Lending is where complexity meets opportunity, and where traditional automation reaches its limit. In an era where speed, intelligence, and trust are non-negotiable, a new AI paradigm is emerging: Agentic AI. From onboarding and underwriting to servicing and collections, each phase of the lending lifecycle presents a unique opportunity to optimise speed, accuracy, and customer experience.
Agentic AI introduces a new paradigm in artificial intelligence that elevates financial institutions beyond traditional automation, into a realm of intelligent, autonomous operations. In a recently hosted webinar, technology leaders from Pennant and Red Hat shared valuable insights into how Agentic AI is delivering measurable impact across lending workflows, and why forward-thinking banks and financial institutions must act now to embrace this evolution. Here are the key takeaways from the webinar, highlighting both educational insights and practical applications of the technology within the lending domain of banking and financial services.
What Is Agentic AI and Why It Matters
Agentic AI refers to intelligent agents that operate independently toward defined business goals. Unlike conventional AI models, which react to inputs based on fixed rules, Agentic AI agents interpret data, learn continuously, and take proactive action to drive outcomes.
This represents a fundamental shift for banks and financial institutions. While automation has streamlined manual processes, Agentic AI enables systems to reason, adapt, and act autonomously. The result is not only increased efficiency but also enhanced strategic decision-making.
Key characteristics of Agentic AI:
By transforming systems from passive processors into intelligent digital actors, Agentic AI empowers banks and financial institutions to deliver faster decisions, reduce risk, and improve customer experiences at scale.
Agentic AI in Action Across the Lending Lifecycle
Given below are some use cases that demonstrate the potential the technology offers across different lending buyer scenarios
1. Personal Lending: Delivering Hyper-Personalised Journeys
Agentic AI enables straight-through processing in personal loans, guiding borrowers from application to approval in real time.
Key benefits:
This is intelligent orchestration tailored to each customer’s financial profile, not just process automation.
2. Asset-Based Finance: Automating Complex Secured Lending
For asset-backed loan or credit products, Agentic AI agents validate assets, ensure compliance, and dynamically adjust offers based on contextual data.
Strategic outcomes:
Agentic AI enables lenders to scale secured finance while maintaining strong risk oversight.
3. Commercial Lending: Augmenting Human Intelligence
In large-ticket commercial loans, Agentic AI acts as a digital assistant to underwriters. It aggregates data, summarises credit profiles, and flags exceptions proactively.
Operational improvements:
Agentic AI enhances underwriter expertise without replacing human judgment, leading to better lending outcomes.
What’s Holding Banks Back?
During the joint webinar, Red Hat and Pennant surveyed financial institutions on key barriers to AI adoption. The top two concerns reflected by the Poll survey were – Unclear ROI (indicated 27% of the audience) and Regulatory compliance requirements (polled by 27% of the audience). Additional challenges that came up included the challenges from legacy infrastructure and poor data quality.
These concerns underscore the need for strategic planning and the right technology partners to enable responsible AI adoption.
A Roadmap for Agentic AI Adoption
The webinar speakers recommended financial institutions should take a phased approach while planning to deploy and scale the Agentic AI solution:
This roadmap ensures Agentic AI becomes a reliable enabler of growth and efficiency, not a disruptive force.
Agentic AI Is Not the Future, It’s the Now
Agentic AI is not a future aspiration. It is already embedded in core lending operations at leading financial institutions, helping reduce decision time, increase accuracy, and boost customer satisfaction.
For financial institutions aiming to stay ahead of the curve, Agentic AI represents a strategic leap forward. It’s more than a tool. It’s a redefinition of intelligence, autonomy, and value creation in digital banking.
Static automation belongs to the past. The future belongs to systems that think, learn, and act with purpose
Red Hat and Pennant: Delivering Enterprise-Ready AI
Red Hat offers the scalable, secure infrastructure needed to operationalise AI. Its OpenShift AI platform provides a containerised environment for developing, deploying, and managing AI workloads with compliance and resilience in mind.
Pennant brings deep lending expertise through its composable, Digital-first platform, which manages over 80 million accounts globally. Pennant’s Lending Platform spans the entire lending lifecycle from origination to collections, and with Agentic AI capabilities offers powerful benefits including contextual decision-making and operational agility. Together, Red Hat and Pennant deliver the technology, infrastructure, and domain expertise required for scalable, responsible AI innovation in lending.
Resources
To access the webinar recording, please visit.
AI-Driven Lending: Moving Beyond Chatbots to Autonomous Agents
Click here to read the webinar transcript.
For a Demo of our Agentic AI Solutions, please write to: marketing@pennanttech.com
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