ThinkBusiness on Narrative and the future of small business banking

ThinkBusiness has published a profile of Narrative by John Kennedy. It contrasts the bank manager who once knew every local business and its plans with today, when many small business owners take their questions to general-purpose AI tools instead. When that happens, the decisions that follow are made outside the bank’s view.

The piece describes how Finley (more generally known as Narrative Coach) works inside a bank’s own platform, drawing on the business’s banking and accounting data. It explains what the numbers mean for the business, flags the cash position and the cash needs coming up, and produces weekly growth ideas grounded in market, seasonal and local research, any of which can become a tracked project. It also acts as a mentor the owner can turn to with any question.

“The payback for the bank is that a growing small business, and a more financially comfortable one, is more likely to take out financial products.”

Working with Bank of Ireland

The article covers our work with Bank of Ireland on BenefitsFinder, which helps customers identify the tax credits and reliefs available to them, and which ThinkBusiness describes as the bank’s first customer-facing AI product. It also notes that Bank of Ireland has supported Narrative with feedback from the very beginning.

What else it covers

At the time of writing, we were working on pilots with banks in three European countries, with the aim of turning them into full production deployments. The profile also covers our time in the Central Bank of Ireland’s Innovation Sandbox Programme, what we took from Techstars, the support we have had from Enterprise Ireland, and how we run Narrative as an AI-native company. It also touches on where we come from: both founders grew up in small business households.

Read the full article on ThinkBusiness