Technology

Affinidi and CardInfoLink Put the Missing Trust Layer for AI Agents into Production

Published

5 months ago

June 19, 2026

As businesses race to solve how AI agents transact, the layer that governs their behaviour has been missing. Affinidi and CardInfoLink have now put it into live production.

SINGAPORE, June 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CardInfoLink has deployed Agent Gateway on Agenzo, its agentic commerce platform for travel and hospitality merchants, making it what is believed to be the first commercial deployment in Asia to operate AI agents under an independent trust and governance layer. Every AI agent connecting to CardInfoLink’s merchants does so through a governed, auditable channel, on open standards, without disrupting the payment infrastructure beneath it. CardInfoLink operates live merchant-acquiring infrastructure across Asia, with more than 15 years in payment processing. Affinidi is an active contributor to the Linux Foundation and the standards bodies shaping the next wave of digital trust infrastructure.

With Agenzo, consumers can instruct AI agents to book a ride, a flight, or a hotel, confirming each purchase as they go. The Agent Gateway governs agent interactions in the background, creating a cryptographically verifiable record of all interactions and allowing only authorised agents to transact, with clear accountability established across all parties. All of this happens in the background, so the experience is unchanged for both the consumer and the merchant. For the business, the agent-readiness process is simplified for merchants by enabling faster implementation through simple configuration with no complex changes to existing systems. This allows them to open their services and products to AI agents through proper governance, and with trust handled at the system boundary rather than custom-built for every integration.

As AI agents begin to act inside commercial systems, the open question is not whether they can transact but who is accountable when they do. In its 2026 Future of Fraud Forecast, Experian named the inability to distinguish legitimate agents from malicious ones as the top fraud threat to businesses this year, warning that machine-to-machine transactions are being initiated without clear ownership of liability. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027, citing escalating costs, unclear value, and inadequate risk controls. In January 2026, Singapore’s IMDA introduced the world’s first governance framework for agentic AI, calling for bounded AI agent autonomy, human accountability, and technical controls as the recommended baseline. Agent Gateway, part of the Affinidi Trust Fabric Suite, is built to meet that bar.

“A shipping container reorganised global trade not because it was clever but because it was standardised. Agentic commerce needs the same: one trusted, standardised way for an AI agent to interact with a merchant. We run real infrastructure with real merchants and real consequences, so we could not add agents without it. The Agent Gateway gave us that, inside the systems we already use,” said Hyman Zhu, Co-Founder of CardInfoLink.

“AI Governance and payment processing are distinct problems and challenges, and they need separate infrastructure. The Agent Gateway is the layer that governs how an AI agent connects to the systems it acts on, independent of how the payment is settled. That layer has been missing from production. With CardInfoLink, it is now running, and every business putting agents to work will need it,” said Glenn Gore, CEO of Affinidi.

This deployment is the first live proof of an approach that the wider industry has been calling for, a layer that lets AI agents act inside real systems under governance built in from the start.

For Affinidi, agentic commerce for travel and hospitality is the first commercial use of a trust layer built to span industries, from payments to healthcare and beyond. Both companies see it as the start of an agent economy that is accountable by default.

About Agenzo

Agenzo is the AI payment brand developed by Evonet and CardInfoLink. It focuses on helping AI agents complete payments in a safe, simple, and compliant way. Agenzo connects AI agents, merchants, wallets, payment networks, and acquirers. It allows an AI agent to understand a customer’s payment intent, create an order, request payment authorisation, and complete the transaction through a trusted payment infrastructure. Agenzo has worked on agentic payment use cases such as travel booking, retail, EV charging, loyalty, QR payment, and merchant checkout. Its goal is to make AI-driven commerce easier for merchants, safer for consumers, and more practical for financial institutions and payment partners.

About CardInfoLink

CardInfoLink is a payment technology company founded in 2010. The company provides payment infrastructure, acquiring systems, gateway solutions, wallet technology, risk management tools, and payment security services for banks, payment institutions, merchants, and technology partners. CardInfoLink has served customers across Asia and supported many types of payment services, including card acquiring, QR payment, online payment, 3D Secure, settlement, dispute handling, and fraud prevention. Over the years, CardInfoLink has built strong experience in payment system development, cross-border payment connectivity, and financial-grade technology operations. The company continues to support banks, acquirers, PSPs, and merchants with reliable and flexible payment solutions.

About Agent Gateway

The Agent Gateway, part of the Affinidi Trust Fabric suite, is the trust and governance layer for agentic AI. Built on open standards to avoid vendor lock-in, it gives every AI agent a cryptographic identity, enforces policy at runtime, produces tamper-evident audit trails, and secures messaging across organisational and cloud boundaries. Agent Gateway is built for production workloads that demand multiple agentic flows within and across organisations, meeting the audit requirements of strict regulatory and governance models. Agent Gateway holds AI agents and human actors accountable, traceable, and auditable at scale, enabling businesses to extend their reach to more customers, more data, and more partners without sacrificing governance or control. To learn more, visit affinidi.com/trust-fabric.

About Affinidi

Affinidi is a Temasek-founded technology company building trust infrastructure for AI agents and the digital economy. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Singapore, with teams in Bangalore and Berlin, Affinidi provides builders and organisations with the tools to enable verifiable, privacy-preserving interactions between people, businesses, and the systems that serve them. Its technology spans governance infrastructure for AI agents, verifiable credential management, trust registries, and developer tooling, all built on open standards for full interoperability, to avoid vendor lock-in. An active contributor to the Linux Foundation, W3C, and the Decentralized Identity Foundation. Visit www.affinidi.com for more information.

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SOURCE Affinidi

Technology

Drake Software Expands Native AI Features for Tax Year 2026

Published

58 minutes ago

November 6, 2026

AI-powered tax document extraction, reimagined client intake and an in-workflow Assistant help tax professionals spend less time on manual work and more time with clients.

FRANKLIN, N.C., Nov. 5, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — This upcoming season, Drake Software®, a leader in professional tax preparation software, is putting more native AI capabilities to work right in the software that more than 70,000 tax professionals know and trust. With Drake SmartExtract™ (beta), a reimagined Drake Portals® experience and an AI Assistant built into Drake Tax® and Drake Tax Online®, preparers can reduce repetitive work and focus more of their time on their clients.

Developed by Drake in conjunction with its customers, these AI capabilities integrate natively with Drake’s tax preparation workflows and wider product suite. They are designed to help professionals move quickly to turn client documents into populated return fields and allow them to get answers instantly while working in a return, with the preparer firmly in control of all tax review and filing decisions.

“Tax professionals want time back during their busiest months, and they want technology they can trust,” said Noha Ghazouani, Vice President of Product Management at Drake Software. “We’re thoughtfully integrating AI into the familiar Drake workflows they already rely on, making it easier to get help with everyday tasks while keeping tax professionals in control. It’s about supporting their expertise, reducing manual work, and giving them more time to focus on their clients.”

Drake SmartExtract turns client tax documents into return-ready data

Drake SmartExtract applies AI to one of tax preparation’s most time-consuming tasks: moving information from client tax documents into a return. Available in beta for Drake Tax® and Drake Tax Online®, Drake SmartExtract extracts data from supported documents and maps it to the corresponding return fields. Preparers can review and adjust extracted information before adding it to the return, reducing manual rekeying.

Drake SmartExtract will be available for purchase in December at $5 per return, with package pricing as low as $1.50 per return when customers purchase 100 or more returns. Pricing is subject to change. Visit our website for more information.

Supported documents include Forms W-2 and 1098; Forms 1099-B, 1099-DA, 1099-DIV, 1099-INT, 1099-K, 1099-MISC, 1099-NEC and 1099-R; Consolidated 1099 statements; and Schedule K-1 (Form 1065).

For Tax Year 2026, planned form expansion includes Forms 1095-A, 1095-B, 1095-C, 1098-E, 1098-T, 1099-C, 1099-G, 1099-Q, 1099-S, 1099-SA, SSA-1099, W-2G, 5498-SA and 5498 for IRA contributions. Planned expansion also includes additional Schedule K-1 data for Forms 1065, 1041 and 1120-S, including related supplemental statements.

Planned Drake SmartExtract enhancements for Tax Year 2026 include deeper integration with Drake Portals and Drake Workflow. These enhancements will help firms move client documents through preparation more seamlessly, focus review on items that need attention, and identify returns that are ready for preparers.

A reimagined Drake Portals experience simplifies client intake

Drake Portals provides the secure, client-facing starting point for tax preparation. Redesigned for 2026, it makes it easier for clients to upload tax documents, complete requests and communicate securely with their preparer. Its AI-powered document ingestion recognizes and then categorizes supported tax documents and connects them to the appropriate checklist items, reducing the time staff spend sorting through files and tracking what has arrived.

The newly launched Guided Organizer™ helps practices onboard clients with customizable questions and personalized document checklists. Preparers can use a client’s prior-year return to help tailor the intake experience, making it clearer what the client needs to provide.

Together with Drake SmartExtract in supported Drake workflows, Portals seamlessly connects document collection with tax preparation: clients upload their documents securely, AI helps organize them, and Drake SmartExtract extracts supported tax data for preparer review and direct population into the return.

An AI Assistant answers questions within the return workflow

The all-new AI Assistant is built directly into the return preparation workflow in Drake Tax and Drake Tax Online, where preparers can ask questions in natural-language chat. Using the screen they’re viewing and information from the return, it answers tax questions, explains forms and alerts, clarifies how amounts were calculated, and suggests next steps. Preparers can get relevant guidance while continuing their work in Drake. A side-by-side view keeps the Assistant and the return visible together, so preparers can review guidance alongside their work without switching screens.

“Our focus is helping preparers accomplish more this season with the Drake software they already rely on,” said Ghazouani. “These capabilities reduce manual work while keeping tax professionals in charge of the return and the client relationship.”

Preparers should verify AI-assisted information against source documents and apply professional judgment before use.

Feature availability, supported documents, beta terms and pricing vary by product and release.

Explore these AI-powered features across Drake products under Drake Intelligence.

About Drake Software

Founded in 1977, Drake Software provides award-winning tax preparation software that helps tax professionals serve their clients with confidence. Its growing portfolio connects tax preparation with client intake, document sharing, signatures, payments and post-filing support, helping firms work more efficiently.

Media Contact

Colleen Woods Heikka
Sr. Director, Product Marketing
Colleen.woods@Taxact.com
+1-781-588-6339

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SOURCE Drake Software, LLC

Technology

webAI Launches webAI App for On-Device AI With No Per-Token Charges

Published

2 hours ago

November 5, 2026

The webAI app lets anyone build teams of AI experts that work across Slack, DocuSign, Hugging Face, Apple apps and more, while their files stay on their Mac.

AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 5, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — webAI today released the webAI app for Mac to the public for the first time. The app runs webAI’s new small reasoning models on the user’s own computer, so people can use AI on private work without sending files to the cloud or paying per token.

Most AI runs in the cloud, where usage is metered by tokens or capped by plan, and every document goes to someone else’s servers. webAI runs the model on the Mac itself. A user can work through a sensitive client proposal or an unfinished business plan, revise it as many times as they want, and never hit a token limit.

“With the webAI app, we’re making cloud AI optional,” said David Stout, CEO and co-founder of webAI. “Why should you have to send a private document to an online service just to get help with it? Your Mac can do the work. You keep control of what you share, and you can ask as many follow-up questions as you need without watching a token meter.”

In the app, users create Personas: AI experts with a role, knowledge and tools the user chooses. Several Personas can work together on the same task. A consultant could have one pull client requirements from project notes, a second draft the proposal and a third check the draft for anything missed.

Connectors work with the apps you already use, including Slack, DocuSign, Hugging Face and Apple apps. You control what each Persona can access and what actions it can take. A Persona can pull a client’s latest decisions from Slack, see which contracts are still unsigned in DocuSign, and draft follow-ups for your approval. You spend less time hunting for context and copying details between apps.

Watch the demo: https://www.webai.com/blog/webai-launches-webai-app-for-on-device-ai-with-no-per-token-charges

Availability: The webAI app is available now for Mac at webAI.com.

About webAI

webAI builds technology that lets people create, run, and control AI on their own devices.

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SOURCE webAI

Technology

Cheche Group Announces Extraordinary General Meeting

Published

3 hours ago

November 5, 2026

BEIJING, Nov. 5, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cheche Group Inc. (NASDAQ: CCG) (“Cheche” or the “Company”), China’s leading auto insurance technology platform, today announced that an extraordinary general meeting of the Company (the “Meeting”) will be held at 10 A.M. on November 25, 2026, Beijing time (9 P.M. on November 24, 2026, U.S. Eastern time) at 8/F, Desheng Hopson Fortune Plaza, 13-1 Deshengmenwai Avenue, Xicheng District, Beijing 100088, China. The Company has established the close of business on November 5, 2026, Eastern time (the “Record Date”), as the record date for determining shareholders entitled to notice of, and to vote at, the Meeting and any adjournments or postponements thereof. The purpose of the Meeting includes, among others:

(1) to approve by ordinary resolution the creation of a new class of ordinary shares of the Company designated as class C ordinary shares, each with a par value of US$0.00035 (the “Class C Ordinary Shares”), with the rights and restrictions set forth in the proposed third amended and restated memorandum and articles of association of the Company (the “New M&A”), including 300 votes per Class C Ordinary Share;

(2) to approve by ordinary resolution that the authorized share capital of the Company be amended:

(i) FROM: US$50,000 divided into 142,857,143 shares comprising (i) 114,285,714 class A ordinary shares of a par value of US$0.00035 each, and (ii) 28,571,429 class B ordinary shares of a par value of US$0.00035 each,

(ii) TO: US$50,000 divided into 142,857,143 shares comprising (i) 114,285,714 class A ordinary shares of a par value of US$0.00035 each; (ii) 18,571,429 class B ordinary shares of a par value of US$0.00035 each; and (iii) 10,000,000 class C ordinary shares of a par value of US$0.00035 each;

(3) to approve by ordinary resolution that 10,000,000 authorized but unissued class B ordinary shares of the Company of a par value of US$0.00035 each be re-classified as 10,000,000 class C ordinary shares of the Company of a par value of US$0.00035 each with the rights attached to it in the New M&A; and

(4) to approve by special resolution the amendment and restatement of the Company’s second amended and restated memorandum and articles of association currently in effect (the “Current M&A”) be replaced in their entirety with the New M&A to provide for, among other things, the creation and rights of the Class C Ordinary Shares.

Copies of the notice of the Meeting and the form of proxy are available on the Company’s corporate investor relations website at https://ir.chechegroup.com/.

Safe Harbor Statements

This press release includes “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of words such as “estimate,” “plan,” “project,” “forecast,” “intend,” “will,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “seek,” “target” or other similar expressions that predict or indicate future events or trends or that are not statements of historical matters. These forward-looking statements also include, but are not limited to, statements regarding existing and new partnerships and customer relationships, projections, estimation, and forecasts of revenue and other financial and performance metrics, projections of market opportunity and expectations, the Company’s ability to scale and grow its business, the Company’s advantages and expected growth, and its ability to source and retain talent, as applicable. These statements are based on various assumptions, whether or not identified in this press release, and on the current expectations of the Company’s management and are not predictions of actual performance. These statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the Company’s actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to materially differ from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Further information regarding these and other risks, uncertainties, or factors is included in the Company’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Although the Company believes that it has a reasonable basis for each forward-looking statement contained in this press release, the Company cautions you that these statements are based on a combination of facts and factors currently known and projections of the future, which are inherently uncertain. The forward-looking statements in this press release represent the views of the Company as of the date of this press release. Subsequent events and developments may cause those views to change. Except as may be required by law, the Company does not undertake any duty to update these forward-looking statements.

About Cheche Group Inc.

Established in 2014 and headquartered in Beijing, China, Cheche is a leading auto insurance technology platform with a nationwide network of around 108 branches licensed to distribute insurance policies across 25 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in China. Capitalizing on its leading position in auto insurance transaction services, Cheche has evolved into a comprehensive, data-driven technology platform that offers a full suite of services and products for digital insurance transactions and insurance SaaS solutions in China. Learn more at https://www.chechegroup.com/en.

Cheche Group Inc.:
IR@chechegroup.com

Crocker Coulson
crocker.coulson@aumadvisors.com
(646) 652-7185

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SOURCE Cheche Group Inc.