How a Regional Bank Automated Loan Validation with Agentic AI

A bank turned a growing loan validation backlog into a same-week routine, clearing loans roughly nine times faster while strengthening its key control for data accuracy and keeping every loan audit ready.

In banking, the work does not end when a loan closes. Data from each loan's documents has to match the bank's core system, where it was keyed in by hand or carried over for booking. Validation is the check that confirms the two match, and it serves as the bank's key control for data accuracy. It stands behind the integrity of financial reporting.

Done by hand, validation takes about 30 minutes per loan. One bank reached 600 loans in its backlog at a manual pace that could not keep up. The pressure peaked at quarter and year end. Because validation is the key control for data accuracy, an unfinished queue meant financial statement data stayed unverified until the backlog cleared, which put reporting integrity at risk.

The manual process carried risks of its own. Field-by-field checks done by hand raise the chance of false positive matches, and they leave no log of the work that SOX internal control audits require. When a check surfaced an error that affected a client's interest or payments, the loan could sit in the backlog for months.

Ashling built an intelligent solution that validates loan documents across consumer, residential, and commercial lending, and logs every discrepancy. It reads loan document packages from SharePoint and works the queue end to end.

A purpose-built AI agent handles the validation in a clear sequence. It locates each loan in its assigned folder. It follows a strict checklist that includes SOX requirements, then finds and extracts the key fields from every document. It compares each field against the core system, one by one. Matches are marked as validated and move forward, while mismatches route to the loan team for review.

Every validation result is recorded along with each field-level discrepancy, giving the bank full visibility into potential errors on a loan. The result is faster validation, more accurate data handling, and a clear audit trail that keeps every loan compliant and audit ready.

The solution cleared 15% of the 600-loan backlog overnight, roughly nine times faster than manual review. A job that ran close to two months now takes about a week, and validation now runs in real time as new applications arrive.

Beyond speed, the bank gained cleaner data handling and audit-ready compliance on every loan, with a documented record of any discrepancy found along the way.