Celtic Bank Taps AI to Overhaul Small Business Lending

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – April 29, 2026 – Celtic Bank, a perennial top-ten Small Business Administration (SBA) lender, has announced a major technological leap by partnering with Casca, a fintech firm specializing in artificial intelligence for commercial loans. The collaboration will see Celtic Bank integrate Casca's AI-native platform to power its entire SBA lending program, a move aimed at drastically cutting loan approval times, boosting loan volume, and overhauling the digital experience for small business owners seeking capital.

The partnership signifies a critical shift in the high-stakes, often cumbersome world of SBA lending. By adopting a platform that promises to compress origination timelines from months to mere days, Celtic Bank is positioning itself at the forefront of a technological wave transforming how financial institutions serve America's small business backbone.

The End of the Waiting Game?

For decades, the SBA loan process has been notoriously paper-intensive and slow. Small business owners seeking 7(a) loans—the SBA's most common loan program—often face a gauntlet of complex forms, redundant data requests, and a waiting period that can stretch from 60 to 90 days or longer. This administrative friction creates a significant barrier, particularly for smaller businesses that need capital quickly to survive and grow.

Casca's platform is engineered to dismantle these bottlenecks. The system digitizes and simplifies complex SBA forms like the 1919, 413, and 159, guiding borrowers through an intuitive, step-by-step flow that has been likened to the user experience of popular tax software. On the lender's side, the platform automates laborious tasks that once consumed days of a loan officer's time. This includes automated financial spreading, where the AI analyzes financial documents to extract key data, and sophisticated analysis that turns tasks that took hours into minutes.

This automation frees up Celtic Bank's lending team from manual data entry and document chasing. "We've been looking for a technology partner that can keep up with our ambitions for small-dollar SBA lending," said Todd Boren, President and COO of Celtic Bank, in a statement. The goal is to allow loan officers to focus on higher-value activities: building relationships with borrowers and making nuanced credit judgments.

Speed as a Strategic Imperative

Perhaps the most disruptive element of the partnership is the speed of implementation. Where traditional loan origination system (LOS) overhauls are multi-year, multi-million dollar projects, Casca's modern, cloud-native architecture allowed Celtic Bank to move from contract to full configuration in a matter of weeks.

"Casca's speed to deploy and ability to scale with us has been unlike anything we've experienced with traditional lending technology," Boren noted. This agility is a game-changer for established institutions like Celtic Bank, which must innovate to compete with digital-native lenders but are often constrained by legacy infrastructure. The ability to rapidly adopt and deploy cutting-edge technology without a prolonged, high-risk implementation cycle represents a significant competitive advantage.

This "quick-to-market" capability allows banks to respond to market needs faster and begin realizing returns on their technology investments almost immediately. For Celtic Bank, which operates as an SBA Preferred Lender with the authority to approve loans without direct SBA review, this newfound technological speed amplifies its existing advantage, enabling it to move even faster on funding opportunities for small businesses.

AI-Native vs. AI-Enabled: A New Breed of Technology

The term "AI" has become ubiquitous in finance, but not all AI platforms are created equal. The distinction between "AI-enabled" and "AI-native" is crucial. Many legacy systems are "AI-enabled," meaning artificial intelligence features have been bolted onto an older software framework. In contrast, Casca's platform is "AI-native," built from the ground up around AI, which allows for deeper, more effective integration into the lending workflow.

This architecture allows the system to handle complex, unstructured data—such as scanned financial statements or business plans—with greater accuracy. It automates credit checks and "know-your-business" verifications by integrating seamlessly with third-party data providers, credit bureaus, and a bank's own core systems. The result is a unified dashboard that provides underwriters with a comprehensive view of the applicant, automating up to 90% of the manual work in document collection and initial analysis. This frees human experts to focus on the qualitative aspects of a loan application and handle exceptions, creating a more robust and efficient "human-in-the-loop" process.

A Growing Ecosystem of AI-Powered Lenders

Celtic Bank is not embarking on this journey alone. It joins an elite group of the nation's most active SBA lenders that have also turned to Casca to modernize their operations. This includes Live Oak Bank, the number one SBA 7(a) lender by dollar volume, and Huntington National Bank, the top lender by number of loans. Both institutions are not only clients but also investors in Casca, signaling deep confidence in the platform's potential.

Recent reports from Live Oak Bank's pilot program with Casca show promising early results. The bank reported a significant increase in its small-dollar loan originations and is on track to cut its application-to-funding timeline by roughly half, aiming for a 7-to-10-day turnaround. This provides strong evidence that the dramatic efficiency gains promised by the technology are achievable in practice.

This growing ecosystem points to a broader industry trend: the most successful lenders are increasingly becoming technology-first organizations. They are leveraging AI not just for marginal efficiency gains, but to fundamentally re-engineer their business models to be faster, smarter, and more customer-centric.

"Behind every SBA loan is a family betting on themselves, a Main Street storefront opening its doors, a community getting stronger. That's why we built Casca," said Lukas Haffer, CEO and Co-Founder of Casca. "When lenders like Celtic Bank can move faster and reach more borrowers, the impact ripples out to the communities those businesses serve." This partnership, therefore, is about more than just software; it's about channeling capital more effectively to the engines of the American economy.