THE ISRAELI STARTUP BUILDING A NEW INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM

While the financial world has undergone rapid digital transformation in recent years, one area has remained largely untouched: commercial credit processes. Even though this layer underpins the business economy, it remains one of the slowest, most costly, and most cumbersome aspects of financial institutions. The Israeli-American startup AIO Network is addressing this gap, aiming to create an entirely new infrastructure — a validated, digital, intelligent data layer for credit processes.
AIO is led by its three co-founders, Illit Geller Halevy, its CEO, Yuval Ryaboy, its CTO, and Yoram Bechler. The company's vision is to replace the archaic, manual mechanisms that currently manage trillions of dollars in business credit and transform them into a modern, precise, data-driven system.

Geller Halevy, who is steering the company toward significant achievements, is a serial entrepreneur with four successful fintech and technology startups behind her. Her experience in driving financial innovation and managing global teams equips AIO to move quickly, deploy complex technologies and navigate regulatory and security challenges in international markets.
Since beginning to commercialize its services, AIO has grown exponentially, reporting revenue growth of over 200 percent in the past year alone. The company serves leading financial institutions in Israel among them institions like Menora Mivtachim, Bank Leumi, BTB Israel, Menora ERN and Bank of Jerusalem are manybanks, insurance companies and non-bank financial institutions across the US. The leading accounting and consulting firm EY is not only a major client but also as a strategic partner, helping expand the platform to additional financial institutions and implement it in large-scale projects.

Opening the Bottleneck
AIO started by identifying what is known in the industry as 'document latency.' This is not merely an operational headache but a bottleneck that impedes economic growth. Analysts at institutions approving business loans spend a large portion of their time handling hundreds of pages of documents per application — Audit reports, financial statements, tax forms, legal approvals, bank statements and corporate registry data. After collection, every document must be checked for authemticity, missing information, verified against institutional policy requirements, manually entered into banking systems and cross-checked with external sources.

"The statistics speak for themselves," says Geller Halevy. "About 80 percent of loan applications are initially submitted with missing or incorrect documents. Studies show that an average of seven back-and-forth email exchanges and roughly 27 days are required just to collect the necessary information for approving a new business customer. Documents can range from five to 300 pages, each of which must be manually reviewed by skilled analysts. Mathematically, this can amount to processing up to 21,000 pages for a single loan. It's nearly impossible for humans to do this without errors, creating an operational burden that hampers analysts from focusing on strategic analysis, meaningful customer engagement and sound decision-making."

Beyond the sheer volume of documents lies a still deeper problem: all the data that financial institutions need for due diligence, understanding business activity, risk management and underwriting decisions already exist — but they are scattered across documents, external data sources and internal forms. With no way to consolidate, validate and translate this information into a single, complete, digital data-layer, the system remains slow, inefficient and fragile.

AIO has developed infrastructure that optimizes across multiple AI models, distinguishing document types, confirming authenticity, extracting complex data and interpreting its financial context. The more effectively a financial institution builds a flexible, verified and complete data-layer on its customers, the greater its capacity to deliver fast, accurate and efficient service.

The Vision: Turning Paperwork into Living Data
AIO's system, explains the company, is designed not to replace bankers but to give them 'superpowers.' It not only reads documents but also collects complete document- packages, classifies them, confirms the data and builds a fully validated financial profile of the borrower, all within minutes. This creates what the company calls a 'trust layer' for the business world. The result is an intelligent platform that does not simply read words on a page but understands their financial meaning, validates them and transforms a pile of opaque documents into a complete, authenticated digital financial profile in minutes.
What differentiates AIO from other solutions, notes CTO Ryaboy, is its advanced technological approach. Rather than relying on a single AI model to handle everything, the company has developed an orchestration system in which multiple 'instruments' work together in tandem, specifically built to meet the high-precision standards required in financial services.

"Our system runs multiple specialized models in parallel throughout the loan workflow and treats the borrower's entire document package as a unified data layer," explains Ryaboy. "One model handles real-time document ingestion and classification, another extracts complex financial data, and others confirm and cross-check to produce structured information that enables fast underwriting decisions — all, of course, under strict security protocols."

In collaboration with clients, the system learns exactly which documents are required for each type of loan. It sends reminders to all parties involved until submission is complete, using AI to ensure that nothing is missing. Moreover, it validates data against external sources such as corporate registries, D&B and other global data providers. The result is a clean, organized data-package that allows bank decision-makers to focus on risk management rather than paperwork.

"By transforming financial information into a verified, accessible data-layer and activating business models based on strategic partnerships — such as integration with Finastra systems (see box) — the technology enables financial institutions to reduce average review time by about eight hours per document set," notes Ryaboy.
"The shift from manual processes to AI-driven automation is not merely a technical improvement," adds Geller Halevy. "It's an economic necessity in a market where response speed and data accuracy can mean the difference between growth and significant operational losses."

The Economic Equation: Saving Dozens of Hours
The economic impact of AIO's technology for banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions is substantial. Industry studies indicate that the average cost of handling a loan-application ranges from $3,000 to $5,000. Annual operational costs add an another $1,000 to $2,000 per loan. For institutions processing hundreds of applications annually, this amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoidable operational costs. That is, AIO's ability to reduce lenders' workload by approximately 76 percent translates directly into massive cost savings and enables institutions to scale transaction volume without increasing headcount.
Customers are already feeling the impact. Deedra Howes, director of commercial lending operations at First Tech Federal Credit Union, describes the immediate effect on her organization. "We anticipate a 25 percent improvement in productivity and a reduction of 42 hours from application submission to approval," she says. For a financial organization like First Tech, cutting 42 hours from the workflow per file is more than an efficiency gain. It represents a business model shift that enables significantly higher volumes without hiring additional staff.

Becoming an Industry Standard
At the end of 2023, AIO completed a seed-round led by US venture funds, enabling it to expand development and data teams, accelerate US market penetration and deepen engagement with large financial institutions. With this funding solidifying its position as an emerging infrastructure player in the commercial credit world, the company has, since then, recorded over 200 percent revenue growth, expanded its workforce by some 40 percent, and forged strategic partnerships with leading financial institutions in Israel and the US.

At a time when 'data is the new oil,' AIO has positioned itself not as another mining company but as a sophisticated refinery, transforming unstructured raw material (hundreds of stacks of financial documents) into clean, high-quality fuel that powers the economy.
"In a world where the economy moves faster than ever and business liquidity is critical, our technology is far more than an office-efficiency tool," say Geller Halevy and Ryaboy. "It's an infrastructure that allows money to flow faster from lender to borrower, removes bureaucratic barriers and enables businesses to focus on growth rather than paperwork."

MY AIO: The New Face of Customer Experience
One of the company's most notable innovations is MY AIO, a dedicated portal for business customers that allows banks to offer a fast and accurate digital document-submission experience. Instead of navigating endless email chains, scans and errors, customers see a clear checklist, can easily upload documents (including photos taken with a smartphone) and receive immediate feedback on document quality and type.
For borrowers, it is a fast and transparent experience. For banks, it ensures that documents reach underwriting desks complete and compliant, significantly improving conversion rates in the credit process.

Partnership with a World Fintech Player
AIO's partnership with Finastra, the world's third-largest fintech company, represents a major strategic milestone. Through this collaboration, AIO technology is now available on Finastra's FusionFabric cloud platform, granting access to the thousands of banks and financial institutions worldwide that use Finastra's systems.

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In collaboration with the AIO Network