OakNorth Credit Intelligence: Reinventing Credit Analysis and Monitoring with Machine Learning
Abstract
Commercial loan origination has historically been complex and inefficient, requiring many disparate, disconnected steps to be completed, starting from initial discussions with the potential borrower and ending with booking the closed loan on the bank’s loan servicing system. While automation and digitization tools have been available for a long time, banks often postpone investments in commercial loan technology in favor of higher priority regulatory compliance projects or improving profit margins on high-volume small business credit products. The OakNorth Credit Intelligence Suite seeks to help banks make better informed commercial credit decisions through portfolio insights, credit analysis, and loan monitoring.
Built over five years by a team of 250 credit scientists and software engineers, the ON Credit Intelligence Suite is a data-driven, cloud-hosted technology that gives lenders a bottom-up, granular, forward-looking view at both the borrower and portfolio levels, based on rich and dynamic data sets and subsector-specific scenarios.
ON Credit Intelligence is driven by machine learning, including:
- OCR/NLP to ingest financial documents
- Detecting anomalies in financial statements
- Finding and ranking peers
- Driver selection to identify predictive factors of growth, revenue, and costs
- Monitoring portfolios for potential problems
Banks can undoubtedly leverage various AI tools and off-the-shelf, AI-enabled credit scoring solutions to analyze internal commercial loan performance and borrower data purchased from business credit bureaus. OakNorth's unique approach to applying machine learning to traditional borrower-supplied financial statements augmented by numerous data sets, including unconventional and previously unavailable data, sets the platform apart from legacy credit analysis and portfolio monitoring tools.