VMPL

Singapore / Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], September 2: Lending Labs, a lending-technology firm serving banks and non-bank lenders across Asia-Pacific, today launched its enterprise orchestration platform, Ontoz, on IBM Cloud. Ontoz uses industry ontology to help lenders automate the full loan lifecycle while keeping customer data and AI decisioning inside national borders, addressing a barrier that has stalled AI adoption in regulated banking.

The main obstacle to AI in lending has been accountability, not model quality. Once an AI system informs a credit decision, a bank must show a regulator where the data sits, who is responsible and how the decision was reached. Many institutions have run pilots that cleared their numbers but never reached production because they could not answer those questions.

Ontoz is built to close that gap. With industry ontology and domain language that enforces regulatory and product policy boundaries, Ontoz offers a 360 degree role automation and co-pilots across sales, underwriting, operations, support, engineering, testing and product documentation.

The launch comes as data-residency and AI-governance rules tighten across Asia-Pacific, with regulators in a growing number of markets requiring that customer data, and often its processing, remain within national borders. Gartner predicts that more than 75% of enterprises will have a digital sovereignty strategy by 2030.

'The best AI in lending is the AI you can hand a regulator. If a compliance officer cannot stand up and explain exactly what the system did and why, we do not consider it finished.', said Anand, co-founder and chief executive of Lending Labs.

With Ontoz on IBM Cloud, lenders can:

- Automate origination and servicing tasks for complex loan products using AI, including mortgages, auto finance, small-business loans and loans against property

- Set the level of AI autonomy per task, with a defined escalation path mandated by policy

- Hooks to review any AI action, ensuring verifiable compliance with product policy

- Change lending policy as configuration

- Keep data and runtime in-country, where regulators require in-country processing

- Deploy AI-ready lending solutions across IBM's cloud and on-premise environments

'Our work with lending labs reflects a shared vision of helping lenders reimagine processes, accelerate innovation, and unlock new levels of operational efficiency' said Ravi Jain, Vice President, Systems & Cloud Sales, IBM India & South Asia.

Lending Labs said customers using Ontoz have seen a 50% increase in underwriting teams productivity and 30% increase in sales teams productivity benchmarked against their peers.

The company is inviting IBM's customers into a full-day workshop to design their own lending orchestration alongside its team.

Ontoz on IBM is commercially available now across cloud and on-premise deployments.

About Lending Labs

Lending Labs builds lending orchestration software for banks, non-bank financial companies and other lenders, with a focus on Asia-Pacific and other regulated markets. Its platform, Ontoz, coordinates work across people, systems and AI to automate loan origination and servicing while keeping decisions governed and auditable. The company was founded in 2024, is headquartered in Bengaluru. It builds on the lending-technology work of Kuliza. For more information, visit lendinglabs.io.

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