National Australia Bank will use artificial intelligence technology to make credit decisions on small business loans, illustrating how AI applications are shifting from the periphery to the heart of banking operations. NAB hopes the system that is being built by Rich Data, a Sydney-based AI company, will increase the supply of credit by widening the pool of small businesses that can qualify for a loan. It will also help NAB push towards real-time loan assessments, tapping data from cloud accounting platforms, transaction systems and other macroeconomic sources to profile small to medium enterprises and predict their likelihood of repayment. Howard Silby, chief innovation officer at NAB: "This will be put live with real customers early in the 2021 calendar year." NAB is the first major Australian customer for Rich Data, which supplies its Delta platform to banks in Asia and North America. NAB uses AI to triage of customer complaints and to detect money-laundering and fraud.