U.S. Bank is working on AI-driven solutions for its small and medium-sized business clients to improve their operations. 

“By no means is it as easy as just deploying AI into the ecosystem without taking into consideration some of the challenges it comes with,” Shruti Patel, chief product officer for business banking, told Bank Automation News.

The Minneapolis-based bank is exploring automation and AI in business banking to consider the potential of deploying the tech for back-end operations like underwriting, Patel said. 

Among the areas U.S. Bank is exploring for deployment of AI for SMBs are: 

• Payments processing; 
• Payroll management; 
• Underwriting of loan applications; 
• AI assistant for bankers in branches; and 
• Digital onboarding. 

“We want to keep our application flows for digital onboarding, digital application, whether it’s a deposit account, whether it’s a loan application, seamless and frictionless,” Patel said. “There’s a lot of investment [that] we have made already, and we are going to continue to do so.” 

The bank has a scoring model to assist in processing of SMB small-dollar loans, or loans up to $250,000, she said, adding that businesses can get a response on those applications within minutes. 

For small-dollar loans, the $669 billion bank looks at a business’ FICO score, cash flow and tax returns among other things, which is usually “pretty light underwriting,” but for large-dollar loans, the bank is exploring ways to optimize automated data collection and loan decisioning and human decision-making to make sure “that we are not hedging too much on the high-risk verticals.” 

Development of AI

U.S. Bank is cautious in using AI for SMB customer-facing operations as “there’s a lot of customer privacy we need to take into account,” Patel said. 

“We can’t just roll out a new generative AI experience and it’s going to serve millions of customers overnight,” she said. “I think it becomes very easy when you’re in a non-regulated, non-customer privacy data industry … but we are custodians of money. It is different for us.” 

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