Faster Credit Decisions: How AI Agents Reduce Drop Off in Lending Journeys

Interview by Sean Murphy, COO at The Connector.

For years, one of banking's most persistent challenges has been the speed of loan approval.  Borrowers endure long waits, sometimes 180 days, for decisions. It is no surprise that if a rival  can deliver a decision in 90 days, customers often walk away. This drop off problem was  painfully familiar to me when I ran a digital mortgage broker, Simpler Mortgages, in 2018.

Our largest bottleneck was always in document analysis and credit memo preparation. Each application came with hundreds of pages. Reviewing each was straightforward, but turning  the entire package into a coherent credit memo was always a time-consuming task. Missing  pages triggered follow ups with clients, creating further delays and undermining conversion. Back then, the technology simply was not capable of supporting that type of work efficiently.

Fast forward to 2025. Agentic AI, purpose built for lending and credit teams, is transforming  that reality. Covecta’s platform completes tasks across the loan lifecycle, from customer  profiling and document reconciliation to drafting credit memos, in minutes instead of days. It  is not SaaS. It is something entirely new. Covecta enables banks to deploy configurable  agents that automate front line workflows with 70 percent average time savings,  credit memos reduced from two days to 40 minutes, and customer analysis slashed from 90 to 15 minutes.

In the UK, Metro Bank has brought this model to life. Partnering with Covecta, they rolled out agentic AI across commercial credit operations, shrinking tasks that once took hours into minutes. The impact is measurable: greater team efficiency and faster decision making. This shift addresses the drop off issue directly, giving borrowers a faster, frictionless experience and more completed deals.

A defining departure from traditional SaaS is how value is measured. Unlike per seat licensing models where firms buy dozens or hundreds of user seats, many of them unused, Covecta charges per completed task. Whether it is a memo, reconciliation, or analysis, each outcome is tied to actual business impact. As CEO Scott Wilson put it in our recent conversation: “With SaaS, businesses grew by selling users and seats. In AI, it is the inverse. You are not incentivising headcount growth. You are enabling your current teams to deliver more with less effort .”

When Covecta and Metro Bank started, many institutions preferred human in the loop  deployments. But confidence in agent autonomy is growing quickly. Now, firms are shifting  enterprise budget from SaaS and headcount into AI. This is not minor optimisation. It is a  structural shift that looks like a new industrial revolution for white collar work.

I saw the problem clearly back in 2018. If we had access to agents like these, the largest bottleneck in our business would have been eliminated. Automated agents that could scan pages and reconcile documents, generate credit memos on brand approved templates,  and flag missing information instantly would have reduced client drop off dramatically. Covecta’s configurability makes this real. Their agents operate within existing workflows, using the institution’s templates, reconciling documents, enriching analysis, and seamlessly  integrating into broader systems.

The practical outcomes are compelling:

• Applications uploaded late on Friday night no longer sit idle until Monday morning. Agents pick them up instantly.

• Credit decisions that used to take days are completed in under an hour.

• Document reconciliation and analysis is fully automated, standardised, and efficient.

For borrowers, this means fewer callbacks, smoother journeys, and faster outcomes. For banks, it means higher throughput, reduced operational drag, and measurable lending growth.

The transition from SaaS to AI is more than a technology upgrade. It is a redefinition. Where traditional enterprise software grew teams, this model replaces them. Where SaaS tracked usage by login, agents deliver consistent, reliable outcomes. As Scott noted, “AI today is as bad as it will ever be. It will only improve.”

As for me, having lived the drop off struggle firsthand, there is something deeply affirming about watching the problem I battled now being solved. Banks can finally address one of their most pressing challenges not with more people or more seats, but with digital agents that execute, refine, and learn.

Covecta Covecta is building AI Agents for financial services. It is the tool to optimise your workforce with AI. At the core of their offering is a conversational experience with web based research capabilities and specialised agents for the financial services sector.

Covecta services a range of institutions from banks, to specialist lenders and building societies, across the front to back office

https://www.covecta.io/