9fin hires former JPMorgan digital banking chief huw Richards. 9fin, the AI-native platform for global debt capital markets, has appointed Huw Richards as head of customer partnerships, a newly created position based in the company's New York office. Richards spent 23 years at JPMorgan, where he led several debt financing businesses globally before becoming the lead architect of the bank's Digital Investment Bank unit, a programme designed to embed technology and data more deeply into its investment banking operations. The hire signals a deliberate shift in how 9fin is positioning itself with its largest institutional clients. Rather than selling a data subscription at arm's length, the company says it is increasingly embedding its platform directly into client workflows via API and model context protocol connections, and through a suite of 9fin agents that institutions can use standalone or link to their own AI systems. Why the hire matters. Richards brings a credential that is difficult to replicate on the open market: he has been the buyer, not just the seller, of the kind of AI-driven data infrastructure that 9fin is now offering. Having run digital transformation from inside JPMorgan, he understands the procurement cycles, integration constraints and internal politics that determine whether an external platform gains genuine operational adoption or remains a peripheral tool. "In over 30 years in debt capital markets, I've not seen a moment as pivotal as this one for unlocking data-led insight," Richards said. "AI's potential is only fully unlocked when it's grounded in trusted, proprietary data. 9fin has both. The opportunity now is to connect that data directly to the AI-driven workflows of the world's largest institutions." 9fin says more than 350 banks, asset managers, law firms and advisers use its platform daily. The company has positioned its proprietary data as the differentiating layer that makes its AI outputs more reliable than general-purpose models trained on publicly available information, a framing that has become increasingly common among financial data vendors as the market for AI tooling in capital markets matures. Market context. The debt markets data and intelligence space has become more competitive as institutional buyers raise their expectations of what AI integration should look like in practice. Bloomberg, Refinitiv and a set of specialist credit intelligence providers all compete for the workflow of credit analysts and portfolio managers, while a growing cohort of AI-native challengers, 9fin among them, has built natively on large language models rather than retrofitting them onto legacy data architectures. The regulatory backdrop is also relevant. As financial institutions in the UK and EU face obligations under DORA and evolving FCA operational resilience guidance, the decision to embed a third-party AI platform into core investment banking workflows carries governance and vendor-concentration risk assessments that senior customer-facing hires are increasingly expected to navigate alongside commercial conversations. Richards's experience at JPMorgan positions him to engage with those concerns credibly. The near-term markers to watch are whether 9fin announces specific enterprise integrations off the back of this hire, and whether the customer partnerships model accelerates the company's progression toward a deeper, systems-level relationship with the bulge-bracket institutions that represent its highest-value segment.

9fin has launched a comprehensive BDC Watchlist identifying $5.7 billion of loans across 157 business development companies as potentially at risk. The AI-native information platform analysed Q1 2026 filings and found 468 individual loan positions showing material value erosion, representing 1.9% of the $305.2 billion BDC universe. The watchlist tracks quarter-over-quarter declines in fair value marks, identifying credits that have fallen below 90% and face potential further deterioration. These at-risk loans show an erosion of $1.2 billion from their $6.9 billion par value. Blackstone Private Credit Fund has the highest exposure with 37 positions cited, more than double any other vehicle. Some loans, including data analytics platform Qlik and logistics software company Solera, appear across 10 different BDC portfolios. The tool sits alongside 9fin's BDC Valuations platform, currently in beta.

9fin appoints Intapp veteran Amit Lalwani as CRO to drive global expansion. Institutional fixed-income markets are undergoing a profound, software-driven modernization wave as complex credit workflows transition away from legacy terminal systems toward specialized intelligence networks. In a significant institutional play to capture this multi-trillion-dollar vertical, 9fin, the AI-native platform built explicitly for global debt markets, has officially named Amit Lalwani as its first chief revenue officer (CRO). Based in New York, Lalwani will report directly to 9fin chief executive officer and co-founder Steven Hunter. In this newly created executive post, his primary mandate centers on architecting an integrated, high-performing global revenue apparatus spanning enterprise sales, corporate account management, client success pipelines, and end-to-end revenue operations. The scaling metrics of an AI fintech unicorn. The heavyweight executive hire lands at a definitive milestone in 9fin's operational trajectory. Over the past twelve months, the company successfully closed a $170 million Series C funding round, minting its status as a market unicorn with a formal valuation of $1.3 billion. Backed by this capital, the platform has achieved significant cross-border scale: * Hyper-Growth Velocity: The business has sustained multiple consecutive fiscal years of 100% Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) growth. * Geographic Proliferation: The platform's United States division is currently outlacing all other geographic territories, complemented by aggressive entry into major hubs across Latin America and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. * Institutional Penetration: More than 350 elite institutions now natively rely on the platform to guide critical credit decisions, a cohort comprising tier-one investment banks, global asset managers, corporate law firms, and advisory groups. The Intapp and Dealogic operational blueprint. Lalwani steps into the CRO role backed by more than two decades of proven leadership experience engineering commercial scale for high-growth financial technology organizations. He joins the debt capital markets platform from specialized software provider Intapp, where he functioned as vice president of financial services. During his impactful eight-year tenure across Intapp and DealCloud, Lalwani orchestrated a massive commercial expansion, spearheading account management and sales teams across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC corridors. Under his commercial leadership, the financial services division achieved a staggering 22x increase in client acquisition alongside a 25x expansion in ARR. Prior to his hyper-scale achievements at Intapp, Lalwani dedicated over 15 years to capital markets data provider Dealogic. While there, he occupied multiple executive positions traversing enterprise software sales, localized product development, and global account management frameworks, equipping him with a deep understanding of institutional buyer workflows. "Amit brings a rare combination of understanding our market and customers, and having scaled commercial organisations to hundreds of millions in ARR," noted Steven Hunter, CEO and co-founder of 9fin. "Our vision is to be the number one AI platform in the debt markets, and Amit is here to build the commercial machine to get us there". Embedding generative AI inside credit workflows. The structural foundation of 9fin - originally established by former J.P. Morgan banker Steven Hunter and veteran Deutsche Bank engineer Hussam El-Sheikh - combines proprietary fixed-income data pools, predictive analytics, and automated workflows into a single interface. The platform's latest technological leap involves the native deployment of AI Chat and the Research Grid. These advanced systems inject tailored generative AI directly into day-to-day credit analysis, allowing investment teams to parse complex debt covenants, compare historical yields, and generate automated research briefs with unparalleled speed. "9fin possesses the perfect combination of cutting-edge technology, elite talent, and proprietary data to spearhead the AI-driven transformation of global debt markets," added Lalwani. "It is incredibly rare to find a platform so deeply embedded across the entire credit ecosystem... The commercial runway ahead of us is enormous, and I am thrilled to lead the charge as we accelerate into our next hyper-growth chapter". As global debt markets grow increasingly complex amid shifting macroeconomic interest rate regimes, the ability to rapidly digest unstructured credit documentation via AI is transitioning from an operational luxury to an absolute necessity. Operating from centralized hubs in London, New York, Hong Kong, and Belfast, 9fin's newly consolidated leadership stack is uniquely positioned to transition legacy fixed-income analytics into a highly automated, intelligent era.