What

Arteria AI is a document infrastructure layer for major banks. As the connective layer between unstructured data and automation lifecycles, Arteria lets banks turn the majority of their data into actionable processes and insights. Founded in 2020, Arteria most recently raised a $13.7M CAD Series A in 2021, with funding from Information Venture Partners, Illuminate Financial, StandUp Ventures, and Golden Ventures.

Why

To Shelby Austin, Arteria’s Founder & CEO, AI presents a time-sensitive intervention in the back-office and in finance writ large. Whereas banks and other institutions may have previously benefited from holding out and waiting for cutting-edge technologies to develop further, the benefits of AI are of such a magnitude that waiting too long can make their processes full generations behind those of their competitors. Tech developments within the past decade have made Arteria and the promise of AI possible, Austin said.

In addition, Austin thinks there’s a misperception that the back office is reluctant to change. “People are actually trying really hard to be quite efficient, and I think it's hard to make change within these organizations,” she said. “It’s really a matter of creating a culture that allows people to adopt change in a way that will make things different.”

How

Arteria presents an opportunity for banks to improve their operations as well as tech-implementation cultures. Austin said banks no longer have the appetite to have tech providers sit within their organizations and deploy within their operational schema, rather than letting an institution implement the software themselves. “We’re able to take Arteria business to business and have it as strategic technology that sits within the four walls,” she said.

Arteria’s document-structuring capabilities also help tighten the trading process, from onboarding through reconciliation. It provides similar benefits for the lending process. Visibility on deals, their structuring, their risk, and lessons on how to make better deals in the future help make bank processes and operations more efficient. These efficiency plays may make banks redistribute talent or shrink headcount, Austin said, but are an inevitable result of major pressure to make the back office more efficient, especially in the face of headwinds.

Austin thinks the back office will continue to shrink, namely through the front office expanding into many of the tasks previously carried out by the back office. This suggests many of the people affected by restructurings may move into the front office. “There’s more of an interest in trying to enable people who are closer to the customer to take that back office journey further so that they’re more in control of the customer journey,” Austin said, especially with younger, digital-native customers who want things to happen more instantaneously.

“We'd like to play a critical component in the heart and soul of the core processes of large banks,” Austin said.