Banorte was recognized in both, Corporate/Institutional Digital Banking and Consumer Digital Banking categories at regional and national levels.

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Global Finance recognized Banorte in the Corporate/Institutional Digital Banking and Consumer Digital Banking categories in both Mexico and Latin America for its leadership in digital transformation.

Highlights include the strength of its strategy, customer adoption of its solutions, the breadth of its product offering, and the quality of the experience it provides through its digital channels.

Carlos Hank Gonzalez, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Grupo Financiero Banorte, said: “Our commitment is to continue innovating to deliver the best hyper-personalized banking experience in Mexico, combining technology with a human-centered approach”.

Likewise, in the Corporate/Institutional category, Banorte was named Best Corporate/Institutional Digital Bank in Mexico and received awards in the Best Online Portal/User Experience (UX) and Best Online Treasury and Cash Management Services subcategories in both Latin America and Mexico. It was also recognized for the Best Digital Payments Strategy in Mexico.

In addition, in the Consumer Digital Banking category, Banorte was recognized in both Latin America and Mexico in the Best in Transformation subcategory.

Through its hyper-personalization strategy and human-digital approach, Banorte enhances its customers’ banking experience by offering faster, more secure, and more personalized services.

About the World’s Best Digital Banks 2026 Awards

The awards are granted by Global Finance in collaboration with Infosys, a global consulting and technology services company. Founded in 1987, Global Finance has a presence in 163 countries and an audience comprising senior corporate and financial executives. Renowned for its international market analysis, the publication presents annual awards that have become a standard of excellence within the global financial community.

About Banorte

Grupo Financiero Banorte (GFNorte) provides financial services to individuals and businesses through its banking, brokerage, fund management, insurance, pension, leasing and factoring, warehousing, portfolio management, and remittance operations.

GFNorte also includes Afore XXI Banorte, one of the country’s leading retirement fund administrators by assets under management. GFNorte is a publicly traded company listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange’s benchmark index and has 35,701 employees, 1,229 branches, 12,318 ATMs, 268,877 point-of-sale terminals, and 46,191 banking correspondent locations.

LinkedIn: Grupo Financiero Banorte

X: @GFBanorte_mx

Facebook: Grupo Financiero Banorte

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SOURCE Banorte

The Canadian government will support this new initiative to accelerate the research & development of open source AI, providing a collaborative, safe and accessible alternative to proprietary models.

MONTRÉAL, Sept. 17, 2026 /CNW/ — Today at ALL IN, Canada’s largest AI and technology event, Mila and Mozilla announced a new initiative and fresh investment to build an open source AI foundation layer that enables organizations and institutions to own and operate advanced AI systems locally, ensuring full control over their technology and data.

Doubling down on its commitment to open source AI, the Government of Canada announced its support for the initiative. Mila will lead the technical delivery and coordination of the project, while Mozilla contributes technical expertise and provided the initial $5 million investment to kick off the project. Hypertec is committing an additional $1 million in first-year funding to accelerate initial Canadian deployments of the open source AI foundation layer on Hypertec hardware.

Founding this new initiative in Canada is a deliberate bet, and a distinctly Canadian one. The same country that took an early chance on deep learning when few others believed in it is now betting that the next generation of AI will be built on open source AI, and that Canada can help build it.

Mila and Mozilla will lead the work together: Mila drawing on a world-class community of close to 2,000 researchers and professionals, Mozilla as technical partner from industry, bringing twenty-five years of experience stewarding open infrastructure others build on. Mila and Mozilla are actively engaging new partners, inviting companies, research institutions, funders, governments and developers to join and support this work.

What’s Being Built

The goal is simple: make owning your AI as easy as renting it. Using open-source models was never the hard part. Turning a raw open-source model into something a small business, a hospital, a local charity or a government can run in production — secure, reliable, plugged into everything else — takes an engineering team most organizations and institutions do not have and months they can’t spare.

The goal is to offer businesses and organizations a ready-to-use AI package that they can run privately and keep under their own control, rather than having to build a complex system themselves or rely entirely on expensive, pay-per-use proprietary AI services.

For example, a small manufacturer could use the system as a private AI assistant for its employees. It could search the company’s manuals, procedures and past project files; help staff draft reports or answer technical questions; and help its software team write and improve code. Because the system is designed to be able to run locally, the company could do this while keeping its proprietary information and data within its own environment.

That also means lower costs. For the vast majority of everyday business tasks, companies will be able to use open-source AI running on open-source tools instead of paying a commercial provider every time an employee makes a request. But this requires reducing the technical work and expense involved in putting open-source AI into practice.

This initiative was founded to solve that problem, building the free layer that makes owning open source AI easy – the same kind of layer the web was built on. It has two halves: An open standard, published as interface contracts, so any part of the stack can be swapped for a better one. And a working “reference implementation” any organization can install on its own machines or the ones it chooses, running the models and controls it chooses against its own data, with governance and access control built in from the start. The ambition is that with the standards and foundation in place, open source AI can be built anywhere, by anyone.

The Work Already Underway

Over the last six months, Mila and Mozilla have been designing the architecture, deciding which open source components belong at each layer, and testing that the whole system works end to end. This investment builds on that progress.

Working alongside Mila and Mozilla, Hypertec will help move the initiative from research and reference implementation to real-world adoption by Canadian businesses and institutions, providing a practical, private and cost-effective path to deploy AI while maintaining greater control over their data and technology.

Why Now

Mozilla’s State of Open Source AI report found that while 79% of developers adding AI functionality use open models, only 53% of teams ever reach production, stopped by cost, security, integration and maintenance. This work aims to change that.

Within six months, Mozilla and Mila expect to publish working reference implementations for enterprise, government and public-interest use cases. The two-year ambition is bigger: to have solved this problem outright, so that open source AI can be adopted fully and easily, anywhere, by anyone.

Quotes

“Canada has a choice: depend on technologies developed elsewhere, or build more of what we need here at home. Open-source AI gives Canadian businesses and institutions greater control over their technology and data, while making powerful tools more affordable, accessible and easier to adapt. By supporting this work, we are strengthening Canada’s capacity to build and adopt AI on our own terms.” — The Honourable Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario

“Six months ago, we announced our partnership with Mozilla to advance open-source and sovereign AI. Today, we are bringing that work to a whole new level. By delivering an open, secure AI foundation layer, we empower organizations, from small businesses to non-profits to governments, to own their technological future so they can run, control, and maintain AI models themselves. At Mila, our research community has always believed that for AI to be trustworthy and accessible, it must be built on open standards that keep control in local hands.” — Valérie Pisano, President and CEO, Mila

“AI today is at a crossroads, where it could be closed and owned by a few, or open and available to every coder, developer, enterprise and nation. That’s what we’re building – an open source AI ecosystem that fits together as seamlessly as the web, and that anyone, anywhere can build on. We’re so grateful to Canada for scaling this work, and call on partners across sectors – from enterprises and governments to coders and startups – to join us in building this future.” — Mark Surman, President, Mozilla

“AI is advancing at an extraordinary pace and has the potential to transform our economy and society for the better. Canada has an important role to play in ensuring that AI is developed and adopted responsibly. Hypertec is proud to help turn open source innovation into AI that Canadian organizations can deploy securely and under their own control. This is exactly the kind of partnership between government, research and Canadian industry needed to realize the full potential of AI.” — Simon Ahdoot, CEO, Hypertec Group

About Mila
Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio, Mila is one of the world’s leading AI research institutes, bringing together close to 2,000 researchers & professionals shaping the future of intelligence. A non-profit organization based in Montreal, Mila is recognized for its scientific contributions, global innovation partnerships, leadership in safe & responsible AI, and acceleration of AI venture creation. It was created through a unique partnership between Université de Montréal and McGill University to advance scientific breakthroughs for the benefit of all. Mila is supported by the Government of Canada, the Government of Quebec, and more than 150 industrial partners. For more information, visit mila.ai

About Mozilla

Mozilla is a mission-driven organization that has spent more than twenty-five years building an open, healthy internet. Best known for the Firefox browser, Mozilla today works across products, advocacy, research and investment — including Mozilla.ai and Mozilla Ventures — to ensure that artificial intelligence, like the web before it, is built as public infrastructure rather than private property. Mozilla is backed by a non-profit foundation and answers to a mission rather than to shareholders. Learn more at mozilla.org.

SOURCE Mila – Quebec AI Institute

BISMARCK, N.D., Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — BNCCORP, INC. (OTCQX Markets: BNCC) (“BNCC”) and its wholly owned subsidiary, BNC National Bank (“BNC”) announced today that its stockholders have approved the previously announced sale to OppFi (“OppFi”), a tech-enabled digital finance platform, in a cash and stock transaction. Under the terms of the agreement, BNCC stockholders will receive $19.375 per share in cash and 1.9 shares of OppFi Class A common stock for each BNCC share.

BNCC stockholders approved the transaction on September 17, 2026. Completion remains subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.

The transaction brings together two complementary, market-leading businesses, combining OppFi’s sophisticated online lending platform with BNC’s national bank charter and diversified banking infrastructure to create stronger, more diversified, more scalable financial services.

“This stockholder vote is a significant development in the process of completing this transformative agreement with OppFi.” said BNCC Chairman, Michael Vekich. Mr. Vekich continued, “The BNCC Board of Directors in alignment with the management team is committed to a strategy which protects and enhances BNCC as an organization for the betterment of stockholders, employees, customers and the communities we serve.”

The final vote total will be reported by BNCC in its quarterly report for the fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2026, which will be posted to the BNCC website.

About BNC

BNC National Bank is a community-focused commercial bank headquartered in Glendale, Arizona and operating as a subsidiary of BNCCORP, Inc., providing a broad range of financial services to individuals and small-to-medium-sized businesses across markets such as North Dakota and Arizona. Founded in 1987, the bank emphasizes relationship-driven banking, offering core products including checking and savings accounts, commercial and consumer loans, wealth management, and digital banking services, with a particular strength in business financing and SBA lending. Its model is centered on customer service, positioning the bank as a stable, regionally focused institution that supports economic activity in its communities while complementing traditional banking with modern online and mobile capabilities.

About OppFi

OppFi (NYSE: OPFI) is a tech-enabled digital finance platform that partners with banks to offer financial products and services to everyday Americans. Through this transparent and responsible platform, which emphasizes financial inclusion and exceptional customer experience, the Company assists consumers who are underserved by traditional financing options in building improved financial health. OppLoans by OppFi maintains a 4.4/5.0-star rating on Trustpilot based on over 5,400 reviews, positioning the Company among the top consumer-rated financial platforms online. OppFi also holds a 35% equity interest in Bitty Holdings, LLC (“Bitty”), a credit access company that provides revenue-based financing and other working capital solutions to small businesses. For additional information, please visit oppfi.com.

Contact:

Bob McNaney (On Behalf of BNCC)
651 249 7718, bob@themcnaneygroup.com

Forward-Looking Statements This news release may contain “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 with respect to the financial condition, results of operations, plans, objectives, future performance, and business of BNCCORP. Forward-looking statements, which may be based upon beliefs, expectations and assumptions of our management and on information currently available to management are generally identifiable by the use of words such as “expect”, “believe”, “anticipate”, “plan”, “intend”, “estimate”, “may”, “will”, “would”, “could”, “should”, or other expressions. We caution readers that these forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, our future business prospects, revenues, working capital, liquidity, capital needs, interest costs and income, are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements due to several important factors. These factors include, but are not limited to: risks of loans and investments, including dependence on local and regional economic conditions; competition for our customers from other providers of financial services; possible adverse effects of changes in interest rates, including the effects of such changes on derivative contracts and associated accounting consequences; risks associated with our acquisition and growth strategies; and other risks which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond our control.

These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding OppFi’s proposed acquisition of, including the anticipated timing, structure, benefits, and strategic rationale of such transactions; OppFi’s expectations with respect to the geographic expansion and product diversification that may come from the acquisition; OppFi’s expectations with respect to its full year 2026 guidance, the future performance of OppFi’s platform and underwriting models, and expectations for OppFi’s growth and future financial performance. These forward-looking statements are based on BNCC’s current expectations and assumptions about future events, including expectations of OppFi management that have been shared with BNCC management, and are based on currently available information as to the outcome and timing of future events. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results. Most of these factors are outside BNCC’s control and are difficult to predict. Factors that may cause such differences include, but are not limited to, risks related to the proposed acquisition of BNCC by OppFi, including the risk that the transaction may not be completed in a timely manner or at all; the failure to satisfy closing conditions or obtain required regulatory approvals: the impact of the transactions on OppFi’s governance structure; integration or execution challenges, adverse reactions from customers or stockholders, the impact of general economic conditions, including economic slowdowns, inflation, interest rate changes, recessions, the impact of tariffs, and tightening of credit markets on OppFi’s business; changes in the market price of OppFi’s Class A Common Stock; the impact of challenging macroeconomic and marketplace conditions; the impact of stimulus or other government programs; risks related to potential litigation in relation to the proposed sale to OppFi or the operation of the BNCC business generally; and other risks and uncertainties indicated from time to time in BNCC’s disclosures with the OTCQX. BNCC cautions that the foregoing list of factors is not exclusive, and readers should not place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. BNCC does not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to publicly release any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
WEBSITE: www.bnccorp.com

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SOURCE BNCCORP