Why AI for specialist lending? Why Now? How Artificial Intelligence Can Transform Specialist Lending Today

Following hype through 2023, and development in 2024, AI has now properly stepped into the real world; and it’s here to stay. 

AI can consistently hit performance and creativity levels once thought impossible. The technology has become accessible, powerful, and ready to tackle real business jobs. Its strengths are particularly well suited to taking on specialist tasks which traditionally relied on experienced skilled people. 

With the biggest cost in lenders being staff overheads, and the most amount of time spent on cases being admin; there’s a real opportunity by focusing on the admin tasks. Lenders have typically needed to hire more people if they want to grow because their manual processes aren’t scalable. AI changes that.  

Imagine if you could hire a 24/7 always on concierge that would provide dedicated personal service over any channel to each of your brokers, guide them through everything from initial enquiry to fully packaged case, and make sure your underwriters always get a perfectly packaged case right first time; what would that be worth to your business? 

If you’re in the specialist lending sector, whether second charge, mortgages, bridging, asset finance, or commercial, there’s a strong case that the time to adopt AI is right now. Here’s why… 

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AI Can Do What We Thought Only Humans Could Do

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it can’t handle tasks requiring contextual understanding, nuance, or “human” thinking. That may have been true for earlier, more rigid systems. But Generative AI is a different beast. It doesn’t just follow set rules; it learns from vast amounts of text and data, adapting to new scenarios and applying reasoning. 

AI consistently passes Turing tests to convince it’s a human, outscores human test takers in advanced legal, medical, and reasoning assessments, is reported as more empathetic than Doctors and has the ability to conjure creative arts and music. If it can crack the legal bar exam, and get into Harvard University; then it can handle specialist lending tasks like analysing borrower documents, verifying eligibility criteria, picking out errors in incomplete case files, and getting things fixed. 

AI can engage; it’s not just a transactional, binary computer says no path; it reasons and can be trained to display empath, and guide brokers through complex paths to help shape lending deals in the grey areas. It can understand and respond to any query in natural language over any channel. It isn’t just for number crunching. It can read free form text, interpret questions, jargon, and partial information from brokers, then figure out the core questions or missing documents. Machines didn’t used to be able to do these jobs, so they’ve been reserved for humans. But AI can excel at them now; 24/7, instantly, to high quality, with no stress, emotion, or distraction. 

Specialist nuances, scenarios where no two cases are ever the same, like bridging finance for a partially renovated property and inexperienced developer or a portfolio landlord with unique income streams; AI can handle these too. It all comes back to the training and Large Language Model. It requires expertise, but it’s not too tricky to get this right and train AI on incredibly broad datasets that include unusual phrases, domain specific terms, and context clues, and continually updated on the latest information and conditions. It can even review its own performance, and make and implement recommendations on how to improve itself. Its reading comprehension and capacity for nuanced decision support make it particularly well suited to the “specialist” part of specialist lending. 

It is important to keep a human in the loop still, to keep an eye on things, and learn about what it does well. And it’s also key to recognise that the frontiers of its capabilities are jagged, the capabilities and features are moving so quickly through billions of pounds of funding and the brightest minds as the US, UK, and Far East technology providers race to drive things forward. 

The AI of today is leaps ahead of what it was just a year ago, it’s the fastest moving technology ever, shows no sign of slowing down, and is already in most UK consumers hands every day now in the form of ChatGPT apps, and the sprinkle of sparkle icons that have popped up in every platform from CRMs to Microsoft Word and email systems.  

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The Challenge: “But Our Work Is Too Complex for AI”

With the biggest cost in lenders being staff overheads, and the biggest amount of time being spent on admin; there’s a real opportunity to make the simpler admin work your first focus for AI, so your experts can focus on high value activities, not admin slog. 

It’s common for specialist lenders to assume their deals are too complicated. Maybe they involve freehold/leasehold complexities, multi layered valuations, or a borrower with a tangled portfolio. Often the actual criteria that is written down isn’t exactly what a lender will do, and the value of a human call to tell the story of the deal has traditionally been crucial. Surely a machine can’t cope with the nuances, twists, and instinct?  

Maybe today’s AI can do this for more complex underwriting activities, and personal relationshop activities. Maybe it can’t. Does it matter? The reality is that AI will disrupt this market, and it’s important to start learning about how it works and can fit alongside your people and in your operation. So perhaps the better question is to consider whether the AI can do the simpler admin work, don’t worrk about whether it can replace your expert underwriters or relationship managers. These can remain hypothetical questions for now; don’t use too much energy on those questions, invest that focus instead on what AI can definitely do and that’s handle the drudgery of the boring, repetitive back and forth, gathering, chasing, checking, updating, moving things around, and re-keing that that is the main source of time, cost, and errors on deals today. Even if you don’t believe that AI can nail complex credit decisions, it is hard to deny that it can: 

Be available 24/7, on whatever channel your broker wants to use, providing instant responses and updates to any question; with an ability to hand off to a human and manage expectations if required. The latest AI is not a chatbot; it’s much more rounded, flexible and powerful. 

Categorise incoming documents and evidence: Many complex deals require multiple sets of documents; personal IDs, business bank statements, property appraisals, you name it. AI tools can detect and file these automatically, highlight missing paperwork, and flagging suspicious things. 

Summarise and cross reference data: AI can cross check a valuation report with an applicant’s declared property details, ensure income and expenditure evidences matches what the borrower said, check the details on an invoice match the asset purchase price and date, and see if anything doesn’t match across the whole case. It can let a human reviewer know where there’s a discrepancy. No more reading through 50 pages of documentation by eye. 

Maintain real time progress tracking: Instead of staff manually sending “please submit X” follow-up emails, an AI engine can instantly see if a crucial doc hasn’t arrived and ping the broker, send daily updates outlining what’s done and what’s outstanding, recommend next actions or even take them on “Hi Steve, I can send an ID request to the borrower if you like?”. 

AI doesn’t need to step on the toes of your deal structuring experts or core personal relationship proposition. There’s huge value in automating the repetitive tasks that eat up hours of staff time every single day. And if any exceptions or truly unusual scenarios pop up, the AI routes them to the right human. 

The result is your experts focusing on high value activities, not admin slog. 

The Price of Doing Nothing

Many lenders follow a view of “When our volumes increase, we’ll just hire more staff.” But that approach has hidden costs:

Spiralling staff expenses: Bringing on new admins isn’t cheap. They need to be skilled and experienced, and often quality in regions can be scarce. Onboarding, salaries, and management oversight all add up; and growing too big can have consequences on culture. If your firm adds, say, 10 more ops people just to handle the email backlog, you’re spending an ongoing, substantial sum that doesn’t fundamentally improve your process.

Productivity roadblocks: Throwing people at the problem of too much manual work doesn’t solve it, and it makes it harder to solve in future because the business change complexity goes up. Humans can only handle so many tasks at once. AI can process far more data concurrently, 24/7. They don’t get overwhelemed, stressed, emotional or distracted. That means you can scale your operations without your overheads ballooning. . 

Risk of losing deals to faster competitors: In specialist lending, deals often hinge on speed. If a broker or borrower experiences delays or repeated requests for the same documents, they might walk. If a competitor can offer instant quotes, processing or better communication, you risk missing out on potential business, and brokers may not come back. 

Every day you delay, you’re paying for inefficiency, direct staff costs and lost opportunity. 

Then there’s the fact that AI is going to disrupt the market. Even if you don’t believe it’s ready today, it’s still hard to argue that it’s coming; and if that’s the case, then it’s crucial to get on the learning curve. It’s the type of technology that works well as a co-pilot, supporting humans in their jobs, and the more you can do this, the more you can learn about how it works, empower your people to use it, and understand how to play to its strengths so you stay ahead of the game. 

The specialist lending sector is getting more competitive. Brokers want faster decisions, borrowers want quicker offers, and margins can get squeezed. If you’re not looking at AI right now, you’re at risk of falling behind competitors and missing a key window to introduce innovation. 

Falling behind competitors as early adopters are already claiming an edge by responding to broker requests faster, cutting out mistakes, and scaling up throughput. These lenders will attract brokers who value speed and consistency.

AI capabilities are evolving at breakneck speed. By delaying, you miss out on shaping how AI fits your organisation’s unique quirks. Then, you’ll be in a scramble to catch up, maybe adopting half baked solutions later because everyone else is using them rather than shaping them to fit your specific proposition and competitive advantage. 

You want to be the lender brokers talk about as “the one who sorted my documents so efficiently” or “the one who gave me a quick decision because they never lost track of the conversation.” That reputation is huge in the specialist space, where relationships can make or break deals. AI can help with this, right now. 

“At a Fraction of the Price”: The Financial Case for AI

One of AI’s biggest draws is the potential for massive cost savings through increased productivity. It’s completely scalable at a fraction of the price of staff. To keep things simple, let’s say your average ops or admin staff member might be £20 per hour. Multiply that by a few hours of repetitive admin per day, and you see thousands of pounds per employee per month spent on tasks that AI could handle. 

AI is far cheaper than people, and can handle tens or hundreds of times as much work, many times faster, with much fewer errors. AI doesn’t clock off or take sick days. It can handle a blizzard of emails, documents, and queries as your business grows, and it keeps getting better with time, as models refine themselves through experience and / or your team customises them. 

Each new deal processed by AI adds only a marginal cost (a bit of computing power), whereas each new deal handled by humans adds big incremental costs (headcount, management, workspace). That’s the beauty of a scalable solution. And that’s exactly what specialist lenders need to support a spike in deal volumes. 

AI Is Ready, So Why the Delay?

If AI’s so great, why isn’t everyone using it? Part of the hesitation is cultural; some worry that an “impersonal machine” can’t match human communication. But that’s precisely what Generative AI does best: natural language. It can read, interpret, and generate human-sounding text. Others assume it’s too risky or untested. Yet, ironically, the real risk is not adopting tools that every other industry is already leveraging.

Then there’s the fear of complexity, “We’d have to rebuild our entire process from scratch!” Not necessarily. You can pilot an AI solution on your existing email workflows without a major overhaul. Brokers keep emailing as normal; the AI just handles the incoming messages, sorts them, extracts data, and flags exceptions. This “overlay” model is surprisingly straightforward. And once you prove the ROI (which is often immediate in admin time savings), you can expand usage. 

Practical Steps to Get Started

1. Choose a Target Area
Identify the part of your operation that’s drowning in admin. Maybe it’s broker email intake, or verifying documents for bridging finance. Start there.

2. Pilot, Don’t Overhaul
You don’t have to scrap your current systems. Look for AI solutions designed to integrate with Outlook, Gmail, or your existing CRM. Let the AI sit between broker emails and your back office system.

3. Empower Your Team
Staff may be nervous that “the robots are coming for our jobs.” Reassure them that this is about offloading the dull, repetitive tasks, freeing them to do more meaningful work, and saving the business from wasting money on manual processes. Being part of a tech led growth story can be exciting for everyone. 

4. Measure Results
Keep track of how many hours saved, how much staff overhead reduced, or how many fewer deals fall through. Having numbers will help you build the case to scale AI usage further. 

5. Stay Curious and EvolveGenerative AI is advancing quickly. Keep an eye on updates or new features. Once you’ve nailed admin automation, you can expand into more complex areas.

Concluding Thought: Seize the AI Advantage

It’s normal to feel apprehensive when a major technology shift comes along. But organisations who embrace game changing solutions early tend to get the rewards while those that resist find themselves scrambling to catch up.

So, why AI, why now? Imagine if you could hire a 24/7 concierge that would provide dedicated personal service over any channel, any time, to each of your brokers, and guide them through everything from initial enquiry to fully packaged case being received by your underwriters right first time; what would that be worth to your business? 

AI can deliver today on what used to be unthinkable and is ready to automate the specialist tasks that weigh your team down. It can deliver a leap in productivity allowing you to grow without hiring more people. Continuing to hire more and more people just to handle repetitive admin is a stopgap, not a solution. Every month waited is another month a competitor might steal your edge.