OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FINTECH SNARK TANK
In a world awash in AI hype, the next wave of innovation won’t come from general-purpose tools but from a new class of highly specialized applications designed to embed expertise directly into workflows. Think of this emerging category as “tradecraft AI.”
What Is Tradecraft AI?
Tradecraft AI is the fusion of applied domain knowledge and AI technology. It captures the tacit, apprentice-learned knowledge traditionally acquired through years of experience and embeds it into software that executes with the precision, nuance, and adaptability of a seasoned expert.
Think of a veteran underwriter, experienced analyst, or seasoned enterprise banker. They don’t just follow checklists. They apply deep judgment, pattern recognition, and learned instincts to complex, variable situations. Tradecraft AI aims to replicate and scale that kind of professional decision-making.
Unlike horizontal AI platforms (e.g., chatbots, summary generators, generic assistants), tradecraft AI is hyper-verticalized. It’s tailored to a specific job family within a specific domain. Examples include:
- A credit memo generator that writes like a seasoned credit officer.
- A large language model (LLM)-powered deal sourcing engine that understands an investment fund’s thesis and flags high-potential opportunities.
- Treasury management agent that assesses currency exposure, counterparty risk, and optimizes interest rates.
Tradecraft AI refers to AI applications that:
- Replicate the judgment, nuance, and pattern recognition of seasoned professionals (e.g., underwriters, bankers, analysts)
- Encode tacit knowledge—skills often acquired through years of experience or apprenticeship
- Operate within specific job families or workflows, not just at the industry or “vertical AI” level
This isn’t “AI that can do a task” in the abstract–it’s AI that understands the job because it’s been trained, shaped, and constrained by tradecraft. According to Mike Degnan, founder of VC firm Darrery Capital:
“At its core, tradecraft AI is about the human element—the honed skill set of an expert who has lived the nuances of their craft. There’s a difference between canned spaghetti sauce and your Grandma’s slow-simmered Sunday sauce. Grandma’s cooking isn’t just about ingredients–it’s about innate timing, feel, and adjustments. That’s tradecraft. And that’s the essence of what this new generation of AI tools captures.”
Tradecraft AI isn’t just data-fed software. It’s a digital master craftsman, using AI trained by masters–through observation and direction–and built to deploy judgement and excellence at scale through an application layer.
Why Tradecraft AI Is a Compelling VC Theme
Tradecraft AI sits at the intersection of three powerful investment theses:
- Vertical SaaS. These companies are application-first and built for workflows, not just data.
- Applied AI. The firms that apply AI to real, valuable problems will extract significant economic rent.
- Financial services infrastructure. As Cornerstone Advisors noted in a recent report titled The Playbook for Generative AI-Driven Productivity Improvement “AI tools and technologies are now infrastructure—technology capabilities upon which to build business capabilities and processes.
What sets tradecraft AI apart from traditional vertical AI is its depth of specialization. Tradecraft AI understands the jobs-to-be-done and translates that understanding into software that thinks, recommends, and acts like a domain expert.
Emerging Tradecraft AI Startups
Companies emerging in the new tradecraft AI space include:
- MogoPlus provides agentic AI solutions for lenders. Its AI agents automate critical components of the consumer and SME loan lifecycle, including income verification, creditworthiness analysis, and application processing.
- Unique AI is a Zurich-based startup that streamlines investment research, due diligence, and KYC workflows with autonomous, task-specific AI agents.
- FinRobot is an open-source, multi-agent AI platform designed for sophisticated financial analysis. Its LLMs replicate expert-level reasoning in tasks such as equity research, market forecasting, document analysis, and automated reporting.
- Uptiq offers pre-built AI agents tailored to fintech workflows covering lending, fraud detection, customer support, financial planning and analysis, and loan servicing. Enables rapid deployment with zero coding required.
- Covecta is an agentic AI platform for commercial lending and credit teams. AI agents autonomously handle end-to-end loan lifecycle tasks—from lead intake and customer profiling to covenant testing and portfolio monitoring.
- Binkey classifies purchase transactions in real time to determine if they’re FSA/HSA eligible based on IRS rules, then automatically routes reimbursements to credit cards, bank accounts, or loyalty balances.
- LamaAI assists commercial loan originators with tasks like lead pre-qualification, underwriting data preparation, and peer benchmarking to accelerate approval cycle time.
Tradecraft AI: Why Now?
Several forces are converging to make tradecraft AI not only possible but inevitable:
- Maturing LLM infrastructure makes it feasible to encode complex patterns and nuanced judgments.
- Vertical SaaS incumbents have mapped the workflows, but lack AI-native interfaces.
- Financial services employees are overwhelmed by manual, fragmented processes ripe for intelligent automation.
And perhaps most importantly, the market is ready. The financial services industry is defined by apprenticeship, manual workflows, and regulatory burden—a perfect breeding ground for productivity tools that can offer speed and precision.
Tradecraft AI Benefits for the Industry
Professionals stand to gain immensely. Benefits include:
- Efficiency. Tradecraft AI promises to automate 80% of the rote, manual work that consumes bandwidth with the intelligent decision making of a skilled expert craftsman.
- Effectiveness. Tradecraft AI can elevate the quality of analysis and decision-making with expert-level AI assistance.
- Scale. In-house developed tradecraft AI tools are replicating expertise across teams without scaling headcount.
This doesn’t mean job displacement. It means enabling bankers to focus on high-value work, and bringing sophisticated decision-making to a broader range of institutions.
Tradecraft AI Benefits for Consumers and Businesses
The downstream effects of tradecraft AI are profound:
- Faster loan approvals with less bias
- Smarter recommendations tailored to real financial goals
- More personalized, proactive financial wellness tools
- Deeper market research to understand nuance and avoid false positive signals, delivered in minutes
By embedding AI into the fabric of financial services, institutions can deliver better outcomes, at lower cost, with greater transparency.
Final Thoughts on Tradecraft AI
Tradecraft AI isn’t a buzzword. It’s a shift in how software is built and delivered. According to Darrery Capital’s Mike Degnan:
“Tradecraft AI is built on the belief that expert systems can be more than brittle rule engines—they can be adaptive, empathetic, and programmatic.”
For founders, this is a greenfield opportunity to reshape the financial services industry. For investors, it’s a category that combines deep moats, real workflows, and massive market need. For bankers, it’s a productivity revolution wrapped in software that finally understands your job.
And for the consumer tradecraft AI offers better service, better outcomes, and a more human financial system—powered by machines that finally know what they’re doing.
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