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.
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