Lending service provider Vine has launched AI Assistant, which is designed to streamline commercial and agricultural lending workflows. 

Launched May 6, AI Assistantaims to help bank credit analysts and lending officers cut down on the time spent searching through loan policies, regulations and supporting documentation, Chief Executive David Eads told FinAi News.  

The tool is targeted at community banks handling commercial real estate, small business and agriculture loans — a vertical Vine has historically served but is now establishing as a distinct offering.  

According to data analytics firm DataM Intelligence’s December report, the farming and agriculture finance market reached $183.21 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $256.97 billion by 2032, expanding at a combined annual growth rate of 4.3%. 

“Agriculture lending is often handled completely separately from commercial lending, even though technically they’re both commercial lending, but in practice the skill sets are very different,” Eads said. 

While commercial real estate underwriting tends to look at tax returns and financial statements, agricultural lending is forward-looking, focused on projected crop yields, livestock cycles and operating capital needs, he said. 

AI Assistant supports lending across row crops, livestock, equipment, land and operating capital and Vine has customers underwriting everything from thoroughbred breeding operations to cannabis loans, Eads said. 

“The agriculture market is really important. There are not a lot of ag lenders out there around the country. [The majority of them are] in the community banking space,” Eads said.  

Vine says because agricultural lending is a growing vertical for the company, it is important for it to make lending easy.  

“Even if there are only 20 banks that are able to lend in that particular market,” he said. 

The tech 

The assistant lets bank employees query loan policies, regulations such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency handbook and bank-specific reference materials in natural language, with the system returning sourced answers in seconds, Eads said. 

“It can make your least-productive employees as productive as your most productive employees,” Blake Paulson, former chief national bank examiner and board observer at Vine, told FinAi News.  

Tasks such as locating a specific clause in a bank’s loan policy — work that previously took 30 minutes of manual searching — now can be completed within 10 seconds, Eads said. 

The tool is built on Vine’s proprietary technology, including its own vector database, but is model-agnostic, allowing banks to select which LLM powers the assistant based on their cost and performance preferences, Eads said. 

Banks are using the assistant to find litigation records on borrowers, query quarterly subdivision sales data and cross-reference loan terms against internal credit policies — work that previously required pulling binders from file cabinets or scanning shared drives, he said. 

Growing client base 

This year has been strong for Vine, with the company seeing accelerated momentum across its client base, Eads said. 

Part of that tailwind comes from a shift in how regulators approach AI in banking, Paulson said.  

The OCC and other regulators recently issued risk-management guidance that explicitly excludes generative and agentic AI, with plans to release principles-based guidance rather than prescriptive checklists, he said. 

“The OCC, in their most recent semiannual risk perspective, talked about innovation, particularly artificial intelligence, but they talked about it in a way that is encouraging to banks to adopt these new tools and innovations, not so much warnings and talking about the downside of it,” Paulson said. 

That regulatory shift has made banks more comfortable adopting AI tools, a reversal from 18 months ago when bankers were defensive about the technology, he said. 

Eads declined to disclose which financial institutions are using AI Assistant, but  Vine’s client base includes Primeway Federal Credit Union, HSLC, Crest Savings Bank and Ipava State Bank, according to the company.  

“Vine’s approach is centered on putting AI in the banker’s hands, not bankers in the hands of AI,” a Vine spokesperson earlier told FinAi News. 

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