Information and App Overload

There are 2.4 million apps in the Apple App Store and of course on a daily basis, we use about 9 apps and over a month, we might touch 30 apps. If you are doing math, every day we use about 0.000375% of what’s available for us to use.

We simply don’t have enough attention span or time in a day to explore all the apps. It doesn’t mean that those 2.4 million apps are not useful, it’s just that wWe can’t possibly synthesize all of the information available to us.

Apple is introducing Apple Intelligence to help us navigate through our problems and leverage some level of artificial intelligence and agentic workflow to utilize the apps that are on our phones. Google, Meta, OpenAI offers generalized artificial intelligence to answer our questions that can reason with the user and interact with them to a certain level.

There are specialized generalized AI apps that can accomplish specific tasks such as coding. Generalized AI and agentic workflow goes beyond the phrasing “There’s an App for that.”, we should replace that phrasing with “There’s a prompt for that.”

LendAPI enters A.I. race with ARC AI

At LendAPI, we are developing specialized generalized A.I. tools to help lenders, banks and credit unions to gain more efficiency and reduce operational costs. Helping the operations team to make less mistakes and increase their productivity is what ARC AI is all about.

The first implementation of our ARC AI tool is the ability to understand the totality of the submitted application and help underwriters to understand what they are looking at and provide informed decisions based on all of the data available.

ARC AI doesn’t get tired and won’t shy away from the amount of content available to digest. It will act as your co-pilot underwriter and help you think through ways to help this applicate from identity verification to income verification.

ARC AI - Prompting for Ideas

LendAPI is all about saving time and increasing efficiency. Sometimes the hardest starting point for underwriters is where to start.

We’ve designed prompts for underwriters to start asking questions with a point of click. Sometimes, we just want to see a summary of all of the information submitted and sometimes we want to go straight to the issue at hand and investigate why the application is declined.

You can click on the ARC AI icon on the dashboard home page and a prompting dialog box will appear filled with ready made questions that will help you to get started. 

You can also access ARC AI by going to Agent Dashboard and clicking into a specific application you are interested in and on the summary panel on the right hand side, you can click through a series of prompts made for you as well. There are plenty of options for you to activate ARC AI and want to make it available within the context of your operational workflow.

ARC AI will identify sections of what’s important to the underwriter, traverse through thousands of not tens of thousands of data elements and summarize into an easy to read report. This information is also saved for later review. Everything is logged.

From identity verification to underwriting criteria, it neatly summarizes the information and gives you a reflection of all of the information and narrative.

ARC AI, your Co-Pilot at your Service

You can dive deeper with ARC AI as well. Perhaps one of the most burning questions are about why a certain application is declined or in a review status.

In banking and financial services, a credit decision is never ambiguous. The final credit decisions are deterministic, meaning that there’s no grey area. Either an application is approved or declined.

The way banks, financial services and credit unions reach these decisions are through decision engines and credit risk strategies or rules. Sometimes these rules sets are complex or chained together depending on the path these decisions take.

These series of if, then, else logic execute in sub seconds, parsing through thousands of variables, scores that an underwriter might use hours to figure out why a decline or adverse action took place.

Our underwriters can start with simple questions such as “Did the applicant pass OFAC?”. Before A.I., an underwriter might have to contact someone in information technology to request a credit report or an identity verification report.

These reports are often unreadable by people, so the business intelligence team will have to transform this data into something that’s human readable. 

Often, some information is left out or misinterpreted or masked because the IT, Data and credit underwriting team doesn’t have a cohesive knowledge or understanding on what each one of these teams of people are looking for.

Say, after the report is delivered to the underwriters, it could have been days or weeks passed and the underwriter has moved on and the customer might have moved on as well. Losing a critical opportunity to convert a potential customer into a client.

The underwriter will have to then work with the credit risk team and understand the latest set of underwriter criteria coded into a decision engine that the underwriting team didn’t know which produced the decline results. Another team is now involved to compare the data that was received and manually simulate the outcome to see exactly what went wrong.

ARC AI analyzes all of this information in seconds and points to the exact point of failure and directs the underwriter into the next conversation that’s on point, in context and productive. It immediately increases the underwriters output by a thousand fold.

With ARC AI from LendAPI, underwriters can even help the broader team to diagnose potential issues with the rule set that was implemented and integration points of failures that could take weeks or months to uncover.

ARC AI is now available for everyone on the platform to use.

Going Deeper with ARC AI

Sometimes you need a second opinion on a credit decision by having a conversation with your peer or someone senior on the team. This gut check helps underwriters to learn and understand the boundaries of their credit underwriting box.

Most of the time, everyone is busy with their tasks and can’t hardly make time to help someone else at the drop of a hat. ARC AI is there to help and always available.

Sometimes you want to ask a question like "What are the risk signals on this file?”

ARC AI can highlight a bunch of the most important aspects of the application and compare the information on the file with the most important aspects of the underwriter criteria. 

Debt to Income ratio, length of credit history and the amount of recent inquiries happen to be the most important rules that any self respecting banks will use. ARC AI then does the math and compare the rule, score cut offs to the actual data derived from the application and data from third parties.

This gives the underwriter a greater confidence that his or her thinking process falls in line with what the system is performing. Equipped with this data and summary, the underwriting team can have a more robust conversation with the applicant about what they can do the improve their odds or simply explain multiple failure points to their application within a short period of time to establish trust (even when the application is declined) with that declined applicant.

ARC AI underwriting maxxing

Since ARC AI from LendAPI has a broad understanding of all of the integrated partners, data sets which include identity verification and open banking data and credit data, it’s the perfect pairing to our Rules Studio.

You can prompt ARC AI to write rules and strategies directly into our Rules Studio. You can prompt something like “Create a subprime auto lending risk strategy”. 

ARC AI will scan through all of the data available in the LendAPI platform and leverage reasoning engines which we use through various partners to create a relevant, accurate and complete decisioning tree that’s ready for you to review.

Whereas it might take days or weeks to study all of the variables from various integrated partners, ARC AI can write these rules in minutes. This greatly simplifies the process in which a credit risk analyst will go through to suggest new rules.

Ultimately, credit decisions are regulated by various governmental agencies and these decisions created by ARC AI or any other type of general artificial intelligence tools need to be carefully reviewed and tested.

LendAPI also provides test beds for you to run these strategies in a shadow mode to see how these rules, strategies and models would have performed in production and in reality. A human or a team of experts can then make modifications and ultimately decide to promote these new rules into a production A/B testing environment.

About LendAPI

LendAPI is a global leader in embedded finance infrastructure and one of the fastest-growing fintech platforms in the world. Since its inception in 2024, LendAPI has revolutionized indirect financing across diverse industries, including automotive, marine equipment, luxury consumer goods, and professional services. Our technology powers seamless indirect lending scenarios, unlocking millions of financing opportunities for banks, credit unions, retailers, and fintechs.

Driven by innovation, LendAPI features ARC AI, our proprietary artificial intelligence layer that optimizes underwriting, automates compliance risk assessment, and powers our in-store co-pilot tools. LendAPI delivers a complete, private-labeled ecosystem, encompassing frontend customer experiences, robust administrative suites, full loan servicing, and licensing support, enabling partners to launch in-house Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) and credit products quickly and efficiently.

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