IBM Partners with Lending Labs to Launch AI-Ready Sovereign Lending Solution

Lending Labs, a lending-technology firm in Asia-Pacific, has partnered with IBM to offer an AI-ready sovereign lending solution to banks and financial institutions. The platform, Ontoz, uses industry ontology to automate loan origination and servicing while keeping customer data and AI decisioning inside national borders.

According to Anand, co-founder and chief executive of Lending Labs, 'The best AI in lending is the AI you can hand a regulator.' He added that if compliance officers cannot explain exactly what the system did and why, it's not considered finished. Ontoz addresses this issue by providing a 360-degree role automation and co-pilots across sales, underwriting, operations, support, engineering, testing, and product documentation.

The launch of Ontoz on IBM Cloud comes as data-residency and AI-governance rules tighten across Asia-Pacific. Regulators in many markets require that customer data and its processing remain within national borders. Gartner predicts that more than 75% of enterprises will have a digital sovereignty strategy by 2030.

Lending Labs said customers using Ontoz have seen a 50% increase in underwriting teams' productivity and a 30% increase in sales teams' productivity benchmarked against their peers. The company is inviting IBM's customers to design their own lending orchestration alongside its team through a full-day workshop.