Bhushan Joshi, Dr Manas Panda, Raja Basu
Discover top fintech news and events!
Subscribe to FinTech Weekly's newsletter
Read by executives at JP Morgan, Coinbase, Blackrock, Klarna and more
The financial services industry is undergoing a paradigm shift as generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI systems are redefining the business process flows - credit decisioning being one of them. Banks are now embracing AI-driven systems enhancing predictive accuracy while simultaneously automating complex workflows. This article explores how GenAI and agentic AI can be strategically deployed in credit evaluation process significantly improving the level of efficiency and automation, while addressing governance, risk, and compliance considerations.
The GenAI Advantage: Intelligent Data Enrichment
Data is the lifeblood of credit evaluation. Banks and financial institutions assess and evaluate loads of data elements using logistical and heuristic models. Come GenAI, this process has leap frogged, as GenAI models provided the capability to evaluate unstructured data, generating valuable insights. Generating synthetic data to simulate scenarios in advance is another key change in the evaluation process.
GenAI models excel at parsing unstructured information transforming them into structured data. This capability enables the extraction of key attributes such as income consistencies, payment inconsistencies, employment data, discretionary spending etc. which can provide critical insights in underwriting evaluation.
Synthetic data generation is a capability GenAI models offer, which can be leveraged for robust modeling and validation purposes. This can help mitigate data sparsity in edge cases. AI models can be used to define edge scenario, add more nuanced criteria- liquidity buffers, income volatility, etc.- and can be validated with synthetic data. These privacy-preserving data enhances model generalizability and resilience to tail risks.
Multimodal GenAI systems can flag inconsistencies—such as mismatches between declared income, tax records, bank statements etc. by compare and contrast. These manual time-consuming activities can be fast tracked with improved compliance, detecting gaps and improving data integrity.
Agentic AI: Orchestrating Autonomous Workflows
While multi-modal GenAI systems facilitate data integrity, create and validate extreme scenarios, Agentic AI mesh guides with autonomous workflow.
Agentic AI further advanced the evaluation process with autonomous decision making of discrete tasks. The Agentic AI mesh, comprising of multiple expert agents, are capable of carrying out multiple discrete tasks simultaneously. Identity verification, document retrieval & validation, metrics evaluation, external data validation, credit bureau checks, psychometric analysis, etc. to name some can be performed simultaneously by specialized agents. Each agent operates with defined objectives, successful metrics, and escalation protocols making the process faster with increased accuracy.
This agentic mesh enforces business logic, invoke predictive models, and route applications based on confidence thresholds automating the process workflows dynamically. For instance, low-confidence decisions or flagged anomalies are automatically escalated to human underwriters-in-loop with alerts sent via messaging systems to act on. Simultaneously, agentic systems can proactively monitor applications, detect contradictions, and initiate remediation mechanisms. Similarly, if an applicant’s credit profile falls into a gray zone, it can auto trigger a secondary review or request additional documentation or bring a human-in-loop.
Case-in-point: A large global bank recently implemented a fully automated process of case management from customer emails -- registering cases, invoking workflows, messaging with status tracking and communication-- reducing the effort and processing time to half of earlier.
To top it up, the NLP capability enables agents to converse with applicants in real time, clarifying ambiguities, collecting missing data, and summarizing next steps – in multiple languages and voice-enabled as required. This reduces friction and improves completion rates, particularly for underserved hesitant customer segments.
Hybrid Architecture: Balancing Accuracy and Explainability
GenAI and Agentic AI technologies are designing process flows and architecture - improving efficiency while balancing accuracy and explainability of the outcomes.
A hybrid architecture combining Agentic AI with GenAI models enhances predictive power with richer data and improved regulatory transparency. Combining AI agents also increases robustness and seamless automated execution capabilities.
While GenAI can generate counterfactual explanations - "what-if" scenarios illustrating how applicants can improve their loan eligibility, Agentic systems can collect outcome data, curate edge cases, and initiate retraining cycles. This process of adaptive self-learning with cleaner data sets and plausible edge scenarios improves the accuracy of customer loan eligibility evaluation process.
Call to action: Building Trustworthy AI Systems for more accurate evaluation
Assessing loan eligibility is a complex process which impacts customer experience and long-term business relationship. Some key recommendations to keep in mind, while redesigning the flow are a) A human-in-the-loop architecture to improve the overall decision-making process with traceability and explainability, b) Properly identify and map the decision outcomes to associated features to address interpretability concerns and audit findings, c) Implement responsible AI guardrails, operational safeguards such as role based access controls, escalation matrix, etc. would improve process resilience.
Conclusion
Credit decisioning process is at an inflection point with GenAI & Agentic AI re-defining the business process flows – making the lending eco-system more efficient and resilient. Financial institutions that invest in thoughtful design, rigorous governance & robust data models automating high stakes use cases will lead the next era of intelligent underwriting.
