Northern Trust and Microsoft Deploy a Client Onboarding Agent That Cuts Data Preparation Time by 83 Percent, From Two and a Half Weeks to Three Days
Chicago, Illinois, and Redmond, Washington. Northern Trust and Microsoft Corp. announced on November 9 an expanded collaboration to accelerate artificial intelligence transformation across Northern Trust, beginning with the deployment of a new AI-powered client onboarding agent for clients on Northern Trust Asset Servicing's Front Office Solutions platform.
The agent was developed jointly by Northern Trust and Microsoft Frontier Company Forward Deployed Engineering teams. It handles one of the most complex steps in institutional client onboarding, transforming years of investment and transaction history into a standardized format ready for use within Northern Trust's reporting environment.
The platform serves institutional investors including foundations, endowments, pension schemes and large family offices. Northern Trust said onboarding can require consolidating large volumes of investment and transaction data from multiple sources to reconstruct performance histories, particularly for alternative assets. In a Northern Trust survey, 57 percent of asset owners cited consolidating data from multiple, disparate internal and external sources as their biggest challenge.
Following deployment, the agent cut data preparation time by 83 percent, from about two and a half weeks to three days. In controlled testing it recorded a 96.5 percent F1 first-pass quality score, a metric that combines precision and recall. Footnotes to the release state that the F1 score came from controlled testing across seven representative test cases using real, anonymized historical client transaction workbooks supplied by Northern Trust, and that the preparation time was measured in real client onboarding scenarios after deployment, including data transformation, analyst review, exception handling and final validation.
Built on Microsoft Azure, the agent uses Microsoft Foundry for enterprise AI and integrates with Microsoft Excel and SharePoint in Microsoft 365, so analysts can review, refine and approve its work. The release said Microsoft tuned the system using only anonymized data, so Northern Trust client data remained under the firm's control, and that human oversight is embedded throughout the workflow, with analysts reviewing outputs, evaluating reasoning, resolving exceptions and improving performance through expert feedback.
Pete Cherecwich, Chief Operating Officer at Northern Trust, said in the release that the agent combines Northern Trust's asset servicing expertise with Microsoft's AI capabilities to help clients get up and running more quickly during onboarding, reducing the time required to prepare and validate client data while maintaining the oversight and controls clients expect.
Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President for Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft, said in the release that the collaboration shows what next-generation enterprise operating models can look like, with AI amplifying human expertise to accelerate service delivery and improve agility, with governance and human oversight built in.
Northern Trust said it was founded in Chicago in 1889 and has offices in 24 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., and across 22 locations in Canada, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. As of September 30, 2026, Northern Trust had assets under custody and administration of 19.9 trillion U.S. dollars and assets under management of 2.0 trillion U.S. dollars.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons 词条主图：Northern Trust
