AI push - Customers Bank races to reinvent lending

Customers Bank is stepping up its investment in artificial intelligence, expanding its partnership with OpenAI in a move aimed at transforming the speed and structure of commercial banking services.

The lender, part of Customers Bancorp, said it is pursuing a sweeping overhaul of its lending, deposit and payment systems, with the goal of delivering faster and more efficient outcomes for corporate clients.

The collaboration, which began in 2023 with the deployment of enterprise AI tools, is now entering a new phase.

Over the next six to twelve months, the bank plans to roll out enhancements designed to significantly compress transaction timelines and automate labour-intensive processes.

At the center of the initiative is an ambitious target to reduce the time required to close a commercial loan to around seven days.

Currently, that process can take between 30 and 45 days, reflecting the complexity of underwriting, documentation and legal negotiation.

Chief executive Sam Sidhu described the effort as a fundamental shift in how the institution operates.

“We’re looking at a fundamental reengineering of how Customers Bank operates,” he said, positioning the bank’s strategy as a move toward becoming an AI-driven organization.

The transformation is not limited to lending. Sidhu said account opening for complex commercial clients, which can take more than a day, could be reduced to less than 20 minutes through conversational AI and automated document collection.

Internally, the bank has already embedded AI into a significant portion of its workflows.

According to Sidhu, roughly half of its software code is now generated by artificial intelligence, saving approximately 28,000 hours of development time.

He noted that this efficiency gain is equivalent to avoiding the need to hire around 15 full-time employees.

“This is an opportunity for us to potentially slow that hiring and do more revenue per employee,” Sidhu said, underscoring the productivity benefits driving the bank’s strategy.

Adoption across the organization is already widespread. The bank said about three-quarters of its workforce is using AI-powered tools, reflecting a broad cultural shift toward automation and data-led decision making.

The technology is also beginning to reshape leadership practices. During a recent earnings call, Sidhu disclosed that prepared remarks attributed to him had been delivered using an AI-generated voice, highlighting the growing integration of automation even at senior levels.

Despite the scale of change, the bank has been careful to emphasize that human relationships will remain central to its business model.

By offloading routine tasks such as document collection, credit analysis and portfolio monitoring to AI systems, employees are expected to focus more on structuring deals and serving clients.

“When you have an autonomous agent, you’re essentially creating a digital worker,” Sidhu said. “They can work around the clock.”

However, he acknowledged that the shift raises important questions about the future of work within banking, particularly as automation alters traditional roles and expectations.

Customers Bank also stressed that its partnership with OpenAI goes beyond adopting existing tools. Instead, it involves co-developing capabilities tailored to the bank’s long-term strategy and operational needs.

“This strategic collaboration gives us access to frontier models and engineering expertise,” Sidhu said, adding that it will help guide the institution toward becoming what he described as an AI-native bank.