Metro Bank adopts agentic AI to boost business operations

Metro Bank, a high street bank operating in the UK, is deploying agentic artificial intelligence (AI) to boost technology across corporate and commercial business operations.

Metro Bank is adopting an agentic AI solution from Covecta that will deliver and complete tasks across the end-to-end loan lifecycle from lead acquisition to servicing. This will help compress work that might take hours of manual effort into minutes, according to Metro Bank.

Agentic AI, an emerging form of AI, has the capability to radically transform business operations and usher in a new age of process automation.

Agentic AI improves efficiency, decision-making and risk analysis

In a statement, Metro Bank claimed that each task completed with agentic AI “evidenced a 60-80 percent reduction in time.” This is generating “significant improvements” in team efficiency, decision-making and risk analysis, it added. 

“Covecta’s AI capabilities will help us to continue to grow in the most efficient way,” said Andy Veares, MD of corporate and commercial at Metro Bank. “Metro Bank is rapidly growing lending to corporate and commercial businesses: last year, new loan originations increased by 71 percent and we want to do even more this year.”

Covecta’s agentic AI solution frees up more time for corporate and commercial banking experts to spend servicing customers, which goes to the heart of Metro Bank’s relationship banking ethos, Veares continued.

“Metro Bank has demonstrated a relentless focus on the customer throughout our engagement,” said Ben Thomas, chief revenue officer (CRO) at Covecta. “We believe this ethos, paired with Covecta’s domain specific agentic AI capabilities, will deliver incredible value, so we’re delighted to be supporting Metro Bank on this journey.”

Watch Andreas Welsch, author of the AI Leadership Handbook, discuss the future of agentic AI

Agentic AI and the future of process excellence 

Agentic AI has the potential to revolutionize process excellence like never before. While traditional AI models can perform tasks such as generating text, they are still “prompted” and do not act alone.

However, that is going to change with agentic AI, according to Gartner. The research and analyst giant predicts that, by 2028, 33 percent of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1 percent in 2024. This will enable 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously.

The evolution of agentic AI is giving rise to the concept of agentic process management. This is an approach that utilizes the power of agentic AI to enhance process excellence. It should be considered a “disruptive force” in the long-term, according to Craig Le Clair, VP, principal analyst at Forrester.

“Today’s process tools rely on brittle customization and configuration,” he stated. “Exceptions and deviations must be explicitly configured in the system. Agentic systems can adapt to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of real-world processes.

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