LHV Bank has gone live with agentic AI to process customer emails, in a new deployment with Gradient Labs. The rollout was confirmed by Kris Brewster, interim CEO of LHV Bank, in a LinkedIn statement, and follows a proof-of-concept partnership with Gradient Labs first announced in March.

The structural driver behind the rollout is governance taking priority over speed in a regulated banking environment. "We took our time getting here because in a bank the guardrails matter more than getting live quickly. Early days, but very promising signs and a lot more agentic customer servicing features to come," Brewster said.

Brewster, who previously served as LHV Bank's director of retail banking before taking over as interim CEO from Erki Kilu in April, had earlier described customer support as "a critical touchpoint for retail banking" when the proof-of-concept was first announced, underscoring why the bank chose this function as its first agentic AI deployment.

Gradient Labs provides frontline technology capable of automating customer service functions end to end, with a platform that can also be applied to disputes, lending and user onboarding. "At the beginning you approach implementing AI as a cost measure. But really the biggest learning was that it's not a cost play. It's more of a regulatory compliance and customer experience play," said Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, which he founded in 2023 with fellow Monzo alumni Danai Antoniou and Neal Lathia.

Gradient Labs' client roster includes Wise, Zego, Plum, Stash, Yonder, Pockit, Penfold, Morse, SteadyPay and Bondora, and the company closed a $26 million (approximately €21.8 million) Series A funding round in June, backed by Octopus Ventures, CommerzVentures, Redpoint Ventures and Exceptional Capital.

LHV Bank UK operates as the regional subsidiary of Estonia's LHV Group, providing retail banking, SME lending and banking services for fintechs. Standalone financial results for the UK subsidiary were not disclosed. Beyond the Gradient Labs deployment, LHV Bank has also implemented a regulatory compliance tool called Project SARathon for Suspicious Activity Reports and uses legal technology platform Luminance for contract analysis.

For the sector, the rollout reflects a maturing approach to agentic AI in regulated financial services, where the business case increasingly rests on governance, consistency and customer experience rather than headcount reduction alone.

Source: Konsulteer