Northern Trust ships a client onboarding agent built with Microsoft Frontier Company FDEs, cutting data prep by 83%

Northern Trust and Microsoft announced an expanded collaboration whose first result is an AI client onboarding agent for Northern Trust Asset Servicing's Front Office Solutions platform. The agent was built jointly by Northern Trust staff and Microsoft Frontier Company forward deployed engineering teams, and converts years of client transaction history into Northern Trust's standardized reporting format.

The companies say it cut data preparation time by 83%, from two and a half weeks to three days, and reached a 96.5% F1 first-pass quality score. Items the agent is unsure about go to human analysts. Microsoft's own write-up says the FDEs and Northern Trust's finance experts built a library of rules for the agent together, and tuned it using only anonymized data so client data stayed under the bank's control.

This is one of the first named, measured production results from Microsoft Frontier Company, the $2.5B FDE unit Microsoft launched in July. It shows what FDE work looks like in a regulated bank: pairing with domain experts, building evals, and designing human review into the workflow.