Fintech Finance News | “Power Points” – Ravi Nemalikanti, Abrigo in ‘The Paytech Magazine’

Abrigo launches Abrigo APX, an agentic AI platform designed to automate lending for community banks, reducing manual tasks by 40% and speeding up capital access.

Community banks and credit unions are key to local economies in the States. Abrigo is helping to supercharge them with a new agentic experience.

Small Banks, Big Impact. That was the title of a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis on the impact that community banks and credit unions were having on the regional economy. It illustrated it with some key figures: in 2023, small business loans made up 12.6 per cent of assets held by local banks with $250million in assets or less. That compared to just 3.6 per cent at banks with more than $10billion on the books.

The author concluded that was largely a reflection of the proximity of these smaller institutions to their customers – who are often, literally, just down the road – and how that allowed them to make a better judgement call than those more remote lenders. The previous year, according to the report, 82 per cent of small-business applicants were at least partially approved for loans from small banks. Just 68 per cent of small business applicants received at least partial loan approval from big banks.

But there is a problem. Operating conditions are becoming increasingly difficult for community banks and credit unions in the U.S. due to mounting regulatory, technological, and competitive pressures. Their numbers are shrinking year on year. If they are to continue to be the flywheel for economic growth, they need to find more cost-effective models, without sacrificing the very thing that distinguishes them from their bigger rivals: local knowledge and strong relationships with the communities they serve.

For that, they still need to rely on super intelligence of the human kind. That apparent paradox is at the heart of Abrigo’s vision for the future of lending at community banks and credit unions. The U.S. fintech, whose technology is already deployed across more than 2,400 financial institutions, made its new Abrigo APX (Abrigo Agentic Platform Experience) generally available this autumn to automate and scale lending workflows at these institutions. Abrigo APX is capable not simply of helping a banker complete a task, but of understanding an objective, drawing together data, policies and context, and moving work across an entire lending process.

Abrigo believes that by reducing the time that bankers spend on paperwork, admin and fragmented systems, AI can give them more time to understand customers, spot opportunities and become even better advisors, driving more ‘yeses’, more efficiently. In effect, it’s putting sophisticated technology that was once the preserve of the world’s biggest banks at the fingertips of local bankers, democratising lending capabilities and helping to get more capital to small businesses that are struggling to access it elsewhere.

“J.P. Morgan might have 1,100 or so data scientists working day in, day out. The institutions we work with, thei entire workforce might be 200 or 300 people,” says Ravi Nemalikanti, Abrigo’s Chief Product and Technology Officer.

He’s aware that when transformational technologies such as AI emerge, smaller organisations like this struggle to develop the expertise and keep pace with competitors whose IT budgets dwarf their own.

“So, that’s why we bring it home, apply it and build on-ramps to new technologies for them,” says Nemalikanti.

A 2026 survey by the American Bankers Association (ABA) found that technology limitations and integration gaps were among community institutions’ biggest barriers to growing commercial lending.

Abrigo APX is ‘not about an AI feature that’s just bolted on to an existing platform’, says Nemalikanti. It paves the way for a step change in how these smaller banks operate.

“Where conventional AI might extract information from documents, answer a policy question or generate a credit memo, the banker still determines what comes next and moves work between systems. With an agentic platform, you’re helping the entire institution complete an outcome. Think of that as an operating model shift.”

Abrigo’s technology understands the desired outcome and surrounding context, breaks work into steps and coordinates specialist agents across the workflow. Nemalikanti describes these assistants as being closer to ‘digital humans’, and, just like humans, when a task goes beyond their pay grade, the system escalates it to a superior rather than improvise a solution.

“Humans are getting elevated to a higher threshold of intelligence where they have to apply a level of judgement,” says Nemalikanti.

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To see the full article, visit Fintech Finance News, ““Power Points” – Ravi Nemalikanti, Abrigo in ‘The Paytech Magazine’.”