Northern Trust and Microsoft deploy an AI agent that cuts onboarding prep from weeks to days

Northern Trust has expanded its collaboration with Microsoft, starting with an AI agent that prepares clients' historical data for onboarding. According to The Paypers, the agent was developed by Northern Trust and Microsoft Frontier Company's Forward Deployed Engineering teams.

It is being used for clients of Northern Trust Asset Servicing's Front Office Solutions platform, which provides performance and analytics for institutional investors such as foundations, endowments, pension schemes and large family offices.

The work itself is unglamorous but heavy: converting years of a client's investment and transaction data into the standardized format used in Northern Trust's reporting environment. Onboarding can require consolidating large volumes of data from multiple sources to reconstruct performance histories, particularly for alternative assets. In a Northern Trust survey, 57% of asset owners cited consolidating data from disparate internal and external sources as their biggest challenge.

The results are concrete. Northern Trust says the agent cuts data preparation time by 83%, from two and a half weeks to three days, and delivers a 96.5% first-pass F1 quality score, a measure that combines precision and recall.

Humans stay in the loop. Analysts review the agent's outputs, evaluate its reasoning, resolve exceptions and feed improvements back into it; during implementation the agent is used to reconcile errors and validate a client's starting data before the client goes live.

The agent runs on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Foundry and integrates with Excel and SharePoint, while an Azure-based intelligence layer preserves approved onboarding knowledge so the process improves over time.

On governance, Microsoft tuned the agent's quality using only anonymised data, so Northern Trust client data remained under the firm's control. Pete Cherecwich, COO of Northern Trust, said the agent combines the firm's asset servicing expertise with Microsoft's AI capabilities to get clients up and running more quickly while maintaining the oversight and controls clients expect.

Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft, said the collaboration shows how AI can amplify human expertise to speed up service delivery with governance and human oversight built in, and that the approach could apply to complex workflows across regulated industries.

Northern Trust, founded in 1889, reported USD 19.9 trillion in assets under custody or administration and USD 2.0 trillion in assets under management at the end of September 2026. For banks, back-office onboarding work like this is where agents produce measurable returns first, and it is becoming a common entry point for AI moving from pilots into production.