Founders Corner: Narmi’s Practical AI Promise

Every financial institution is currently feeling immense pressure to adopt AI. The market is flooded with hype, yet for the vast majority of bank and credit union executives, the actual path forward remains entirely unclear. And the recent advent of agentic AI, where systems transition from passive assistants to active agents executing multi-step operations, has only accelerated pressure on financial institutions who want to keep up with the latest technology while minding their role as stewards of sensitive financial data.  

Narmi Practical AI

At Narmi, we’ve spent the last year iterating on our AI promise. The answer? Our philosophy centers on Practical AI. This approach is intentionally tailored toward focused, real-world use cases that help bank teams move faster, make more optimized decisions, and drastically reduce friction across daily workflows. We are weaving AI directly into the functions that bankers and account holders engage with every single day.

To date, we’ve delivered:

• AI DecisionAssist: Built directly into Narmi Grow, this tool delivers smarter, faster KYC/KYB decisions grounded in your institution's specific history. By pulling decisioning data through integrations like Alloy and other data sources, it surfaces clear summaries and recommended actions, transforming a historically slow, manual verification process into a streamlined review.
• AI Secure Messages: Operating natively inside Narmi Command, this feature helps service teams deliver faster, more consistent responses to secure messages. It drafts highly contextual replies, allowing smaller staff sizes to efficiently handle a broad range of inquiries without losing the human touch or compromising trust.
• MCP for Business and Consumer Banking: This reimagines financial intelligence by allowing small-and-medium-sized businesses to securely connect their permissioned banking data to leading models like Claude or ChatGPT. Business customers can instantly self-serve complex reporting requests—such as cash flow, balance, and transaction analysis—freeing bank staff from fielding manual reporting queries. (Importantly, Narmi MCP users have 1.4x higher deposits, and 62% of monthly MCP Users use it more than once a month.)

• Marketing Promotions and Audiences: Available to marketing and staff teams inside Narmi Command, this pairing turns deposit growth into a repeatable motion. Staff describe an audience in plain language and AI builds it in seconds off live behavioral and balance signals (for example, "balance greater than $10,000 within the last 30 days"), then AI Marketing Promotions generates on-brand campaign content from a URL and a few keywords. It replaces slow manual segmentation and generic blasts with fast, secure experimentation aimed at the funding and primacy behaviors that actually grow deposits, no data team required.
• AI Search Bar: Built into Narmi Command across surfaces like the Application View and ACH Manager, this feature lets staff ask plain-language questions and get clear, narrative answers instead of digging through raw reports. It turns dense, multi-source data into readable insights on the spot, helping teams shift from reactive lookups to proactive financial guidance for the customer in front of them.

And the best part: our clients are actually using these features!

Widespread Uptake

We aren’t just speaking theoretically about these capabilities; our customer base is actively deploying them. Today, 66% of our financial institutions have already signed our AI terms and conditions. Looking at features across live production and active testing environments, the real-world momentum is undeniable. 

Taking Compliance Seriously

Narmi calibrates oversight to autonomy: as AI moves along the agentic gradient from copilot to agentic workflow to autonomous agent, the risk profile rises and our controls tighten in step. We engineer every agentic workflow for the "Goldilocks Zone," where AI does the cognitive heavy lifting while humans retain decision authority at each meaningful inflection point. No agent alters data, sends a communication, or modifies a record without explicit human approval, enforced at the infrastructure level, and decisions like credit determinations, BSA/AML escalations, and adverse action remain human-owned by design. Around these controls, Narmi runs a comprehensive AI governance program built on three pillars:

• Policy, Documentation & Oversight: A cross-functional AI working group (including leaders from Leadership, Product, Engineering, Information Security, and Legal) ensures our AI practices align with both internal policies and industry expectations. We provide clear, easy-to-understand AI security and privacy policies for all employees and partners.
• Education & Awareness: Continuous training ensures that all Narmi employees who design, build, or manage AI systems understand the associated risks and our established controls.
• Security Testing: Narmi's regular security assessments and penetration testing now explicitly include AI-specific adversarial testing. We proactively simulate attacks like prompt injection and model evasion to validate and improve the resilience of our defenses.

Through this gradient-based control model, our Shared Responsibility Model, and rigorous governance, Narmi delivers compliant, highly secure tools while your institution keeps complete oversight and final approval of all AI-generated content. This partnership gives financial institutions the compliance confidence they need to innovate boldly.

Looking Forward

Ultimately, our approach comes down to listening to our customers. We recognized early on that community financial institutions didn't need grand, hypothetical tech promises. By ignoring the hype cycle and focusing entirely on creating approachable, actionable AI products, we’ve built tools that solve immediate operational friction while respecting the rigorous compliance boundaries banks live in.

This pragmatism is exactly why we are seeing such widespread, rapid adoption across our customer base today. Financial institutions aren't hesitating, because they can immediately see how these tools natively fit their daily workflows and empower their teams.

But solving today’s bottlenecks is only half the equation. By embedding these practical, human-in-the-loop workflows right now, we are fundamentally readying the data infrastructure and establishing the secure delivery layer required for the future. As the market shifts toward fully agentic AI, Narmi and our partners won't be scrambling to catch up. We are already primed, structured, and actively building the future of community banking.

To learn more about Narmi Practical AI, visit narmi.com/narmi-ai.