First Internet Bank Automates Compliance to Boost Lending
The bank is reclaiming 24,300 annual employee hours to increase loan volume without hiring additional staff.
Updated on Oct. 26, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence
Live Poll
Do you trust that businesses using AI will prioritize growth over reducing their workforce?
First Internet Bank has implemented AI agents to automate compliance research across four key workflows, saving 24,300 employee hours annually. The bank aims to use these efficiencies to scale loan volume without increasing headcount.
Why it matters
Automation in compliance processes addresses the bottleneck of manual identity and ownership checks, allowing lenders to accelerate loan processing. This shift represents a broader trend of financial institutions using AI to increase capacity while navigating data-heavy regulatory requirements.
The AI agents replace manual research by retrieving corporate records, verifying beneficial owners, and checking sanctions lists. These systems consolidate fragmented data into a single structured report, equivalent to the output of 12 full-time employees.
The players
First Internet Bank
A U.S. financial institution that ranks as a top 10 SBA 7(a) lender.
Customers Bancorp
A financial services firm that achieved $15 million in annualized capacity gains through AI initiatives.
David Becker
The CEO of First Internet Bank who prioritized AI to increase loan volume rather than reduce headcount.
The details
The compliance workflows automated include SBA loan origination, enhanced due diligence, fraud reviews, and periodic customer reviews. These agents function by cross-referencing incoming applications against sanctioned entities and identifying key stakeholders, a process that traditionally slows loan file progression. By offloading this research, the bank enables human analysts to focus on final verification rather than data collection.
Timeline
2024: First Internet Bank funded $610 million in SBA loans.
May 2026: PYMNTS Intelligence reported that 30% of financial services firms identify data quality as their top AI barrier.
The Tech Race
Financial institutions are currently racing to deploy AI in compliance to bridge the gap between traditional processing times and market demand. While 30% of firms cite data quality as a primary barrier to entry, early adopters like Customers Bank and First Internet Bank are already measuring multi-million dollar capacity gains.
Loan applicants at participating institutions may experience faster processing times as agents reduce manual verification delays. While this increases bank capacity, the actual time-to-close remains dependent on specific loan complexity and institutional data maturity.
The takeaway
Banks are successfully using automation to bypass the 30-to-60-day window typically required for commercial loan processing. Observers should track if these staffing capacity gains translate into lower loan fees or more competitive interest rates for borrowers over the coming year.
Further reading
For more on how financial firms are integrating machine learning into banking operations, visit Artificial Intelligence.
Source note: This article includes information reported by PYMNTS.
Live Poll
Do you trust that businesses using AI will prioritize growth over reducing their workforce?
