Smart Loan - E2E digital Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2025

Bank of Georgia (BOG) is revolutionizing SME lending through a fully digital lending platform powered by AI-driven financial assessment models. The core objective is to create a seamless, efficient, and customer-centric lending experience by optimizing processes and leveraging advanced analytics for credit decisions. This marks a major shift from traditional, manual methods to an automated, data-driven approach.

This transformation is especially difficult in SME lending, where businesses are diverse and complex, and financial data is often messy or unstructured. Despite these challenges, BOG has built a reliable digital solution tailored to the unique nature of SMEs.

The motivation behind this innovation lies in the huge untapped potential within the SME segment. Traditional lending processes relied on manual underwriting, often taking up to 12 days to complete, leading to slow turnaround times, limited scalability, and inconsistent credit decisions. These outdated methods struggled to accurately assess the financial health of SMEs, hindering their access to timely funding. Recognizing this gap, BOG set out to digitize and automate the lending journey by employing advanced, AI-driven modeling techniques — unlocking scalable, accurate, and accessible financing for a vital segment of the economy.

In the regional market, SME lending is still dominated by legacy models that rely heavily on manual processes, lengthy paperwork, and generalized risk assessment methods. These approaches often fail to deliver the speed, personalization, and scalability that SMEs urgently need. While some players have taken steps toward partial digitization, few — if any — have delivered a fully end-to-end digital solution. BOG’s AI-powered lending platform stands out by offering instant credit decisions and seamless digital onboarding, setting a new benchmark for efficiency and customer experience in SME finance.

The core inspiration for this project was the ambition to democratize access to finance for SMEs — a segment often underserved by traditional banking. BOG recognized that SMEs are the backbone of the economy, yet their financial needs are frequently unmet due to rigid processes. Inspired by leading global fintech innovations and the transformative power of AI, BOG — always seeking areas of improvement — set out to reimagine the lending journey. With strategic input and collaboration from McKinsey, the bank envisioned a future where lending is fast, fair, and data-driven. This led to the creation of an intelligent, scalable credit model designed to unlock growth for SMEs and fuel broader economic development.

The SME Lending Tribe led the initiative, making it a strong example of cross-functional collaboration within the organization. SME Banking worked closely with Technology, IT, Data, Legal, Finance, and Compliance to redesign the entire end-to-end lending process and build the AI-powered platform. Data scientists developed the core financial models, while the Digital Tribe played a key role in delivering a seamless user experience. . This collective effort enabled BOG to deliver a best-in-class financing journey — where SMEs can get a loan in just 5 clicks.

The introduction of AI-first underwriting has transformed SME lending at BOG — reducing loan processing time from up to 12 days to under 2 minutes. This automation has already streamlined over 20% of applications, lowering operational costs and increasing efficiency. Since launch, the platform has received over 20,000 applications and rapidly built a significant loan portfolio, demonstrating strong demand from day one.

Looking ahead, BOG plans to launch a secured version of the Smart Loan and continuously enhance its AI models to improve accuracy, expand coverage, and drive even stronger results.