Over the past year, we've worked with lenders, debt collectors, and income advance providers across the US, UK, and Europe to scale their operations with AI.
For some teams, their focus was on abandoned applications no one had time to chase. For others, it was the thousands of accounts in arrears sitting in a queue, waiting for a human to dial.
While these are distinct problems, they’re all stages of the same journey, and they share the same constraints: lending is high-volume, time-sensitive, and compliance-heavy, which makes it incredibly difficult to scale.
Instead of solving pieces of the journey, we realised much greater value could be brought to lenders by covering the entire borrower lifecycle end-to-end.
Today, we're launching our Borrower Lifecycle Agent to do just that. It’s an AI agent built specifically for lending that covers the borrower journey from applications to collections, and the back-office work in between.
We’re already processing over 100,000 calls per month across our customer base, matching human recovery rates 1:1.
What makes an AI agent a “lifecycle” agent?
Unlike point solutions that automate one stage at a time, our Borrower Lifecycle Agent covers the entire lending journey.
Just like you have distinct teams for inbound calls and back office processes, we have AI agents with specialised expertise. These AI agents share context, guardrails, and conversation history, so when an issue spans multiple stages, like a hardship case that moves from an outbound call to a back-office review to an inbound resolution, they hand off and collaborate automatically. Your borrowers get a personalised and timely experience and nothing sits in a queue waiting on another team.
From pre-application to hardship reviews, and everything in between
The Borrower Lifecycle Agent begins helping before a loan is even active. Applicants who started but didn't finish get a call or a text from the agent, helping them pick up where they left off: answering eligibility questions, chasing missing documents, and guiding them through to completion.
Once a borrower is approved, the agent makes a personalised welcome call: walking through the payment schedule, setting up autopay, and making sure they know how to get help. Throughout the life of the loan, it handles day-to-day customer service: balance queries, payment date changes, direct debit updates, and account information.
When payments are overdue, the agent reaches out. It calls the borrower, verifies their identity, and walks through what they owe. "I can see you have an overdue balance of £240. I have a few options I can take you through: would you like to hear them?" If the borrower says they're struggling, the agent asks the right questions, triggers a back-office hardship review, and assesses their situation against your forbearance policies. Two days later, the borrower calls back to check on the outcome. The inbound agent picks up, already knows the full history, and walks them through the decision.
Global compliance, out of the box
Lending regulations vary significantly depending on where you operate. A collections call that misstates a payment plan in the US carries FDCPA risk. A hardship conversation in the UK that fails to identify a vulnerable customer triggers FCA Consumer Duty exposure. Across the EU, GDPR and the AI Act add data residency and transparency requirements on top of country-level consumer protection rules.
Every Gradient Labs agent already runs 20+ financial-services-specific guardrails on every turn of every conversation, covering vulnerability detection, misrepresentation prevention, and more.
Our Borrower Lifecycle Agent adds lending-specific compliance on top, pre-configured for three jurisdictions out of the box:
US: FDCPA, TCPA, Reg F, UDAAP, Mini-Miranda disclosures, state-level rules
UK: FCA Consumer Duty, CONC, vulnerable customer handling, Breathing Space
EU: GDPR, EU AI Act, country-specific consumer protection, data residency
Whether you're a US auto lender, a UK personal loans provider, or a European BNPL platform, the compliance layer is live from day one.
Treat every borrower like your only borrower
While many organisations look to AI for cost savings and scale, we've found that the CSAT gains are even more striking. Several customers report 98% CSAT, and in virtually every deployment, our AI agents score higher on customer satisfaction than human teams handling the same queries. In lending, that's not surprising: timeliness, personalisation, and a deep understanding of each borrower's situation go a long way.
Our AI agent knows the borrower's balance, payment history, and available repayment options before it dials. Proprietary timing models determine who to contact, when, and through which channel, so contact rates and promise-to-pay rates climb together. And because conversations and commitments are tracked across the borrower's lifetime, every interaction picks up where the last one left off, in any of our 30+ languages and regional accents.
Getting started
We can launch your outbound AI collections in a day. Simply upload a CSV of accounts and your AI agent can begin outreach the same day, over voice, email, and SMS, without any engineering or integration work.
When you're ready to expand beyond collections, our AI delivery team is there to help you get the full value of the Borrower Lifecycle Agent. We come from finance and have helped dozens of lenders scale their operations with AI, navigating the compliance hurdles, integrations, and QA it takes to go live across every stage.
How SteadyPay automates outbound collections with Gradient Labs
SteadyPay, an FCA-authorised embedded lending infrastructure provider serving neobanks and fintechs across the UK and Europe, was one of the first lenders to deploy our Borrower Lifecycle Agent. They started with outbound collections across their book of 72,000+ active borrowers, a use case where manual dialling simply couldn't keep pace with the volume of overdue accounts.
With Gradient Labs, SteadyPay now makes 33,000 outbound AI calls a month, converting 60% of engaged customers to committed repayment dates, all within FCA compliance standards.
SteadyPay also saw a +20% increase in reactivation within the first month, with cold borrowers who hadn't engaged in months picking up the phone and responding to follow-ups.
SteadyPay started with collections because that's where the pain was sharpest, but they're now looking to expand across the borrower lifecycle. That's the pattern we see across our customers: start where the need is greatest and grow from there.
If you’d like to see how our Borrower Lifecycle Agent can scale your lending operation, book a demo.
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