Writing the Standard Operating Procedure for AI at Your Bank

Why the SOP is organized by phase and not by feature

Vendors document software by feature: here is the valuation module, here is the CIM generator, here is the pipeline. A bank should not. Bankers think in phases, and an associate on a live mandate needs to know what to do in the week the financials arrive, not what a module can theoretically do.

So the SOP has six sections, one per phase: discovery and readiness, valuation, marketing materials, buyer matching and outreach, offers, and negotiation through close. Each section answers the same four questions in the same order. What does the associate put in. What comes out. Who edits it and how far. Who reads it before it goes to the owner or a buyer.

This structure has a second benefit. When something goes wrong on a mandate, the partner can open the SOP to the phase and see immediately whether the procedure was followed or whether the procedure itself is the problem. A feature-organized document cannot do that.

Section by section: what each phase needs

Discovery and readiness is the shortest section. Input: the client questionnaire sent through the owner portal, and the owner's uploads to the data room. Output: the readiness view and the normalized intake. Editor: the analyst checks the intake against the raw uploads and flags anything the owner entered inconsistently. Reviewer: the associate, before the valuation runs. The one rule worth writing in bold is that the questionnaire goes through the portal and not through email, because a single upload point is the thing that stops the owner from being asked twice.

Valuation needs a rule about reruns. Input: the normalized financials and the vertical. Output: the valuation and its source trace. Editor: nobody edits the output figure. The associate changes inputs and reruns, and records why. Reviewer: the managing director, who reads the trace, not just the number. Because the engine is deterministic, the SOP can require that the associate rerun once with identical inputs as a check, which takes a minute and catches input mistakes.

Marketing materials is the longest section. Input: the questionnaire, data room, and settled valuation. Output: the teaser and CIM drafts. Editor: the associate, with a named list of sections that always get rewritten by hand. At most firms that list is the investment thesis, the growth plan, and any passage in the owner's voice. The SOP should say which sections the associate may accept with light edits, which is usually the financial summary and the company history, and which the associate must never send without a partner rewrite. Reviewer: the managing director on the mandate reads the whole CIM, every time.

Buyer matching and outreach needs a rule about the senior banker's knowledge. Input: the CIM, the vertical, and the deal size. Output: the prospect list from the database. Editor: the senior banker on the deal, who adds relationships the database cannot know about and strikes buyers the firm has reason to avoid. The SOP should require that every addition and every strike is recorded with a one-line reason, because that record is how the firm's buyer knowledge stops living in one person's head. Reviewer: the managing director approves the list before the first teaser goes out.

Offers is a procedure section more than an editing section. Input: NDAs returned, data room access requests, IOIs received. Output: the pipeline status and the IOI comparison. Editor: the associate keeps the pipeline current daily. Reviewer: the partner reviews the IOI comparison before any buyer is called back. The rule to write is that no IOI is discussed with the owner until it is in the comparison view, so the owner always sees offers side by side and never one at a time.

Negotiation through close is the section where the SOP says what the software does not do. The pipeline tracks LOI, exclusivity, and diligence requests. The banker negotiates. The SOP should state plainly that no AI output is used in a negotiation with a buyer, so the firm never has to explain a position it did not write.

The review rule that runs through every section

One rule appears in all six sections and deserves its own paragraph at the top of the document: nothing leaves the firm without a named reader. The name is a person, not a role, written next to the artifact in the pipeline. This is consistent with broader AI and model-risk guidance that emphasizes documentation, clear accountability, validation, and ongoing monitoring, although those frameworks are guidance rather than a universal rule for every boutique bank. [1] [2]

This is not new. Every boutique bank already works this way for the CIM. What the SOP does is extend the rule to every artifact the software produces, including ones the firm did not used to think of as artifacts, like the normalized intake and the buyer list with its additions and strikes. Software produces more artifacts faster, which is the point, and the review rule is what keeps that from becoming more errors faster.

Writing it: who, when, and how long

The associate who operated the first mandate writes the first draft, during the week after the first NDA goes out. The draft should take one afternoon. If it takes longer, the associate is documenting the software rather than the procedure, and should cut.

The managing director who sponsored the rollout reads it and approves it, with one specific job: checking that the named reviewer for each phase is someone who will actually do it. An SOP that names the senior partner as reviewer for every artifact on every mandate is a fiction, and the associate will route around it within a month.

After the second mandate, the second associate revises it. The revision is usually about the marketing materials section, because the second mandate is in a different vertical and the list of sections that need a hand rewrite shifts. Date the revision. Keep the old version.

Keeping it alive

An SOP dies when it stops matching what people do. Two habits keep it alive. First, when a partner sends something back, the associate asks whether the procedure was followed. If it was and the output was still wrong, the procedure changes. If it was not, the associate changes. Either way the answer is written down.

Second, review the document at the start of every quarter, in the same meeting where the firm looks at the pipeline. Ten minutes. The question is only whether any section no longer describes what the firm does. Most quarters the answer is no, and the meeting moves on.

This week: if the first mandate is past the first NDA and no SOP exists, block the associate's Thursday afternoon.

How Acquivo Pro fits

Acquivo Pro's structure maps to the six-phase SOP directly, because the platform is organized the same way: discovery and readiness, valuation, marketing materials, buyer matching and outreach, offers, and negotiation through close, all on one login. The deterministic valuation engine makes the rerun rule a one-minute check, the owner portal makes the single-upload rule enforceable, and the single pipeline for NDA, IOI, and LOI flow gives every artifact a place to carry its named reviewer. Client data is isolated and not used to train models for other customers, which belongs in the SOP's first paragraph. To see it on a live mandate, request a demo through the Contact page.