US-headquartered financial technology company nCino has found an enthusiastic customer base for its AI-driven cloud-based platforms among commercial banks keen to gain efficiencies from digitising and streamlining processes.
As Donald Permezel, vice president, data & AI at nCino, says, the firm's offerings are made "by bankers for bankers".
"Being absolutely and religiously close to our customers runs in the lifeblood of nCino," Permezel says. "We have a series of products where we engage in reverse demos, so instead of us showing the client how to use the software, the client demonstrates our own software back to us.
"It's through this that we're gaining insight into what's valuable to them and ultimately exactly what kind of job they're trying to complete with our tools."
nCino's key AI product Banking Advisor - which uses the latest in generative AI and machine learning to focus on practical applications that improve efficiency, reduce errors, and enhance the banking experience - is clawing back valuable time that was often taken up matching bank policy with complex loan applications.
"As a banker you can sometimes hit a very complicated set of issues; you might, for instance, be dealing with a construction loan with multiple entities or projects where the director is in some kind of difficult situation," says Permezel.
"Finding out the bank's policy on these sorts of things - even as recently as 12 months ago - could absorb an enormous amount of staff time."
With the nCino platform, bankers are simplifying these kinds of workflows and building operational resilience.
"Using cutting-edge large language models, it will not only load in the bank's policies, but vectorise the documents themselves," he says. "It doesn't just say 'here's the answer', it will also highlight those parts of the documents that need to be cross referenced to provide substantive proof.
"It's these sorts of things that can save hours of the banks' time and the kind of problems that nCino targets."
Christopher Hart, chief data officer at Massachusetts-based Northern Bank says the nCino platform, which it onboarded in 2016, has helped the bank turn the tables on the problems of data extraction.
"By using Banking Advisor, banks like Northern Bank can now shift towards optimisation for efficient workflows and use the genAI tool to make data work for them versus working for the data," he says.
"nCino's flexible technologies and unified platform enable us to build the intelligent automation into our business and deliver the personalisation our customers expect. It was an easy decision to become an early adopter and pioneer this innovative co-pilot."
The use cases for generative AI in cloud banking, meanwhile, are rapidly expanding. nCino's partnership with AI decisioning platform Rich Data Co is a case in point, showing how AI technology is being successfully applied to highly nuanced areas of risk management.
"They are providing leading edge risk management technology and applying it to banking clients that have received a loan and advising whether there are any problems where the bank may need to help them," nCino's Permezel says.
"They're acting at the point of decision whereby they're giving a thumbs up or thumbs down on the right level of credit risk."
This technology, Permezel says, has moved away from large language models to show not only the solution to a problem, but also how it arrived at its decision - a critical factor when managing the myriad complexities of risk management.
"They've taken a tack with AI that puts explainability at the forefront," Permezel says. "They can use technology to show what is and what is not a good credit risk, but then they'll really quite precisely be able to tell the bank exactly why the machine learning says that."
With the back office the place where bankers spend an inordinate amount of their time, he adds, the power of the collaboration between nCino and Rich Data Co lies in freeing up valuable manhours to focus on managing the right risks.
He says the future for nCino over the next 12 months will be guiding AI technology that can extract, read and file PDF documentation, turning any document into useable data.
"Essentially we're putting into place technology whereby you'll be able to upload any document - whether it's a payslip or a bank statement - and it will withdraw every single bit of information, serve it all up to the banker to cross-reference, and then put it where it needs to go.
"We've got that as a line of business already: it's why chief executive officers everywhere are knocking at our door asking 'when can we have this?'."
