How ConnectOne Bank uses AI to save time on admin work
- Key insight: ConnectOne Bank brought agentic AI tools to its tech stack and is reporting improved efficiency within three months.
- What’s at stake: AI is changing the way commercial banking employees at ConnectOne — and other banks — do their everyday work.
- Supporting data: ConnectOne employees using nCino’s AI tools reduced time spent searching documents by 98%, from 20 minutes to around 30 seconds.
ConnectOne Bank is starting to see results from its AI deployments.
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The Englewood Cliffs-based digital bank released on Tuesday the initial results of an AI-powered integration that it piloted with bank software provider
In one instance, nCino’s
“Connect One is mostly a commercial bank serving small to medium-sized businesses throughout all the markets in which we serve, and that’s been pretty much true since the day we founded the bank 21 years ago,” ConnectOne CEO Frank Sorrentino III told American Banker.
“I’ve been in this business 30 years and I’ve seen several inflection points,” he said. “On the other side of every major technology inflection point there has been growth. I would fully expect that both software companies and banks are going to see growth on the other side of this one, which happens to be called AI.”
Ali Mattera, chief digital officer at ConnectOne and one of American Banker’s 2025
“As we continue to scale, the next opportunity is not only to digitize workflows, but to make them smarter, faster and more intuitive,” she said. “The strategic value of these new AI-driven enhancements is that they support how we work, how we grow and how we create a better experience for our clients and teams. For our bankers, that means less administrative friction and more time to focus on what matters most: relationships, responsiveness and helping our clients move their businesses forward.”
American Banker’s
One of ConnectOne’s goals, according to Sorrentino, is to make the bank’s frontline commercial employees more efficient overall through using AI in their work.
“We could save our frontline folks 50% of their time by taking away the administrative tasks that they deal with on a routine basis,” he told American Banker. “The average person works 2,000 hours a year. If we give them 1,000 hours back, does that mean we’re going to fire 50% of our producers, or do you think we’re going to allow them to go out and be 100% more productive?”
He also said that bringing in agentic AI is not a cost-saving measure for the bank, but instead an investment into the future of the company.
“There’s been a lot of talk in the markets recently about cost savings from AI,” he said. “I think they’re thinking about it in an incorrect way. We’re seeing folks that are able to manage more clients and bring in more opportunities, which is requiring more infrastructure in the back office to be able to accommodate that.”
Even with the bank’s recently reported efficiency improvements, Sorrentino said, ConnectOne will likely need more people to handle the increase in business.
“The amount of revenue that’s coming in is increasing, not decreasing,” he said. “That’s why I am very confident that these tools are going to allow the best companies to get even bigger and hire more people. Some of the jobs are moving around as well, but there are job descriptions that even today I don’t believe exist that we will be hiring for tomorrow.”
