The challenge
A specialist lender was originating loans through a combination of a legacy CRM, a shared spreadsheet holding the real decision logic, and email. Underwriters worked from PDF packets assembled manually. Nobody could reliably answer why a specific decision had been made six months earlier, which had become a growing concern with their regulator and a hard blocker on a planned funding round.
The commercial pressure was equally acute: application volume had roughly doubled over eighteen months while headcount had not, and the median time to decision had drifted past four days. Applicants were dropping out and going to competitors who answered in a day.
What we did
- 01
Extracted the real decision logic
Six weeks of structured sessions with underwriters and analysis of two years of historical decisions produced a documented rule set — including several rules that contradicted the written policy and had to be resolved with the credit committee.
- 02
Built on an event-sourced core
Every state change is an immutable event. Any application can be replayed to any point in its history, and the exact rule version applied to each decision is recorded — which is what made the audit requirement solvable rather than approximated.
- 03
Automated the routine, escalated the rest
A deterministic rules engine handles applications that fall clearly inside policy, routing edge cases and exceptions to underwriters with the specific reason for escalation surfaced rather than buried.
- 04
Integrated the data sources
Credit bureau, open banking, KYC/AML screening and internal exposure data pulled automatically at application, replacing the manual packet assembly that consumed most of an underwriter's day.
- 05
Migrated in parallel
The new platform ran alongside the old process for nine weeks with decisions compared on both paths, so discrepancies were resolved on a report rather than in production.
The outcome
Median time to credit decision fell from 4.2 days to under 6 hours, with roughly 60% of in-policy applications decided without manual intervention. Underwriter throughput more than tripled, with the team redeployed onto the complex cases where their judgement actually adds value.
The audit position changed materially: any decision can now be reconstructed with its inputs, the rule version applied, and the identity of anyone who overrode it. That evidence formed part of a successful funding round diligence process the following quarter.
“The discovery phase alone was worth the engagement — they found contradictions in our credit policy that we had been operating around for years without realising it.”