SOURCE SmartOrg, Inc.

Technology

Cathay Financial Holdings Leverages Open-Source Small Language Models to Identify Customer Intent

Published

29 minutes ago

June 11, 2026

Fine-tuning Small Language Models to Better Understand Local Financial Service Contexts, Domain Terminology, and Ambiguous Customer Queries

TAIPEI, June 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — To enhance operational efficiency and customer experience, Cathay Financial Holdings (Cathay FHC) continues to advance the application of generative AI in financial services through its generative AI technical framework, GAIA, and AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) strategy. Building on last year’s validation of large language models (LLMs) for financial applications, Cathay FHC recently unveiled its latest AI research findings at NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026, demonstrating how open-source small language models (SLMs) can be fine-tuned for customer intent classification and applied to future financial service scenarios.

The study evaluated several leading open-source models from Meta, TAIDE, TAME, NVIDIA and OpenAI. Preliminary results showed that, under the testing framework, fine-tuned SLMs may reduce dependence on complex prompt engineering and vector retrieval modules, potentially simplifying system architecture while lowering future operational and maintenance complexity.

The findings indicated that, when combined with carefully designed financial-domain datasets and targeted model fine-tuning, SLMs can further improve model stability, inference efficiency, and deployment controllability. In customer intent classification, the fine-tuned SLM achieved performance close to mainstream closed-source LLMs, approaching that of leading proprietary LLMs, providing enterprises with a practical reference for evaluating AI model training and deployment strategies.

From a data governance and privacy perspective, the study adopted a fully synthetic data approach, ensuring that no real customer information was used during model training. Through techniques including service-function clustering, single-intent and multi-intent dataset design, Taiwan-context localization, and keyword expansion, Cathay FHC strengthened the model’s ability to understand local financial service contexts, industry-specific terminology, and ambiguous customer queries.

Potential future applications include mortgage balance inquiries, credit card payment assistance, and branch service navigation, laying the groundwork for intelligent search, service routing, and next-generation customer engagement experiences.

From a technical architecture standpoint, Cathay FHC integrated NVIDIA AI tools—including NVIDIA NeMo Customizer, NVIDIA NeMo Curator, and NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM—together with NVIDIA Hopper architecture computing resources to support data generation, model fine-tuning, inference optimization, and experimental evaluation. Leveraging NVIDIA AI ecosystem, Cathay FHC continues to strengthen its capabilities in financial-domain model development, data governance, and application validation.

In recent years, Cathay FHC has steadily expanded AI innovation across a wide range of financial scenarios, building scalable technological foundations spanning internal process optimization, customer service enhancement, financial knowledge understanding, and model governance. As financial institutions navigate an increasingly regulated environment, stringent data governance requirements, and rapidly evolving customer expectations, Cathay FHC remains committed to advancing AI research in a compliant, secure, and resilient manner.

Looking ahead, Cathay FHC will continue exploring long-context classification, advanced financial document understanding, and cross-scenario AI applications. By developing model training and deployment approaches tailored to the financial sector, the company aims to accelerate innovation and create more intelligent, efficient, and customer-centric financial services.

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SOURCE Cathay Financial Holdings

Technology

First Advantage Set to Join S&P SmallCap 600

Published

29 minutes ago

June 11, 2026

NEW YORK, June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — First Advantage Corporation (NASD: FA) will replace Kennedy-Wilson Holdings Inc. (NYSE: KW) in the S&P SmallCap 600 effective prior to the opening of trading on Tuesday, June 16. A consortium led by KW’s CEO with Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited (TSE: FFH) is acquiring Kennedy-Wilson Holdings in a deal expected to close soon, pending final closing conditions.

Following is a summary of the changes that will take place prior to the open of trading on the effective date:

Effective Date

Index Name

Action

Company Name

Ticker

GICS Sector

June 16, 2026

S&P SmallCap 600

Addition

First Advantage

Industrials

June 16, 2026

S&P SmallCap 600

Deletion

Kennedy-Wilson Holdings

Real Estate

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S&P Dow Jones Indices is a division of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI), which provides essential intelligence for individuals, companies, and governments to make decisions with confidence. For more information, visit www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

S&P Dow Jones Indices
index_services@spglobal.com

Media Inquiries
spdji.comms@spglobal.com

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SOURCE S&P Dow Jones Indices