The UK financial services sector is home to a vital and resilient tier of institutions: the private banks, mutual building societies, and speciality commercial brokers. We call this the High-Touch Economy. Unlike the massive, standardised utilities, these firms generate value not through volume, but through nuance. Their competitive edge lies in the human capacity to manage complexity, whether it’s structuring a bespoke wealth plan for an entrepreneur or handling a complex, non-standard insurance claim.
Yet, this reliance on human judgment creates a critical paradox as these businesses scale from tens of millions in revenue to the hundreds. The administrative burden of delivering personalised service scales linearly with revenue. Growth, whether organic or through M&A, quickly compounds operational friction, eroding margins and jeopardising the very service quality that defines them. For ambitious mid-market leaders, the question is simple: how do you scale human differentiation without linearly scaling human cost?
The Core Bottleneck
For the last decade, the industry invested heavily in modern "Systems of Record" core banking platforms, loan origination systems, and broker management platforms. While these systems are stable and essential, they share a critical vulnerability regarding high-touch service: they demand structured data inputs in a world of unstructured reality.
The lifeblood of a nuanced financial business is messy: a scanned PDF of a company's accounts, a complex email chain from a broker negotiating coverage, or a transcribed meeting note full of "soft facts" about a client’s objectives.
Highly skilled professionals are forced to act as "human middleware," spending 30% to 50% of their time on cognitive drudgery: reading, extracting key variables, and re-keying them into the rigid fields of the core system. This is not merely an efficiency loss; it is the strategic vulnerability that stops exponential growth.
Agentic AI as the Digital Sidecar
The solution lies in moving beyond simple Generative AI (focused on content creation) toward Agentic AI, Artificial Intelligence focused on task execution.
Agentic AI systems use Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason about the data they process. They can perceive context, plan a sequence of actions, and execute complex workflows that previously required human cognition. This capability allows us to automate the "Missing Middle" the judgmental data ingestion and triage layers that sit between the external client interaction and the internal System of Record.
We could describe this as ‘The Digital Sidecar Architecture’. We don't propose ripping out your core, stable system; we build a secure, isolated layer of intelligence that connects to the core via API. This approach is low-risk, vendor-agnostic, and allows us to deploy capacity multipliers in weeks, not years.
Unlocking Capacity in the High-Touch Economy
We see three key operational pain points where bespoke Agentic AI delivers immediate, transformative value:
1. Audit-Proofing Compliance in Private Banking
The UK regulatory environment demands rigor, particularly under Consumer Duty. A private banker or paraplanner must synthesise "hard" financial data with "soft" client objectives into a rigorous Suitability Report. This synthesis is cognitive and can take four to six hours of manual effort per report.
A Solution: The Compliance Copilot
A bespoke Agentic AI acts as a Compliance Copilot. It integrates with meeting transcription to capture a client’s "own words." It reasons: Given Objective X and Financial Constraint Y, Product Z is suitable because... It then drafts a fully formatted, evidence-cited suitability report, reducing the time from hours to minutes. Crucially, a secondary AI "Auditor" agent reviews the draft against codified FCA rules, flagging missing risk warnings before the human banker sees it. This gives staff 80% more time to spend on clients, not documentation.
2. Accelerating Decisioning in SME Lending
Challenger banks focused on the "Missing Middle" of SMEs often struggle with the "Financial Spreading" gridlock. Credit analysis requires manually reviewing SME financial statements, which arrive in chaotic formats like scanned, non-standard PDFs or Excel exports. This manual entry consumes underwriter time, introduces error, and makes smaller loans unprofitable to process.
A Solution: The Intelligent Credit Architect
Deploy an Intelligent Spreading Agent that bridges the gap between unstructured documents and structured databases. Using Vision-Language Models, it visually "reads" the document, semantically maps raw line items to the bank’s credit taxonomy, and performs anomaly detection ("Flag: Revenue increased 20%, but cash flow is negative"). Clean, validated data is pushed to the Loan Origination System in minutes, transforming a day-long process into an instant decision, fulfilling the promise of speed and agility.
3. De-Risking and Funding Broker M&A
For aggressive consolidators in the insurance brokerage space, the M&A playbook often stalls on data integration. Every acquisition brings a different legacy system, trapping valuable client data in silos. Until migration is complete (a multi-year effort) the Group lacks a Single Customer View, making cross-selling and organic growth impossible.
A Solution: The Virtual Data Harmoniser
Instead of waiting for physical migration, we deploy a Virtual Data Harmoniser Overlay. An AI Agent ingests the raw legacy data and performs Entity Resolution, linking "J. Smith Builders Ltd" across five different systems to create a virtual "Golden Record." This allows the Group to identify cross-sell opportunities (e.g., a client has property cover but no cyber insurance) and generate personalised lead emails immediately, funding the integration before the project is even finish
The Tech Enabler's Perspective
The barrier to exponential growth for high-touch finance is not a lack of customers, but a lack of capacity to process the complexity those customers bring. We see Agentic AI not as a frightening replacement, but as a strategic capacity multiplier.
By automating the cognitive admin (the reading, checking, and drafting) we allow your highly talented people to focus on the human skills that truly differentiate your business. We simplify the complex, focus on high-impact initiatives, and take the initiative to build solutions that support your next stage of growth.
The future of high-touch finance is not about sacrificing nuance for scale, but achieving both through smart, bespoke technology.
What we are building
Our commitment to driving business success through innovation and AI is backed by continuous, hands-on development. Our specialist teams are already actively building AI solutions and prototypes designed to directly address the scaling challenges we’ve discussed within regulated industries. Our dedicated Future Labs team is constantly innovating, working on groundbreaking solutions to tackle industry challenges head-on. You can check out our first prototype, 'Polaris View', here. Polaris View is an AI tool for regulated sectors whose whole purpose is to deliver Better, Faster, Human-Led Decisions. If you’d like to chat with the team or request a demo, please feel free to get in touch; we’d love to show you what's possible.
