Case Study 5 min read
AI agents in B2B lending: How a fast-growing fintech tripled customer onboarding capacity and cut underwriting time by 50%
Key takeaways
A fast-growing B2B fintech teamed up with Taktile to deploy AI agents across its onboarding and underwriting processes and help its team keep pace with rising demand. By activating AI-driven decision automation, the team was able to:
- Reduce onboarding time by 75%, approving more customers faster without compromising safety or compliance. Now, most customers get started in <24 hours.
- Cut credit underwriting time by 50%, freeing underwriting analysts from routine tasks like document validation so they could focus on higher-value work.
Triple onboarding capacity after automating 80% of onboarding.
“We’re getting insights that previously took 6-7 hours in an hour. It gives us the ability to be more thoughtful in our customer communications and go deeper where we value human judgement most.”
The opportunity: Expand the team’s onboarding and underwriting capacity with AI-driven automation
This fast-growing fintech needed back-end operations to match the speed of business.
For every application, reviewers pored over documents for accuracy, cross-referenced business addresses via Google search, and meticulously extracted data points. These checks created a major backlog at the top of the funnel.
“We were working with a diverse tooling set, jumping between 3-4 different systems. We couldn’t fast-track the straightforward applications because they were stuck behind the cases that needed more attention."
With application volume growing daily, they saw an opportunity to explore how AI agents could enable a more automated, efficient approach. At scale, these agents could handle the routine verification and data extraction—allowing perfect applications to move through the process instantly—while manual reviewers focused on complex or edge cases.
The key: an agentic solution that could handle complex, regulated decision-making.
The innovation: Integrating transparent, agentic AI into the onboarding and underwriting processes
The team set out to reduce the manual effort spent on repetitive tasks like web research and document verification. To accomplish their goal, they made a strategic decision to integrate agentic AI across the onboarding and underwriting processes.
Taktile's agentic document processing capabilities helped the team verify and standardize business information – e.g. checking company names and addresses against public records to confirm businesses are active and legitimate.
They also implemented the Financial Spreading Agent to help analysts:
- Extract and validate data – extracting relevant data points in their preferred format, turning static applications into structured data for approvals.
- Summarize findings for manual review – synthesizing the gathered data and providing clear recommendations to help human reviewers make faster, more informed decisions.
- Model financial data – mapping raw extracted numbers into a standardized financial template to provide a clear and consistent view of a business's financials.
- Use Taktile’s decision engine to apply decision logic – while keeping every step explainable and reviewable.
By automating this labour-intensive "spreading" process, their team no longer needed to spend hours on manual processes. This system reduces errors, standardizes outputs, and provides full traceability from every standardized value.
“The beauty of our system is that these agents are incredibly nuanced and specific to our unique policies, which gives us confidence in the accuracy and consistency of our decisions.”
Human experts still make the final call. With AI agents crunching the numbers and providing context, underwriters can confirm final approvals in a fraction of the time.
As the Operations Lead explains: “A certain level of human judgement is always going to be helpful for us. The north star we’re pushing for is empowering our team to put more energy towards high-value judgment decisions vs. repetitive, transactional decisions.”
The outcome: Higher conversions, happier customers
By transitioning from a largely manual process to a “human-in-the-loop” workflow combining agents, human experts, and deterministic rules, the organization streamlined the path from application to approval.
The team tripled onboarding bandwidth without needing to scale headcount, and reduced onboarding and underwriting times by 75% and 80%, respectively. Customers can now access the company’s core services in hours vs. days, while the company holds the "thoughtful line" on risk and compliance that’s central to the organization.
With their reclaimed time, the team has shifted their role to include a broader strategic scope.
“Our team is moving beyond the 'what' of underwriting to the 'how' of our business. They’re reinvesting their time into building systems that support how we serve our customers and developing the next iteration of our risk monitoring infrastructure.”
The result is a system that blends speed, efficiency, and scale, all without compromising safety or compliance. Customers get faster approvals, employees can replace routine tasks with higher-value work, and the company speeds up time-to-revenue.
The vision: One platform to manage end-to-end customer decisions
Beyond automation in onboarding and underwriting, the company has a long-term vision to extend these efficiencies across the customer lifecycle.
“We’re thinking…how can we use automation with Taktile to engage our existing customer base? We want to get to a place where we’re using Taktile as one consolidated experience to automate and streamline operations across the customer journey.”
