Able provides an AI-powered document orchestration platform for commercial lending and other document-intensive financial use cases. Our platform integrates with commercial loan origination/management (CLO/M) and enterprise content management (ECM) systems and allows financial institutions to automate and streamline the process of scoping, collecting and validating documentation required to complete transactions. We find that this “document orchestration” problem is often the no.1 source of wasted time for producers at financial institutions and one of the most disliked processes by their clients.
Customers use our platform to solve three key problems:
“Needs list” Scoping
We provide clients with an AI-powered rules engine that lets them scope perfectly-sized documentation needs lists for even the most nuanced of deals—letting them effortlessly identify every document that is needed and nothing that is not. Customers say it’s “miles ahead” of competing checklist solutions from major loan origination and management system vendors.
Collection
Clients use our suite of collaboration tools to easily request documentation, keep everyone apprised of progress across various channels (e.g. email, web), and enable privacy-conscious collaboration among all the stakeholders. Customers call this a “five times better experience than [major bank operating system] portal” and their clients call it “the easiest experience they’ve ever gone through”.
Able is served as a SaaS platform with an internal web application for users within the financial institution, and one or more external workspaces that can served as either of:
A white labeled, stand alone client portal
A customizable UI widget that institutions can embed into their own applications (e.g. a Salesforce Experiences portal).
Our platform was built by a team of engineers and designers from blue-chip organizations. You can find more about them here.
Perfect Needs List
Getting to a perfect “needs list” of documents requires surmounting challenges in cross-referencing and synthesizing information from various sources. For example, a relationship’s total credit exposure (found on a CRM) or its existing documentation (found in old emails or in an ECM separate from the CLO/CLM) might alter documentation requirements to be exposed to customers. Able solves for these challenges by connecting to various data repositories, using AI to ascertain the identity and metadata of documentation across the enterprise, and allowing users to configure a powerful, no-code rules engine that takes fine-grained details into account when generating a “right-sized” needs list that meets documentation policies. Part of our “secret sauce” involves our proprietary universal index of lending documentation; something our customers have called the “dewey decimal system” of financial documents.
Users can use our Packages feature, which uses a no-code document policy rule engine, to generate perfectly sized needs lists with one click
Documentation needs update dynamically based on new information
AI-assisted document processing
Validating and indexing documents is error-prone and time consuming. Production teams can spend up to 50% of their day downloading documentation, validating it, and processing it such that it is filed in the right places with the right naming conventions. Customers use Able as an AI-powered “net” that catches documents from many sources (email, portals, data rooms) and automatically processes and labels them with approved naming conventions and extracted entities, dates, etc.
Able uses AI to automatically name/categorize documents and add metadata according to configurable conventions
Users can bulk upload content and let Able identify where it belongs within the needs list
Our proprietary document viewer allows lighting-fast document loading and the ability to quickly search through hundreds of documents
Unified Experience
Processing incoming documents and right-sizing checklists involves lots of edge cases that force users to switch between various applications in a “swivel-chair” manner. Up to a third of documents will require multiple “cycles” to be right and users need to switch between email, PDF processors, and various storage systems to handle these. Able integrates with email, CLO/CLMs, and ECMs allowing users to conduct all of this work in a few clicks from within a single application—standalone or embedded into their CLO/CLM.
Users can search through, merge, split and reorganize documents within the document workspace
Both internal and external stakeholders can securely collaborate on content from one place
Able can integrate with email to access document attachments and log interactions
Our flexible architecture allows accessing content within other applications
All aspects of our application, including the human-in-the-loop document AI system, are covered by patents submitted in 2021 and scheduled to be reviewed in early 2024.
Customers use Able across a variety of use cases and verticals, from originations to portfolio management spanning CRE, C&I, Government Guaranteed, and Venture Debt use cases. Despite the differences in their workflows and constraints, they all agree on one thing: Able decisively makes it easier and faster to close and manage deals, and in doing so it makes their lives (and that of their own customers) better.
[It's] like a magic solution for us
– CTO, $5bn+ AUM Commercial Lender
I would be very sad if I had to go back to everything that we had before Able
– Lender, GGL
[It] works for us and provides value…how [Able] solves this problem for our institution and others…we all see benefits, we see opportunity.
– Senior Director, Strategy and Process, 60bn+ AUM Commercial Lender
[It] was super easy. It was awesome. It flowed really well.
– Director, GGL, 60bn+ AUM Commercial Lender
Approving and sending a document directly to the right place holder in nCino is my favorite thing in the world…[Loans] are going way faster than the few that we did not have in Able because I get on top of things way faster and [they] are getting worked on [by borrowers] much faster” - Loan Coordinator, SBA Lender
CTO, $5bn+ AUM Commercial Lender
[Our] customers like it because it's easy. It's 100 times easier.
– Manager, Loan Renewals
[It’s] probably subtracting at least five times [the time it takes for]our normal process…it's already saving human error…it’s a huge success.
– VP Sales, Commercial Lender
Literally the easiest thing I’ve ever used…and it’s attached to the hardest loan type!
– Borrower $3M+ CRE Loan, SBA Lender
A really phenomenal experience…within 30 minutes [we] got everything we needed
– Sales VP, Commercial Relationship Center
Able’s core investments have been in our document processing engine and interface which enable users to collaborate on document tasks and validate inferences performed by AI. This allows us to capitalize on recent advances in LLMs, which we have begun integrating into our product in an extensible inference engine (“Able Co-Pilot”). Co-pilot allows users to specify document extraction and validation tasks beyond the initial use cases and it enables complex validation tasks that require cross-referencing information across multiple documents or systems.
Able also plans to enable form-filling and e-signature in 2024. More on our roadmap, including prototypes, can be found here.
