8020 Consulting, a finance and accounting advisory firm, and Invoke, an AI and automation company, have announced an exclusive partnership aimed at embedding AI-powered finance transformation directly into loan origination systems. The partnership targets mid-market lenders, replacing manual underwriting with on-premises large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on proprietary deal data. The model promises sub-90-day ROI by auto-generating term sheets and compliance documents before human review.
Overview
The partnership addresses a common hurdle in finance AI adoption: the lack of domain expertise in AI solutions. Many CFOs and finance leaders struggle to implement AI strategies that deliver measurable ROI while managing risk. 8020 Consulting brings deep finance domain knowledge—spanning month-end close, financial systems, monthly reporting, and business analytics—while Invoke provides technical expertise in AI and automation architecture, integrations, and workflow deployment.
What the partnership delivers
The combined model offers several key benefits:
- Strategy plus execution: Clients get both the diagnosis and the delivery from a single team, avoiding the common split between advisory firms that provide strategy without technical execution and technology firms that build solutions without understanding finance.
- Deeper tech knowledge: The partnership distinguishes between automation and AI. Automation handles reconciliations, transaction matching, close checklists, and data movement. AI adds value for pattern recognition, variance interpretation, anomaly detection, and synthesizing inputs. Deploying each in the right context yields better results.
- Reduced time-to-value: Engagements are structured to deliver measurable value at each stage, not deferred until a future go-live date. Examples include reconciliations that run in minutes rather than hours and variance analyses that write themselves. ROI compounds as the engagement progresses, and each component integrates into the broader enterprise architecture.
- Impactful progress: Rather than abrupt technology transformations that can slow change, the approach starts with focused projects that give teams time to learn, react, adapt, and buy into the new technology. This incremental process builds user confidence and identifies additional implementation opportunities.
How it works
Initial engagements are structured as focused, scoped assessments designed to identify the highest-leverage opportunities and produce a clear path forward. The partnership targets mid-market lenders first, sidestepping generic "AI co-pilot" plays with a verticalized stack that auto-generates term sheets and compliance docs.
Tradeoffs
The partnership is exclusive, meaning clients cannot mix and match with other AI vendors for these specific services. The model also requires a commitment to the incremental approach, which may not suit organizations needing rapid, wholesale transformation.
Bottom line
The 8020 Consulting-Invoke partnership offers a practical, domain-specific approach to AI in finance, combining strategy and execution to deliver measurable ROI from day one. Organizations interested in learning more can reach out to either firm at [email protected].