What Wilmington’s nCino says investors get wrong about AI competitive threat
.png "An aerial image of nCino’s headquarters in Wilmington, N.C.")
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- nCino views Claude Code as a coding tool, not a full replacement for SaaS value
- Company emphasizes proprietary data and mission‑critical workflows as defenses
- nCino focuses hiring, scalability and international commercial banking growth
Whether it’s a threat, a tool, or likely both, Claude Code is on nCino’s mind.
“We’re very aware of the capabilities from the engineering front and what it does,” Will Jung, the company’s chief technology officer, told The News & Observer.
Spun out of Wilmington’s Live Oak Bank in 2011, nCino (named for the Spanish word for oak) provides software to help banks originate loans, open customer accounts and manage client relationships, among other things. Still headquartered in Wilmington, the company today has more than 1,700 employees, a slight dip from its reported headcount early last year.
But where the dip hasn’t been minor is on the stock market. nCino this year has been among the software as a service, or SaaS, businesses investors dinged by advancing artificial intelligence. Since Claude Code, a platform from the AI company Anthropic went viral in January, shares of nCino have fallen more than 35%.
What has made Claude Code — and its more user-friendly interface Claude Cowork — such market disruptors are their agentic functions. They aren’t merely chatbots that guide people step-by-step through coding; they are “agents” that can access files to complete long tasks uninterrupted. Jung himself was running Claude to analyze nCino code and research competitors during our video interview.
Some see Claude as a sign of a coming “SaaSpocalypse,” where AI makes it easier and cheaper for customers to find software solutions outside established operators. Will the tool (and those that follow) doom nCino. Perhaps. But its chief technology officer believes many investors have missed something important.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
N&O: There’s existential concern about a sector selloff of SaaS companies in an AI age. What is your response to the sentiment that drove the industry narrative after Claude Code’s release?
Jung: I don’t think people realize that, yes, coding has become a lot easier. But if you think about tech companies, coding isn’t everything that a tech company does or an engineer does. It’s making sure they’re solving the right problem, focusing on the right things and providing that great user experience. There’s a lot more to a tech company than just the coding.
N&O: If Claude Code is an inflection point, how has nCino faced that moment since January?
Jung: I think it’s been interesting to see the gap between what an investment community understands of what a SaaS company does, especially a company like nCino that’s embedded in the processes, and the workflow of a regulated industry in terms of banks and finance institutions.
It’s fine if I code something up now for my personal use, one off. It’s great. I can throw it away. So the cost of coding is gone. But then I think the cost of ownership is going to be something that institutions will need to face.
N&O: What’s an example of a SaaS function that AI could make obsolete?
Jung: Something like document creation. There are companies out there that have just specialized in document creation, without naming any companies That, to me, is more of a tool, right? Because again, that document creation, your IP there is being able to create that document. It’s not the data behind it. Whereas nCino is like, ‘Well, no, we’ve got the data behind it’ because, again, when you onboard a customer, the personal information that comes in, the credit information that we get to originate all of that.
N&O: Claude Code is the worst it’ll ever be. So as the AI competition, or perceived competition, improves, how does a SaaS company like yours future-proof?
Jung: Claude Code itself isn’t replacing (SaaS tools). What (others are) trying to do is use Claude Code to build something that might replace it. So I think there is a distinction there.
(Anthropic trains) on publicly available data. Anything that’s actually proprietary data, or data that’s within a box of a SaaS, that’s something they can’t get into. That’s mission-critical processing.
If you look at mission-critical processes, then the operational data that we’ve got across the institution gets interesting for Claude to get that context right. So I think that’s where the distinction is made in terms of what data you hold.
N&O: Do you sense that nCino is cutting back on hiring because now there’s technology that can do things that used to take multiple software developers?
Jung: For us, the way that I’ll frame it is, we’ve rethought our hiring strategy. We are still hiring. I think we’re right size. I think we’ve done a really good job becoming lean anyway, but what that’s allowed us to do is be a lot more scalable.
But you’re right in the sense that before, the default would have been, ‘We need more people.’ If we’re starting a new initiative, if we’re doing something that’s brought in a new region as an example, the default would have been, we need more people. Now the default is, ‘Well, actually, do we need more people?’ And sometimes you still do, based on a new regional market as an example, it’s a skill set that you need. But it’s not just (hiring) people for scale’s sake.
N&O: What brought me to this conversation was the perceived threat to nCino’s business. Where does nCino see areas of growth?
Jung: One is international growth has been a big one for us, I think where we really play well is commercial banking, because it’s been so underinvested. And I think there’s still a need for that commercial banking transformation across the world. So international banking, international growth, has been a big factor for us.
I think with the current client base that we’ve got across both mortgages and commercial, what we’re seeing is because we have so much of the data in the market now, domestically, we’re able to actually provide again intelligence back into the platform, and people are seeing the value.
This story was originally published March 16, 2026 at 5:45 AM.
