Cutting small-business loan decisions from nine days to four hours

We started by encoding what the best underwriter actually did — two weeks of structured sessions turning tribal judgment into an explicit credit policy with thresholds, exceptions, and escalation rules. That document became the spine of the system and, unexpectedly, the firm's training manual.

The platform automated the mechanical 70%: a borrower portal with document checklists and bank-linked cash-flow ingestion, an extraction pipeline that parsed statements and tax documents with per-field confidence scores, and a rules engine that auto-decisioned clean applications while routing edge cases to humans with the analysis pre-assembled.

Every automated decision writes an immutable audit record — inputs, rule versions, and outcomes — because we designed for the examination before the first loan. Deployment ran on a two-week cadence behind feature flags, with the credit team approving each rules change through a versioned review workflow.