Loan Underwriting AI Agent for Bank | Custom AI Development

The Setup: Leveraging AI for Loan Underwriting

A mid-sized community bank in the South partnered with Sketch Development Services to modernize how its analysts create loan-approval narratives. More specifically, they wanted a secure, compliant web application that could reduce narrative preparation time. Previously, they had been spending four hours to complete this process for every single loan application. Leadership at the bank recognized that it could leverage agentic AI to increase productivity dramatically.

The Challenge: Consistent, Compliant, Secure Agentic AI for Banking

The bank’s lending department faced a familiar problem: analysts spent hours drafting and revising loan narratives that summarized borrower financials and justified approval decisions. The process was manual, inconsistent, and highly dependent on each analyst’s writing ability.

As loan volumes grew, these inefficiencies led to delays, uneven quality, and increased compliance risk. The bank needed a way to standardize narrative generation—without sacrificing accuracy or data protection. Furthermore, this bank had to find a partner capable of building a custom AI solution that was secure and compliant enough for the highly regulated financial industry.

The Solution: Fast and Secure AI Web App on Microsoft Azure

Sketch proposed a lightweight, secure web application powered by Microsoft Azure. Built on Azure App Service with private networking and role-based access, the application keeps all data within a single U.S. Azure region to ensure compliance and protection of sensitive financial information.

Key features include all of the following:

AI-Generated Narratives: Analysts can securely upload a borrower’s cash-flow documents and use Azure OpenAI to generate a first-draft narrative within minutes.
Custom Policy Chatbot: A built-in chatbot trained on the bank’s internal policy manuals and PDFs helps analysts ensure every narrative aligns with institutional standards.
Admin Portal: Bank administrators can easily manage chatbot content and narrative templates through intuitive admin screens—no developer intervention required.
Advanced Editor: An interactive workspace allows analysts to refine AI-generated drafts collaboratively with the model, adjusting tone, structure, and detail before finalizing.
Enterprise-Grade Security: Authentication is handled through Microsoft Entra ID (Single Sign-On), ensuring secure, role-based access across departments. Data storage and interactions are managed through Private DNS, and encryption at rest.

The Results: Improved Quality at 8x Speed

Sketch estimated that it would take six weeks to build this product, but ultimately delivered working software in half the expected time. Within three weeks, the bank had a secure, Azure-based web application that reduced narrative preparation time from four hours to only 30 minutes—while improving consistency, compliance, and quality across the board.

The new system has transformed the bank’s narrative process:

Turnaround Time: Reduced from four hours to thirty minutes per narrative.
Consistency: Every narrative now follows approved templates and policy language.
Compliance: Policy adherence is built directly into the workflow via the chatbot.
User Satisfaction: Analysts report spending more time on analysis and less on writing, freeing capacity for higher-value tasks.

This bank has actualized the promise of agentic AI by achieving the best of both worlds: better outcomes, faster, at a lower cost.

Feedback from the client

"Sketch was quick to move and adjust the goal as the project kept being built. The scope of the work was to develop a loan underwriting tool to generate loan narratives for loan approvals with the help of AI. Additionally, we designed a loan policy assistant tool that allowed us to query loan policy questions and get answers.

They met every delivery time and set a clear expectation on what we could get out of it. Great communication weekly on what they accomplished and what the next step was. Great team to work with.”

–President, Regional Community Bank

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