Wintrust Specialty Finance’s use of AI for credit adjudication is contributing to substantial funding volume, reflecting broader AI trends in lending.  

Deploying AI to determine borrowers’ creditworthiness has helped the equipment lender — a division of Beverly Bank and Trust, which is owned by the $72 billion Wintrust Financial — originate more than 4,000 deals worth roughly $500 million through the first half of 2026, President and Chief Executive David Normandin told FinAi News.  

Wintrust Specialty Finance has a team of 34 people, and without AI, the lender would have likely needed double or triple the number of employees to achieve that volume, Normandin said.

“If you think about the workload in our business, it’s kind of like a funnel shape,” he said. “The top of the funnel you’ve got sales, credit adjudication, documentation, funding, booking. The things that you can affect at the top of the funnel have greater value because the numbers are larger. Near the top of the funnel, credit adjudication is an easy one of those.” 

The lender expects year-over-year origination growth in 2026 and to close more deals in the second half than the first, he said. 

Wintrust is enhancing decision-making, analytics and probability default modeling with AI tools that “help us analyze at a deeper level than we’ve historically been able to do because there’s tons of data available,” Normandin said.  

Maximizing data 

AI is a boon for data-intensive industries like asset-based finance as it strengthens lenders’ ability to “find trends that aren’t easily perceivable or that your team has historical biases,” he said.  

“It helps provide more color and also helps bring things into light that may have been hidden in the past,” he said. 

AI also enhances the borrower experience by providing a deeper understanding of operational needs, enabling lenders to better identify and solve challenges specific to a business, Normandin said. Heightened personalization is a key differentiator, he added.  

“For us, it’s understanding customers so well that we’re solving problems that they didn’t actually know they had. That’s not as frequent as you think.” 

— David Normandin, CEO, Wintrust Specialty Finance

Lenders dive in  

Other financial institutions are using AI to power lending growth.  

For example, Happen Bank reported a 30% year-over-year increase in loans processed in the second quarter largely due to AI, CEO Scott Sanborn said during the company’s July 27 earnings call.  

SoFi’s loan originations reached a record $14.8 billion in Q2 amid growing adoption of digital and AI tools, according to its July 29 earnings call.  

Fintechs also are recognizing AI’s ability to drive value across the lending lifecycle, including front-end processes such as credit adjudication, Patrick Graham, CEO of startup lending fintech CreditLab, told FinAi News. 

“You’re taking a lot of information that a potential borrower is giving you,” he said. “And you’re trying to make a relatively quick decision to say, ‘Do I have enough here to go to my credit department and ask them to do a full underwrite of this deal?’” 

CreditLab plans to develop AI tools to score certain aspects of a loan application, whether that’s collateral, borrower financials or industry strength, Graham said. 

Register here for the FinAi Lending Summit, set for Oct. 7-8 in Las Vegas. This inaugural event will include speakers from Fifth Third and Capital One as well as a fireside chat with Piermont Bank founder and Chief Executive Wendy Cai-Lee.