TD Bank Group's AI team has built and deployed its first AI agent, a model that completes mortgage loan applications in minutes as opposed to the 15 hours it normally takes a human to process, American Banker reports. The agent was deployed in January. TD underwrites hundreds of thousands of mortgages every year, Chad Koziel, an assistant vice president at TD and founder of the AI startup Layer 6 that the bank acquired in 2018, said, and in the U.S. alone TD Bank recorded $826 million in total residential mortgage origination volume in 2025.
Once a borrower has provided documents such as a purchase agreement, government-issued ID, account statements and proof of income, they are assembled into a package. In the past, a human reviewer would review the documents, extract the relevant information, verify details, check for inconsistencies and create a summary. The agent now handles these steps and presents the results to a credit adjudicator, who makes the decision. Koziel said mortgage officers "get a more complete package, they get a more accurate summary at the very end, and they get it in minutes".
TD chose this first use case because it is a sharply defined task with clear inputs, clear outputs and a human in the loop. A rules-based approach could not handle it, Koziel said: "It is not possible to reliably account for all of these differences between humans using rules-based models, that's why we had humans do the process."
Koziel declined to say which foundation model underpins the agent, but said the bank creates some of its own models and also uses open-source models as well as off-the-shelf foundation models like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT. Developers tell the model to use a deterministic, rules-based tool, such as a calculator or Excel spreadsheet, for tasks like annualizing income from a pay stub, and the team feeds the model definitions for TD-specific terms and acronyms. Guardrails steer the model toward a library of tools it can use. The build involved subject matter experts from the business, scientists from Layer 6, engineers and technology professionals, and risk and control partners.
TD has a Trustworthy AI team led by Jesse Cresswell, a staff machine learning scientist at Layer 6. Models go through rigorous testing and final tests before going live, and once live the bank monitors performance metrics and the accuracy and relevance of the models' answers.
TD plans to produce more AI agents. One of its first targets is a wholesale transformation of the lending journey, and next up are AI agents for business loans.