AI should deliver better financial outcomes for everyone.

It began in Scotland, with a savings bank in a Dumfriesshire cottage in 1810, and the co-operative societies of the 1840s followed. Then came credit unions: Germany in the 1860s, Quebec in 1900, Dublin in 1958, Wimbledon in 1964, and Glasgow in 1970, where Drumchapel opened the first in Scotland. Today the credit union movement alone is 67,000 institutions holding $3.8 trillion in assets, alongside the CDFIs, mutuals and co-operative banks that do the same work in their own way.

What has changed around them is the technology. Fintechs built on modern software have found it easier to reach borrowers than lenders running on systems built decades ago. Our thesis is that AI changes this equation. One lending officer can now serve more members. One marketing officer can personalise outreach to every one of them. One compliance officer can run better AML checks. Same institution, same people, far greater reach.

The lenders that use AI well will grow: more members looked after, more good loans made, less bad debt, and all of it with the team they already have. Niovant is building the engine for that growth: AI agents that work inside the systems community lenders already run.

Lewis is an economist. His MSc research modelled how AI changes the economics of work across 75,000 occupation-tasks, and the roles that came out most exposed were the ones that staff a credit union: finance officers, accounts clerks, administrators. The gains from that shift should reach the lenders that exist to serve ordinary people, not only the biggest institutions.

After working on bank stress testing at the Bank of England, he founded Niovant in Glasgow in 2023, bootstrapped it, and spent the first two years inside the sector: training credit-union staff across the UK, rebuilding their manual reporting, learning where growth gets stuck and why, and then experimenting with early agents.

Techscaler took him to Silicon Valley with a cohort of Scottish founders, and he came back determined to take a new and powerful technology, AI agents, and bring it to UK community finance. In 2026 Techstart Ventures backed Niovant. We are a small team based in Glasgow, with agents live at five UK lenders, and we are aiming to grow.