TD Bank has launched an AI model that allows underwriters to review mortgage applications in as little time as a few minutes, the lender announced Thursday.
This means that some of TD’s clients could receive mortgage decisions within a day of submitting their documents, according to the bank.
TD said that it’s been using autonomous AI agents since earlier this year to summarize applications for mortgages and home equity lines of credit, dropping the time it takes to verify and analyze an application from around 15 hours to an average of three minutes.
The bots are able to classify numerous pages of client documents, extract key information, perform consent checks, calculate incomes and identify discrepancies before generating a memo for the underwriters, the bank said in a press release.
“Agentic AI will supercharge our work and put us in a position to deliver more accurate and faster results for our clients,” Luke Gee, chief analytics and AI officer at TD, said in the release.
“We’re building a hybrid future where our colleagues and AI work together to help our clients get to a ‘yes’ faster on some of their most important decisions,” Gee added.
This is the bank’s first agentic AI model, whereby agents are used to perform everyday tasks with minimal human intervention. TD says it is also the first Canadian bank to publicly announce the use of agentic AI in real estate secured lending operations.
The move is part of the lender’s effort to become more efficient through the use of AI, which is expected to generate $1 billion in annual value for the institution in coming years. Other banks, including RBC and BMO, are forecasting a similar financial impact from their own AI initiatives.
Ralph Fox, broker of record at boutique real estate firm Fox Marin, welcomed the news, saying that applying for a mortgage can be a time-consuming and painful process for homebuyers.
“If that friction can be reduced and things can be moving faster … then I think that is only going to best serve consumers and the process of buying real state in Toronto or even Canada,” Fox added.
While TD says the AI agents deliver more accurate results, GTA mortgage broker Mary Sialtsis questioned whether that is actually the case.
“The client is the one who fills out the application,” she said, “so there’s room for error or misinterpretation.” Sialtsis wonders whether AI is able to correctly identify those discrepancies.
TD said it has an AI team dedicated to responsible use of the technology.
“They set the guardrails for our models, consisting of validated checks and balances, robustly testing them long before they come into contact with users,” Chad Koziel, associate vice-president of AI product, wrote in an emailed statement to the Star.
“The team continues to monitor our models once they’re live to ensure they’re operating within the guardrails and predefined thresholds they’ve set for multiple factors, including accuracy.”
Correction — May 21, 2026
This article has been updated. TD’s new AI model enables the fast tracking of mortgage applications — not mortgage pre-approval applications, as stated incorrectly in a previous version of this article. Incorrect information was provided to the Star.
