Making Community Banking more Personal with AI

Overview

Locality Bank is a modern community bank built for South Florida business owners. Their edge has always been simple: know the local market better than anyone and use that knowledge to deliver faster, more personal service.

But Locality’s growth introduced a challenge—staff were spending too much time searching for answers scattered across SharePoint and OneDrive documents. The information was there; it just wasn’t easy to find. And every minute spent hunting for a policy or procedure was a minute not spent helping a customer.

Locality Bank wanted to fix that. They wanted their team focused on people, not paperwork.

That’s where Lamatic came in.

Challenges

• Internal Knowledge Access: Staff needed a faster, more reliable way to find answers to operational policies and procedures.
  
  
• Customer Onboarding Complexity: Migrating business accounts from other banks was slow and frustrating, especially when setting up scheduled transactions and payment flows.
  
  
• Loan Approval Delays: A key benefit of banking locally - fast loan approvals - was slowed by underwriting and approval timeline for new loans.
  

The Solution & Impact

Locality Bank partnered with Lamatic to execute the first of its multi-step plan to use AI to double-down on its personal service mission.

Step 1: Unify Knowledge Hub for Bank Staff

Problem: Staff often struggled to locate critical operational information scattered across SharePoint and OneDrive.

Solution: Lamatic ingested Locality Bank’s document repositories and built a process to ingest and continually refresh a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system. Accessible via a dedicated Microsoft Teams channel, staff could ask natural language questions and instantly get context-aware, policy-compliant answers.

Impact:

• Cut average time to find internal answers by X%.
• Reduced escalations to managers by X%, freeing up leadership for more strategic work.
• Improved staff confidence and service quality at the frontline.
  
  

Why Lamatic?

• Fast Deployment: First AI deployment (internal knowledge system) was delivered in just 4 weeks.
  
  
• Tailored for Banking: Lamatic’s flexible, secure architecture aligned easily with Locality Bank’s compliance and operational needs.
  
  
• Building for Scale: Each phase paved the way for a more automated, AI-powered bank of the future without requiring Locality to invest heavily in an internal AI team.
  
  

What’s Next & Expected Impacts

Step 2: Streamline Account Migration and Onboarding

Problem: New customers switching from other banks face friction when migrating accounts and setting up scheduled payments — a critical onboarding moment for businesses.

Solution: Locality envisions a dynamic onboarding wizard that:

• Guides new customers through account migration.
  
  
• Facilitates the process of setting up scheduled transactions by analyzing historical data from the customer’s prior bank (when available).
  
  
• Reduces manual data entry and errors.
  
  

Expected Impact:

• Shorten the customer onboarding process by X days.
  
  
• Increase Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) by X points.
  
  
• Reduce onboarding operational costs by X%.
  
  
• Deliver a differentiated onboarding experience that other banks can't match.
  
  

Step 3: Automate Loan Approval Workflows

Problem: Loan processing relies heavily on manual review, slowing decisions at the expense of both the customer experience and internal efficiency.

Solution: Locality plans to automate early-stage loan intake and eligibility analysis by:

• Extracting and validating data from loan applications.
  
  
• Running preliminary credit and risk assessments.
  
  
• Auto-routing files for human review based on business rules.
  
  

Expected Impact: Reduce loan decision turnaround time by X days.

With Lamatic’s intelligence delivery platform in place, Locality Bank is on the fast path and finding new ways to smartly and safely deliver on its mission of exceptional personalized service.

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