Grasshopper Bank’s commercial lending clients want streamlined decisioning, so the bank is looking to AI to speed up the lending process for its underwriters and clients. 

Commercial clients want credit decisioning as quickly as possible, Steve Kerr, chief credit officer at Grasshopper, told FinAI News. 

To offer that speed, the $1.4 billion digital bank teamed with fintech EnFi to add agentic AI to its credit memo writing process, Kerr said. 

Traditional underwriting can take up to three weeks, depending on other projects that come across an underwriter’s desk, Kerr said. The amount of time an underwriter needs to actually analyze and type is typically around 10 days. 

Deploying agentic AI for underwriting

With agentic AI deployed into the underwriting process, much of the discovery can be done using technology, Kerr said.  

“There are a lot of components to a credit memo that have the ability for the technology to pull in from internal and external sources,” he added. 

For example, AI can start a risk assessment based on a North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code and determine what a borrower’s financials look like relative to industry peers, Kerr said. 

This turns the underwriter away from collating information and allows them to read the memo like a portfolio manager, assessing the risk and determining what might need to be added, Kerr said. 

With agentic AI, the project goes to the underwriter about 90% ready and they just need to fill in the gaps, he said. This means the project takes a couple of days, rather than a couple of weeks. 

The technology supports underwriters by handling routine information-gathering tasks, Kerr said, allowing the team to focus on higher-level analysis and decision-making. 

The streamlined credit memo process was rolled out in August and is expected to be fully integrated into commercial lending operations by the end of first quarter 2026, Kerr said, noting that “there’s an adoption curve.” 

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