# Northern Trust streamlines client onboarding with AI agent > Source: > Published: 2026-11-09 16:00:00+00:00 Venerable Chicago-based banking institution Northern Trust today unveiled a new AI-powered client onboarding agent to streamline the process of bringing institutional clients onto Northern Trust Asset Servicing’s Front Office Solutions platform. The agent, which transforms years of data and transaction history into a standardized format ready for use in the bank’s reporting environment, is the result of an expanded collaboration with Microsoft. Developed jointly by Northern Trust and [forward deployed engineering (FDE) teams from Microsoft Frontier Company](https://www.cio.com/article/4192504/microsoft-and-amazon-devote-billions-of-dollars-to-thousands-of-fdes.html), the agent has cut data preparation time by 83%, from two-and-a-half weeks to just three days. “Onboarding a large institutional client can involve an enormous amount of data, particularly in alternative investments,” says Northern Trust COO Pete Cherecwich. “You might have years of transaction history and cash flows across multiple investments, and the data can come to us in all kinds of different formats.” Northern Trust Until now, Northern Trust had to map and transform that data manually before loading the data into its environment. “This seemed like a really good problem for AI because there’s a lot of complexity and variability in the data, but there are also patterns that the technology can learn,” Cherecwich adds. “The agent does a lot of the heavy lifting, and then our people review the output and handle the things where there’s uncertainty. That’s the sweet spot for us: let the technology do what it does well and let our people apply their expertise where it matters.” Cherecwich notes the agent, which consolidates large volumes of investment and transaction data from multiple sources to reconstruct performance histories, achieves over a 96% F1 first-pass quality score, an AI evaluation metric of the correctness and completeness of the mappings it produces. The agent was also evaluated using only anonymized data to ensure client data was securely governed throughout the process. The partners say this eyes off approach has allowed them to achieve production-scale performance while meeting the stringent data stewardship requirements of the highly regulated financial services industry. “When I think about ROI, I wouldn’t look at just one number,” Cherecwich says. “It’s speed to revenue, the client experience, and taking a very manual process and making it more efficient. It’s allowing our people to spend less time moving data around and more working with clients.” The partners built the agent on Microsoft Azure. It uses Microsoft Foundry for enterprise AI and integrates with Microsoft 365 tools like Microsoft Excel and SharePoint. Azure provides a governed intelligence layer to preserve approved onboarding knowledge to support continuous improvement of the onboarding process. The agent is a result of one of Microsoft Frontier Company’s earliest client engagements. Microsoft launched the $2.5 billion venture in July to provide clients support from FDEs that help them overcome the hurdle of moving from AI trials to deploying frontier AI at scale. “We felt like we needed to organize ourselves differently to be able to serve customers at the speed and scale they want,” says Bill Borden, CVP at Worldwide Financial Services, Microsoft. “We organized Frontier Company as we’ve been thinking about what makes a company ‘frontier’ and on the outer edge to take advantage of what AI can do.” Microsoft Part of that process has been studying Microsoft’s internal AI transformation. Those lessons have led Microsoft Frontier Company to bring together not only hands-on engineering teams, but also industry experts in energy and power, manufacturing, automotive, and government, for instance. Team members with expertise in change management and process optimization are also key parts of the mix. “We now have a really powerful organization that can sit with customers, understand their business processes and their challenges, and understand how we can actually leverage the tech,” Borden says. Cherecwich agrees those capabilities are what allowed the collaboration between Northern Trust and Microsoft Frontier Company to bear fruit. “We know asset servicing, our clients, and what a capital call or a valuation looks like even when the data comes in a strange format,” he says. “Microsoft knows AI and the underlying technology. You really needed both. I don’t think either side could have built as good a solution by themselves. And having Microsoft’s engineers embedded with our people and our expertise allowed us to move a lot faster.”