SME lending providerSample
Same-day loan decisions for an SME lender that ran underwriting from a shared inbox
A UK SME lender was handling several hundred applications a month through shared inboxes, spreadsheets and a loan management system that only saw a deal once it had been approved. We built the origination platform in front of it (broker portal, underwriting workbench, decision rules, document collection and the integrations between them). Typical time-to-decision went from days to hours without adding underwriters.
- Client
- SME lending provider
- Industry
- Fintech & Financial Services
- Year
- 2024
- Duration
- 7 months to first live decisions
- Team
- 5 people
Illustrative figures for a representative engagement.
The challenge
Where things stood when we arrived.
Applications came in from brokers as emailed PDFs and were logged in a shared spreadsheet. Underwriters pulled credit bureau reports by hand, asked for bank statements by email and wrote up their reasoning in free text. None of it was structured the same way twice, so the same application could get a different answer depending on who picked it up.
The compliance team was uneasy. Evidence for decisions was spread across inboxes and local files, a Consumer Duty or audit request meant days of reconstruction, and it was hard to prove the same criteria had been applied to every applicant.
The business wanted to grow broker volume substantially without doubling the underwriting team, and to give brokers a status view so the phone would stop ringing. The existing loan management system was staying, so the job was the origination process in front of it.
The solution
What we built, and how it fits together.
The platform has three parts. Brokers get a portal where they submit applications, upload documents and can see where each one has got to. The underwriting workbench pulls bureau data, open banking transaction analysis, documents and affordability calculations into a single case view. The lender's own staff use an admin area to set up products and change criteria and decision rules.
A rules-based decisioning engine applies eligibility and risk criteria automatically. Clear passes and clear declines go straight through. Borderline cases route to an underwriter with the failing rules highlighted. Every rule evaluation, data pull and human decision is written to an append-only audit log, along with the version of the criteria in force at the time.
Integrations with a credit bureau, an open banking AIS provider and an e-signature service sit behind internal interfaces with retries, idempotency keys and per-vendor monitoring. Approved deals are pushed into the loan management system through its API, which ended the re-keying step. Hosting is on AWS in the London region, provisioned with Terraform, with CI/CD through GitHub Actions and preview environments so compliance can review changes before release.
Approach
The order we did things in.
Technology
- TypeScript
- React
- Next.js
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- REST / OpenAPI
- AWS
- Terraform
- GitHub Actions
- 01
Discovery with underwriting and compliance
Four weeks mapping the real process, workarounds included, and agreeing decision criteria, evidence requirements and the design of the audit trail with the compliance lead before any build started.
- 02
Workbench and audit log before the broker portal
The internal workbench and audit log went live first, fed by the existing email submissions. Underwriters worked in the new tool for six weeks while brokers carried on emailing, so their feedback shaped the product before anyone outside saw it.
- 03
Broker portal and integrations
The bureau, open banking and e-signature integrations landed alongside the broker portal. Three brokers piloted it for a month before the wider panel was invited.
- 04
Decisioning rollout
Automated decisions ran in shadow mode for eight weeks, compared against what the underwriters decided and tuned, before straight-through processing was switched on product by product.
Results
What changed.
- Median time-to-decision fell from roughly three days to under four hours within three months of go-live
- Around 35% of applications are now decided straight-through; borderline cases go to an underwriter with the reasons attached
- Underwriters handle roughly twice the volume, and status enquiries from brokers by phone and email dropped noticeably
- Every decision has a complete, versioned audit trail. A Consumer Duty evidence request that used to take days to reconstruct is now a report
- The lender's product team sets up new criteria and products themselves, without a development change
“We had assumed growth meant hiring more underwriters. What we needed was for the underwriters we had to stop doing admin.”
Sample quote. Replace with an attributed client statement.
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