Northern Trust has an AI agent that does the first and dullest part of taking on a new institutional client: reshaping years of the client's old transaction records into the bank's standard format. Preparing that data used to take about two and a half weeks. With the agent, built together with engineers from Microsoft, it takes three days, and an analyst checks the result.
The wait was never about decisions
A pension fund or an endowment that moves its reporting to Northern Trust brings its history with it, spread across several systems, each with its own layout. Someone has to rebuild that history, especially for investments that are hard to value, before the new service can show a correct number. The bank's analysts did that by hand while the client waited. Now the agent does the conversion, and the analysts review it in Excel and SharePoint, resolve the exceptions and approve it. Because this happens before the client goes live, they also catch mistakes in the client's own starting data.
This is only one step of onboarding, at one bank, for one kind of client. But anyone who has changed accounting software, a bank or a payroll company knows the shape of it. The new product is fine. Getting your old records into it is what takes weeks, and that is why people put up with the old product for years.
Fixing it used to take a whole industry
The UK's bank switching scheme shows how hard that was to fix. Before it launched in 2013, switching took weeks. The scheme only worked because the banks agreed to one shared process and to a seven-day guarantee for customers. In effect, they made every customer's records look alike.
The agent does the opposite. It makes one company tolerant of any format. That removes the need for a committee, because any firm that receives customers' old files can do it alone, and any firm that does will start winning customers away from rivals who still make people wait. I expect "live in days" to turn up in the sales pitch of many ordinary businesses within a couple of years.
What it looks like in a small firm
Take a bookkeeping practice that takes on three new clients a month. Each arrives with two or three years of bank exports and spreadsheets in different layouts, and about ten working days go into cleaning each one before real work starts. An agent that maps those files into the practice's own chart of accounts, with a bookkeeper reviewing the odd items, brings that to about three days. That is roughly twenty working days a month back, close to a whole person's month, and the new client sees useful books in the first week instead of the third.
The same arithmetic applies to a clinic taking over patient files, a school receiving pupil records from other schools, or a recruiter loading a client's old candidate lists.
Outside help without handing over your data
One detail matters for anyone who deals with sensitive records. Microsoft's engineers improved the agent's scores using only anonymized data, so Northern Trust's client records stayed under the bank's own control. The real files only met the finished agent inside the bank's systems.
A smaller business can ask for the same thing. When a vendor builds or tunes a tool for you, ask whether it can be tested on scrubbed copies, and keep the real records out of the vendor's hands until the tool is finished.
If you run any business with a setup step, the length of that step is about to become something customers compare. It is worth finding out how many days yours takes, and how many of them are spent retyping someone else's old records.