Northern Trust and Microsoft today announced an expanded collaboration to accelerate artificial intelligence transformation. The financial institution launched a new AI-powered client onboarding agent for its Front Office Solutions platform. Joint engineering teams from Northern Trust and Microsoft Frontier Company developed the advanced technology. The tool streamlines complex onboarding tasks for institutional clients across the financial sector.
Specifically, the system converts years of legacy transaction history into a standardized format. The new capability combines advanced artificial intelligence with enterprise privacy and security controls. Consequently, institutional investors receive a much faster onboarding experience.
For clients using Front Office Solutions, conventional onboarding is very challenging from an operational point of view. The system offers analytics to foundations, endowments, pension funds, and big family offices. Prior to this system, onboarding involved engineers spending lots of time bringing together huge amounts of information on investments.
The new initiative directly addresses a major industry bottleneck. Northern Trust surveys reveal that 57 percent of asset owners struggle with data consolidation. The automated onboarding agent resolves this issue by standardizing historical transaction data quickly.
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Because of this, the system cuts down on the data preparation process time by 83 percent. Time taken to get someone on board was reduced from two and a half weeks to just three days. In addition, the system received an F1 score of 96.5 percent when put through its initial test run. This is because human involvement is integrated into the whole process.
Analysts can validate starting data long before the client’s official launch date. Built directly on Microsoft Azure, the agent integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Foundry capabilities. Furthermore, analysts interact with the agent using familiar Microsoft 365 tools like Excel. A governed intelligence layer preserves approved knowledge to refine future onboarding tasks.
Consequently, Northern Trust minimizes manual labor while improving service predictability for institutional clients. Designed for strictly regulated financial markets, the platform maintains robust security protocols. Microsoft engineers utilized anonymized data to improve model scoring without compromising privacy. Therefore, Northern Trust retains full control over all proprietary client information.
“At Northern Trust, our close relationships with our clients give us a unique perspective on how their needs are evolving and where we can create value,” said Pete Cherecwich, Chief Operating Officer, Northern Trust. “The client onboarding agent is an example of an approach that combines Northern Trust’s asset servicing expertise with Microsoft’s AI capabilities to help get clients up and running more quickly during onboarding. The solution reduces the time required to prepare and validate clients’ data while maintaining the oversight and controls our clients expect, creating capacity for both sides to focus on higher-value work.”
Northern Trust continues applying artificial intelligence across its core operational capabilities. Augmented intelligence serves as a force multiplier for internal human expertise.
“Advanced AI can turn deep industry expertise into better client experiences and new capacity for growth,” said Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Financial Services, Microsoft. “Through Microsoft Frontier Company, our collaboration with Northern Trust shows what next-generation enterprise operating models can look like: AI amplifying human expertise to accelerate service delivery and improve agility, with governance and human oversight built in. This approach points to a broader opportunity across regulated industries to transform complex workflows and deliver business value without compromising trust.”
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