A regional community bank with more than $8 billion in assets, serving consumers and businesses across several states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
Every loan application is capital waiting to go to work. At origination, though, that capital can sit idle.
Before a loan can move forward, the bank has to validate it: confirm that every field in the loan document package matches the core banking system and meets SOX compliance requirements. Done by hand, that check took about 30 minutes per loan. With 600 loans in the backlog, the queue stretched to roughly 300 hours of manual work, close to two months of waiting.
The cost of that delay compounds. Capital stays parked. Operating costs climb. And the longer a borrower waits, the more likely they are to rate-shop or close with a competitor first. Manual validation had become a bottleneck at the exact point where speed matters most.
The bank partnered with Ashling to build an intelligent validation solution that works across consumer, residential, and commercial loans.
Here is how it works. Loan document packages land in a SharePoint repository. A purpose-built AI agent, given context on each loan type, locates the right folder and follows a strict checklist that includes SOX requirements. The agent extracts the key fields from each document, then goes field by field, comparing every value against the core banking system.
Matches are marked validated and move forward automatically. Mismatches route to the loan team for review. Every result is logged, along with every field-level discrepancy, giving the bank full visibility into potential errors and a complete audit trail.
The architecture is built to scale. Each loan type gets its own agent, grounded in the documents specific to that loan. Consumer loan validation went live first. Commercial and residential follow on the same foundation, with a repeatable structure to add additional loan types as needed.
Using the solution, the bank validated 15% of its 600-loan backlog overnight, roughly nine times faster than manual review. A job that would have taken two months by hand came down to about a week. Outstanding loans dropped by up to 80%, 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. This allows the team to investigate and validate loans that only truly require their attention.
Loan validation is one step in a much longer journey. It sits inside an end-to-end loan lifecycle that runs from origination through processing, underwriting, closing, and servicing. As the bank automates more of that lifecycle, the same pattern applies: faster speed-to-street, quicker closes, and steady gains in efficiency and revenue.