Carefull, an application for monitoring the day-to-day financial safety of the elderly and helping family members, caregivers and the advisors of those in cognitive decline, announced the rollout of GreyMatter, its artificial intelligence insights engine, at the Money20/20 conference this week in Las Vegas.
The company, which began development six years ago and launched in 2021, was built with financial advisors in mind from the start. As part of an individual’s circle of caregivers it was meant to help connect, communicate, and jointly monitor a loved one’s finances.
“Carefull has always used AI and other techniques to detect elder fraud,” said co-founder and co-CEO Max Goldman, “but GreyMatter represents a major advancement, giving Carefull superpowers.”
“By opening GreyMatter to more collaboration with banks, telcos, retailers, cybersecurity firms, researchers, and government organizations, we can move faster,” said Todd Rovak, Carefull’s other co-founder and co-CEO, “and the financial institutions caught in the middle of it all can reduce fraud and risk.”
He said that the company has never outsourced developing its core competency, which is the proprietary technology for identification of financial issues that can affect people’s lives, including elder fraud.
Carefull now uses multiple large learning models to support the proprietary insights engine that makes up GreyMatter, which he said is built on three pillars.
Each of those pillars employs a variety of techniques that now include and incorporate LLMs, “the right one for the task,” at specific points to achieve their missions, he said.
The first pillar is enrichment, where the technology ingests raw data and turns it into structured signals, whether identifying merchants or detecting transaction types to help uncover context that Carefull says most other systems miss.
“With very sensitive and complex issues like elder fraud, what’s out there already simply wasn’t effective or accurate enough, so we built our own,” said Rovak.
The second pillar is a baseline of an individual’s normal day-to-day, month-to-month financial behavior, including how they spend money, what merchants they use and their habits around withdrawing money, which allows the more subtle deviations from such behavior to stand out and trigger alerts.
Finally, the reasoning pillar goes beyond single data points and connects insights across time, context, and additional data sources, such as credit reports, to detect emerging risks, whether external threats like senior-targeted scams or evidence of an individual’s cognitive decline.
In May, the national RIA Integrated Partners announced a new strategic partnership with Carefull and has previously announced deals with national insurance carrier Nationwide and Cetera Financial Group.
Carefull has raised a total of $19.7 million in publicly announced funding; $16.5 million in a Series A round in late 2023, and an initial seed funding round of $3.2 million in February 2021.
