The Agentic Bank

SME Underwriting Agent

⬡ Tally Scorecard-driven credit decisioning for small-dollar SME facilities.
◆ Autonomous Specialist

Takes the spread and the application, runs the SME credit policy and scorecard, and decides standardized small-ticket cases inside the delegated-authority guardrails: approve, decline, or refer up. Writes an adverse-action-compliant rationale for every decision and refers anything above its ticket size or risk grade to the chief-credit agent.

Memory

Working The application, spread, scorecard inputs, and current decision lean.
Episodic The borrower's prior facilities and conduct history.
Semantic SME credit policy, scorecard logic, delegated-authority limits.
Store Policy store + decision ledger

Orchestration

MCP

Harness · Managed Agents … session event-log per decision; deterministic policy tool calls.

Tools

{ } Credit scorecard engine API { } Bureau + conduct data API Credit policy (RAG) Retrieval Referral to chief-credit agent A2A

Evals & guardrails

  • Delegated-authority guardrail: cannot approve above a ticket size or risk grade … refers up.
  • Every decision carries a written, adverse-action-compliant rationale.
  • Champion/challenger on scorecard changes; outcomes back-tested before promotion.
  • Fairness monitoring across borrower segments.

Frontier edge

  • Formal action-gating: the delegated-authority limit is a hard, cryptographically-signed policy constraint … the agent provably cannot approve above its ticket size or risk grade, and every decision is replayable.
  • World-model simulation: stress-tests the facility against the borrower's likely cash-flow paths before deciding, not just the point-in-time scorecard.
  • Causal reasoning on adverse action: the written rationale rests on counterfactual 'which factor, if changed, flips the decision' analysis, not feature correlation.

A sample run

Trigger A £50k working-capital line application with a complete spread.
  1. 1Pull bureau + conduct data; run the SME scorecard.
  2. 2Check the request against policy and the delegated-authority matrix.
  3. 3Within limits and grade … approve with conditions; draft the rationale.
Output An approved facility with priced terms and a documented rationale; anything above the delegated limit instead routes to the chief-credit agent, pre-analysed.

In numbers

73%
SME decisions auto-completed
< 5 min
Median time to decision

Handoffs

Across ⇢ Risk → Credit Risk for policy + model governance

More on the Business Banking (SME) desk