Northern Trust has expanded its Microsoft collaboration, starting with an AI agent that prepares clients’ historical data for onboarding.
The agent, developed by Northern Trust and Microsoft Frontier Company’s Forward Deployed Engineering teams, is being used for clients of Northern Trust Asset Servicing’s Front Office Solutions platform, which provides performance and analytics for institutional investors such as foundations, endowments, pension schemes, and large family offices. It converts years of clients’ investment and transaction data into the standardised format used in Northern Trust’s reporting environment.
Automating data preparation
Onboarding for these clients can require Northern Trust to consolidate large volumes of data from multiple sources to reconstruct performance histories, particularly for alternative assets. In a Northern Trust survey, 57% of asset owners cited consolidating data from disparate internal and external sources as their biggest challenge. According to Northern Trust, the agent cuts data preparation time by 83%, from two and a half weeks to three days, with a 96.5% first-pass F1 quality score, which combines precision and recall.
Analysts review the agent’s outputs, evaluate its reasoning, resolve exceptions, and improve its performance through feedback, using it during implementation to reconcile errors and validate a client’s starting data before the client goes live. The agent runs on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Foundry, and integrates with Excel and SharePoint, while an Azure-based intelligence layer preserves approved onboarding knowledge so the process can improve over time.
Data governance in a regulated setting
To protect client data, Microsoft tuned the agent’s quality using only anonymised data, so Northern Trust client data remained under the firm’s control throughout. Pete Cherecwich, COO of Northern Trust, stated that the agent combines Northern Trust’s asset servicing expertise with Microsoft’s AI capabilities to get clients up and running more quickly, while maintaining the oversight and controls clients expect.
Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft, stated that the collaboration shows how AI can amplify human expertise to speed up service delivery, with governance and human oversight built in, and that the approach could apply to complex workflows across regulated industries. Founded in 1889, US-based Northern Trust had USD 19.9 trillion in assets under custody or administration and USD 2.0 trillion in assets under management at the end of September 2026.
