Live Oak Bank: Growing the Balance Sheet, Scaling Personalized Service

Treating Every Customer Like the Only Customer With Banking AI

"Lend to people megabanks ignore, and never make them feel like a number," said Mark Moroz, Chief Banking Officer.

That founding principle has guided Live Oak Bank, the nation's leading SBA 7(a) lender by dollar volume, since 2008. 

It's also the principle behind Live Oak's banking AI strategy. Instead of automating away the human relationship, Live Oak deploys banking AI to protect and scale its main differentiator: highly personalized service for small business owners. 

Growth and personalized service, though, are often seen as competing goals. Add more borrowers and account holders, and personal attention risks getting stretched thin. With the help of Glia, Live Oak set out to prove otherwise.

"Our deployment of Glia voice AI and digital AI proves that automation creates capacity for better service and more growth, at scale," said Josh Goldstein, Director, Contact Center. "Glia’s banking AI helps us serve every customer like they're the only one, around the clock, while freeing our bankers to do the high-value relationship work that grows loans and deposits."

Challenge: Growth Meant Choosing Between More Headcount or Less Personalized Service

Because Live Oak guides SMB customers through high-stakes financial decisions, it holds its frontline team to a high standard. But as the bank focused on adding more borrowers and depositors while pushing further into business checking, Live Oak needed a way to scale its high standard to a growing customer base. Before Glia, the bank’s contact center structure was not equipped to handle increased volume due to several limitations:

• Voice was the only channel. Customers had no way to reach Live Oak outside of a live phone call.
• Automation was non-existent. Every interaction, regardless of complexity, went to a live agent, driving up wait times. 
• Routine inquiries competed with complex ones. Without a way to contain high-volume, low- requests, agents spent as much time on a routine balance check as a high-stakes lending conversation.

These factors threatened to compromise Live Oak’s growth initiatives. “Agent capacity was at its ceiling, handle times were climbing, and we had no mechanism to deflect routine inquiries or shift volume to lower-cost digital channels,” said Goldstein. “There was no containment, no self-service, and no way to scale service quality without a proportional increase in headcount.”

Solution: Automation That Protects the Relationship and Boosts the Bottom Line

With Glia’s Banking AI Platform, Live Oak identified a solution to scale personalized service to a higher volume of account holders.

“Glia gave us the ability to unify voice AI and digital AI interactions on a single platform,” Goldstein said. “This was essential for a contact center managing up to 16,000 monthly interactions.”

Live Oak’s deployment was anchored by Glia Banker, which would automate routine voice and digital inquiries, passing high-value customer requests directly to agents. 

“Voice AI via Glia Banker offered a real path to containment improvement and cost-to-serve reduction where our volume was highest,” Goldstein said. “Routing high-value conversations to the right expert, with full context, ensured customers would never feel handed off—they would feel known.”

Goldstein’s confidence in Glia, however, was driven by more than just technology. It was informed by Glia’s banking-specific focus.

“Glia is built exclusively for financial institutions,” Goldstein said. “That focus matters. Glia understands the regulatory environment, the compliance requirements, and the stakes of getting customer interactions right in a heavily regulated industry. This isn't a generic platform we'd have to bend into a banking context—it comes with that context already built in."

Results: Increasing Deposit Retention by 9X, Growing Business Checking by 63%

Live Oak first deployed voice AI via Glia Banker, adding Glia Banker Digital soon after. Live Oak also built dedicated queues to route at-risk customers directly to a deposit retention team, leveraging new infrastructure to run a structured retention program that was not previously possible. 

The deployment helped Live Oak scale its personalized service to a growing number of borrowers and deposits, driving measurable bottom-line impact. Since launching Glia, Live Oak has used banking AI to:

• Increase deposit retention by nearly 9x, up from $1.4 million in month one to $12.5 million at its peak—a 793% increase. 
• Grow business checking balances 63% YoY, reaching $469 million, with total relationship deposits climbing to $1.2 billion.
• Boost cross-sell adoption by nearly 39%, with 25% of customers now holding both a loan and deposit account, up from 18%.

Behind the bottom line impact was a noticeable shift in how customers chose to receive support. 

Glia Banker Digital volume grew from roughly 1,000 interactions a month to more than 2,700, a 170% increase. Importantly, the volume increase grew consistently, indicating lasting customer adoption rather than event-based usage.

“Digital volume kept growing even after a surge during a promotional period in March,” Goldstein said. “By April, as calls normalized back toward baseline, digital adoption continued climbing. This sends a clear signal customers are actively choosing digital, not just defaulting to it under pressure.”

Since deploying Glia Banker, Live Oak has also:

• Boosted AI adoption by 108%, with much of the increase being absorbed by voice AI.
• More than doubled its AI containment rate within a year, directly reducing agent handle time and cost-to-serve.
• Maintained first contact resolution at 93%, indicating that automation met the high standards for service set by Live Oak’s frontline agents.
• Redirected 13% of inbound calls to digital inquiries, freeing agents for high-value interactions.
• Increased CSAT to 4.6, a testament to Live Oak’s success in scaling personalized service as it grew.

Taken together, these numbers provide data-backed proof Live Oak’s thesis: with the right banking AI, personalized service and balance-sheet growth advance together, not at each other's expense. Goldstein sums up the formula succinctly:

“Every routine interaction the AI absorbs is capacity we redirect toward what humans do best: guiding a borrower through a complex SBA deal, deepening a deposit relationship, and proactively reaching out to grow both sides of the balance sheet,” Goldstein said. “AI handles the volume; our people drive the growth.”

Outcome: An AI Strategy Built for Growth and Service

With the Glia Banking AI Platform, Live Oak turned newfound efficiency into deposit retention, account expansion, and deeper customer relationships.

Live Oak's blueprint serves as a model for every community FI that's ever felt pressured to choose between growing the balance sheet and supporting its customers. By creating capacity with banking AI, financial institutions can now prioritize personalized care and growth at the same time.

Scale While Growing With Glia

How can your institution scale service while growing with the #1 Banking AI Platform? Talk to Glia today to find out. 

‍