When Fifth Third acquired healthcare-lending fintech Provide for an undisclosed amount in 2021, it gained a lending platform that now runs small-business origination across the bank’s entire 1,100-branch network. 

At the time of the deal, Provide had originated more than $1 billion in commercial loans since 2016 and Fifth Third held nearly $400 million of those loans and had been an equity investor since 2018, according to Nasdaq’s June 2021 report. 

What makes the arrangement unusual is how far the platform has spread inside the bank.

“I’m not aware of another example [of a fintech being acquired] and then having their sort of in-house platform expand this much within the bank,” Andrew Bennett, Fifth Third’s head of small business, told FinAi News. 

Provide now operates as a national channel serving dental, veterinary and optometry practices, while its platform consolidates lending bank-wide, he said.

“When we started on this journey, there were four platforms — including ours — that Fifth Third was using to originate loans,” Bennett said.

Combining them into one is “really powerful, because then all the improvements we make … benefits the entire segment.”

The platform also powers a sub-$100,000 SMB loan product launched this quarter, Bennett said, adding that this tool also is used across all branch networks of Fifth Third. 

The tech 

Approvals come “in a matter of hours,” Andrew said, and some loans have been cleared “in less than an hour.” 

In one workflow, a business owner “sitting with a banker” gets an invitation to finish the application on their phone while an analyst reviews and approves “the deal in a matter of minutes … all while that business owner is sitting in the branch.” 

Humans still make every credit decision, Bennett said, adding that the team is working to develop AI to perform repetitive tasks such as documentation, KYC, checking policies and flagging data fields that might need attention.

“Many human jobs in the origination of a loan do not necessarily need human judgment,” he said.  

In the coming quarter, the $213 billion bank aims to consolidate all lending operations for business with less than $10 million in revenue on Provide’s platform to streamline originations, he said.

Other AI deployment 

Beyond lending, Fifth Third’s biggest AI gains so far have come from its engineering team. 

The bank has rolled out GitHub Copilot across its developers and “30% to 40% of the code now is being written by AI,” Bennett said.  

That has let a small engineering team support a growing base of users as Provide’s platform expands across the bank, he said. 

The AI-written code is “probably equivalent to a mid-level engineer,” he said — useful, but still reviewed by humans before deployment.  

Customer-facing lending automation, including AI-assisted loan-file review, is slated for the bank’s 2027 roadmap, Bennett added. 

Register here for the FinAi Lending Summit, set for Oct. 7-8 in Las Vegas.