Announcing the AI-Powered Back Office

Finley is rolling out AI agents on top of its existing workflows to help banks and credit funds obtain, analyze, and act on data from across their portfolios, saving them millions of dollars in the process.

For four and a half years, Finley has been building debt capital tools for lenders and borrowers. Those tools include digitized credit agreements, workflows for common tasks, and dashboards for monitoring portfolios. 

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of AI agents that build on Finley’s existing workflows, while also offering end-to-end support for Credit Agreement Digitization, Loan Servicing, and Portfolio Analysis. These AI agents automate the "in-between" tasks like parsing emails for relevant data, reaching out for data remediation, and updating loan ledgers, post-funding.

Here’s how we got here, our AI product vision moving forward, and what it means for the industry. 

Why Existing AI Applications Fall Short for Banks and Funds

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, forward-thinking banks and private investors have sought to make sure that their firms are making the most of AI throughout the investment lifecycle. 

Often, that looks like bringing AI to the front office, or the investors who originate, conduct due diligence on, and negotiate deals.

Maybe because the most common application of large language models (LLMs) is the chatbot, a lot of attention has gone into the idea of the “AI analyst” or “AI copilot” – an automated solution for researching and preparing reports on potential investments. This is the core use case of innovative financial startups like Hebbia and Rogo. 

While empowering financial analysts is a useful application of AI, it is not ultimately as impactful as managing and monitoring investments, post-close. Need proof? Look at the org structure of a typical bank or credit fund, where 60-70% of headcount tends to live in the back office. (Keep in mind, this ratio doesn’t even take into account the extensive outsourcing of typical credit operations to service providers like Alter Domus and SEI).  

So if most bank headcount and costs come from the back office and not the front office, why haven’t AI-driven back office offerings taken off?

AI Agents for Fund Administration

Applying AI indiscriminately won’t cut it in corporate lending and private credit; Gartner estimates that over 40% of today’s enterprise agentic implementations will be canceled in the next two-and-a-half years. The key is combining what AI is good at with software purpose-built for automating credit data intake, calculation, and automation. 

The prerequisite for accurate, reliable AI agents is to build and refine the infrastructure components of an AI-driven back office: a flexible data lake for ingesting all types of credit data (including data parsed by LLMs), sophisticated interest and invoicing engines that can handle everything from asset-backed loans to fund finance to syndicated loans, and analytics tools for monitoring portfolio risk. These are exactly the primary components of Finley. 

Now, by integrating AI classification and decision-making into our offerings, we’re able to offer outcomes: digital credit agreements, invoices, and trend cards generated instantaneously. All without user input, and all with agents that are running in the background continuously. 

Here are the three Agents we’re introducing, and who they’re designed for: 

• Digitization Agent: Designed for Portfolio analysts that want to digitize a large number of existing credit documents and maintain an up-to-date system of record for investments
• Servicing Agent: Designed for Fund Operations leaders who want to fully automate Loan Administration and Loan Servicing, while also improving accuracy and having a full audit log of decisions
• Portfolio Analysis Agent: Designed for Managing Directors who want agents working 24/7 to generate, analyze, and surface trends in portfolio analysts

Over the next 12 months, we plan to roll out additional agents and purpose-built workflows to cover every task that a full Back Office team might need to accomplish – stay tuned! 

For more information on our Digitization Agent, Loan Servicing Agent, and Portfolio Analyst Agent, or for a demo of how Finley’s agents and software can empower your investment team, schedule a demo with our Business Development team.