ConnectOne Bank is Building the Future of Commercial Lending on nCino’s Agentic Operating System

Already ranked in the nation’s top 1% in efficiency, the Bank is building a suite of AI agents on nCino with a goal to make every frontline commercial banker 50% more productive

nCino, Inc., the platform for agentic AI banking, announced that ConnectOne Bank is actively deploying nCino’s embedded AI capabilities across its commercial lending operations. Through a combination of nCino Banking Advisor capabilities now live in production and two custom AI agents built on the nCino Agentic Operating System (AOS), ConnectOne is expanding what its bankers can do and laying the foundation for a new level of operational performance.

“When we adopted nCino, we needed a tool that could strengthen our efficient operating model as we scaled, while supporting our speed to market,” said Frank Sorrentino III, Chairman and CEO at ConnectOne Bank. “In this next chapter, we are working with nCino to reimagine how our teams work. By leveraging nCino’s investments in AI, we can remove friction & administrative burden from our workflows, and double down on ConnectOne’s competitive advantage – our ability to serve our clients at the pace of their business.”

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Early Results

Banking Advisor’s Knowledge Base capability is live in the nCino Commercial Banking Solution at the Bank, and the results are already clear. Document search, a task that previously took bankers 20 minutes, now takes as little as 30 seconds, a 97.5% reduction in time spent searching credit policy and job aid documentation. Adoption has followed, with active users growing 41% in just 10 weeks.

The AOS enables financial institutions to deploy nCino’s native Banking Advisor capabilities out of the box, then build on top of them using their own workflows, data and institutional knowledge, all governed within the same trust infrastructure that underlies nCino’s own Digital Partners, role-based agents, ensuring every AI-assisted action is auditable, explainable and under the institution’s control.

ConnectOne has started with two agents targeting the high-friction, time-consuming tasks that have long defined commercial lending, comprising 16 unique skills with additional capabilities rolling out over the coming months. One agent, which uses Document Intelligence to update individual and business relationships, has already reduced task time by 60%.

nCino’s forward deployed engineering team worked alongside ConnectOne Bank team members to design, build and refine the agent suite directly within the institution’s environment, compressing what would traditionally be a multi-year transformation into an active, iterative deployment measured in weeks.

Building Toward 50%

At nSight, nCino’s annual industry conference, Sorrentino shared how the deployment fits into ConnectOne’s broader ambition: “We are one of the most efficient banks in the country. I believe with the things we’re working on today together with nCino, we are going to be able to make every single one of our frontline people 50 percent more efficient. Fifty percent means our bankers will work a thousand hours less on things that don’t matter and a thousand hours more on the things that do.”

“Frank had the same questions about AI every banking leader has right now; the same board conversations, the same concerns,” said Sean Desmond, CEO at nCino. “The difference is he made a choice to focus on outcomes over checking a box. And the results speak to what that looks like when you build the right foundation and actually commit to it. Frank and his team have turned AI into a measurable operational advantage across the entire lending lifecycle, and the work they’re doing on the AOS puts them ahead of where most of the industry is even trying to get to.”