Metro Bank has announced the rollout of a new agentic AI tool.
While genAI provides responses based on a single interaction using natural language processing, agentic AI is able to solve more complex and multi-step problems through sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning, with the technology making decisions autonomously.
Metro has implemented Covecta’s AI platform for financial services across its corporate and commercial credit businesses.
The agentic AI tool is able to complete tasks across the end-to-end loan lifecycle from lead acquisition to servicing.
The bank says this helps compress work that might take hours of manual effort into minutes.
According to the partnership, each completed task has shown a 60 to 80 per cent reduction in time, creating “significant improvements in team efficiency, decision making and risk analysis.”
“Metro Bank is rapidly growing lending to corporate and commercial businesses: last year, new loan originations increased by 71 per cent and we want to do even more this year,” said Andy Veares, managing director of corporate and commercial, Metro Bank. “This AI solution frees up more time for our corporate and commercial banking experts to spend servicing our customers, which goes to the heart of our relationship banking ethos”.
The MD added that the technology will help the bank to “continue to grow in the most efficient way”.
While agentic AI technology is still emerging, its potential is vast, with the industry likely to see applications in areas such as customer interactions, fraud detection, risk management, and compliance.
Director of AI and advanced analytics at Lloyds Banking Group Rohit Dhawan told FStech last month that the bank is currently developing a range of solutions that use agentic AI to support both its employees and customers, with more details about the technology to be shared in due course.
Metro’s latest AI rollout follows a partnership with Infosys announced last year, with the bank saying at the time that the move sought to strengthen its IT support services and digitally transform its business operations.
Specifically, the lender integrated an AI-powered technology including generative AI features that aims to deliver an improved customer experience for its finance advisory network (FAN).
