Small businesses across Europe are receiving less financial guidance at exactly the moment they need more of it. Branch networks have shrunk, relationship managers each look after hundreds of business customers, and one-to-one advice is increasingly reserved for the largest clients. The effects show up in the lending data: SME borrowing has fallen sharply across Europe, and in Ireland it has halved over the past decade.
Research at DCU Business School pointed to a problem that runs deeper than access to credit. Small business owners can see every transaction in their banking app, but they get almost no help interpreting what the numbers mean. Many consequently struggle to articulate the clear growth story that borrowing and investment decisions depend on. The cost is felt well beyond the businesses themselves: SMEs account for the large majority of employment in Ireland, so when they under-borrow and under-invest, the wider economy grows more slowly. As Professor Michael Dowling puts it, small businesses are drowning in data but starving for direction.
Artificial Intelligence and Behavioural Finance
Dowling, Professor of Financial Technology at DCU Business School, had spent years working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and behavioural finance, including some of the earliest published research on what large language models could do in finance. That body of work pointed to two conclusions. Financial data only changes behaviour when it is translated into guidance a business owner can understand and act on. And generative AI had matured to the point where that translation could happen reliably, at scale, and within the regulated environment of a bank.
Enterprise Ireland’s Commercialisation Fund backed the DCU team to turn this research into working technology. With a team of AI experts based in DCU:Innovate, the university’s innovation campus, the project moved through the full translation journey: building AI models grounded in evidence-based models of financial behaviour, validating the approach with banks, and assembling a founding team. Dowling was joined by co-founder Dr Yulia Plaksina, a fintech product leader who led development of the first customer-facing generative AI product at global financial services firm StoneX, which she joined through its acquisition of Irish fintech Chasing Returns.
In 2026 the project spun out of DCU as Narrative, raising a substantial pre-seed round with the support of Enterprise Ireland.
A Digital CFO
Narrative has built what it calls a Digital CFO: an AI guidance layer that sits inside a bank’s own app. Using open banking connections, the technology reads a small business’s transaction data and applies a suite of specialised, fine-tuned generative AI models to turn it into plain-language guidance, helping the owner understand their current financial position and the specific steps that would improve it. Because the models are built on the behavioural finance research behind the company, the guidance is designed around how owners actually make decisions, not simply what the data says. In 2025 the company launched a funded pilot of the technology in the Irish market, a critical validation point on the road to full commercial deployment.
Narrative now has ongoing pilots with some of the largest financial institutions in Europe, bringing research-led AI guidance towards the bank’s SME customers. The company was also selected for the Central Bank of Ireland’s Innovation Sandbox programme on the theme of innovation in payments, allowing the technology to be developed in close alignment with consumer protection and financial stability requirements from the outset.
Internationally, the Narrative co-founders completed the Techstars Future of Finance accelerator, the leading fintech accelerator in Europe, and is now expanding to digital lenders across the UK and Europe, with the goal of supporting over one million SME financial relationships. For DCU, the company demonstrates the full arc of research impact: peer-reviewed research, commercialisation funding, incubation on campus, and a spin-out creating high-value employment in Ireland while keeping its academic roots, and its base, at DCU.
