The broker channel
Your best source and your least filtered one. A broker sends what they have, and the ones who send the most are rarely the ones who send the best. Nothing in the submission tells you which is which until an underwriter opens it.
Commercial lending and alternative finance
Every decline costs you a full underwrite
Applications arrive in volume from brokers, paid search and comparison sites. They arrive from people who cannot tell whether they qualify, because nothing on the way in told them. So the credit team does the finding out, case by case, and the cost of that work lands on the deals that fund.
Not open yet. Ours scores your own acquisition rather than a borrower, and it takes about four minutes.
Before
A dozen fields of application form, filled in by somebody with no idea whether they qualify, sitting in a credit queue behind nine more like it.
The underwriter finds out first. The applicant finds out a week later.
After
An indicative facility size, a speed-to-funds estimate and an eligibility band, produced in under three minutes from answers the applicant already knows.
Only the ones that clear the band reach a human, and they arrive with their ledger already described.
Where applications come from now
All three of your routes in are optimised for volume
Brokers are paid on completion, paid search bids on intent it cannot verify, and comparison sites are built to send the same enquiry to four lenders at once.
Paid search
“Business loan”, “invoice finance”, “bridging”. The keyword tells you what they want and nothing about whether they can have it. You are paying the same click price for a three year old trading business and for a startup with no filed accounts.
Comparison sites
An enquiry that reached three of your competitors in the same minute. Speed of response matters more here than anywhere else, and a week in the credit queue is not speed.
None of that is broken. It is a funnel that was built to maximise applications, and it is doing exactly that. The cost sits one step later, in the place where the applications get read.
What the current filter costs
Work out what a decline costs you, because we cannot
Four parts, all of which you can price from your own numbers this afternoon. We are not going to put a figure on your underwriting hours.
The acquisition cost
Whatever the click, the broker introduction or the comparison site listing cost to get the application started. It is spent whether the deal funds or not.
The underwriter’s time
Credit searches, the ledger review, the file notes, the second look when something does not reconcile. Most of it happens before anybody knows the answer will be no.
The broker relationship
A broker who sends three cases and gets three declines stops sending cases. The cost of a decline is not only the file, it is the next 20 files that never arrive.
The applicant
They came for money and left with a week of waiting and a no. They will not come back and they will tell the next business owner who asks.
Multiply that by the share of applications that never fund and you have the number this whole page is about. It is already in your cost per funded deal. It is just spread across the deals that did.
What we would build
How much could you raise, and how fast?
Two questions every borrower has and no lender answers before an application. Answering them is what earns the nine honest answers underneath.
Ask what they already know
Turnover band, time trading, what the money is for, what security exists, how the debtor book is spread and how soon the funds are needed. Nine questions, none of which needs a document open.
Answered from memory, on a phone, in under three minutes.
Return a number with a currency sign
An indicative facility size from the same answers, with the range widening where the answers were vague. A figure is the only output a borrower will sit still for, and it is the reason they finish.
Indicative, stated as indicative, in the same size type as the number.
Score the eligibility separately
The borrower sees the facility and the speed. Your origination team sees the band, the two answers that set it and the product the case actually belongs to.
One instrument, two readers, two different outputs.
Route before it reaches credit
Clear cases go into the application flow with their answers attached. Marginal cases go to the product that fits. Everything else gets a reason and a date rather than a queue.
The credit queue stops being the first filter and becomes the second.
The borrower thinks they are using a calculator. Your origination team is reading a qualification score. Same nine answers, two outputs, and the reason completion stays high is that the half the borrower can see is genuinely worth having.
What reaches the credit queue
The file opens with six things your underwriter currently has to ask for
Self-reported and unverified, all of it. It is not evidence and it is not meant to be. It is enough to decide whether the file is worth opening.
Attached to every pre-qualified case
- Turnover band and months trading
- What the facility is for, in the applicant’s own words
- Debtor concentration, where the product is invoice finance
- Security or assets available, and whether they are already charged
- How quickly the funds are needed, and what happens if they are late
- Whether they have been declined elsewhere in the last 90 days
Why it changes the first hour
An underwriter opens a file already knowing what the money is for and how concentrated the debtor book is. That hour goes on the decision rather than on assembling the question. The answers also give origination something to open a call with that is not “I see you made an application”.
Who reaches an underwriter
Three outcomes, and the third one is where the money currently goes
A decline is an expensive way to say “not yet”, and it is the only thing most application flows know how to say.
Clears the band
Straight into the application, pre-populated from the answers they already gave, and flagged to origination with the facility size they were shown. Nobody retypes a turnover figure they have typed once.
Fits a different product
Asset finance rather than an overdraft, or a bridge rather than a term loan. This is the case your form currently turns into a decline, because a form only knows how to say no to the product it was written for.
Not yet
A reason, the one thing that would change the answer, and a date to come back. A borrower told “nine months of filed accounts and this looks different” returns in nine months. One told “declined” does not.
Where the traffic comes from
The paid search budget is the one that changes immediately
Same keywords, same bids, different destination. The click cost does not move and what it buys does.
Channel
Google Ads
High intent, high cost, and currently landing on a page that asks for 14 fields before it gives anything back. A borrower who gets a figure first will give you the fields afterwards, and the ones who will not were never going to fund.
Not a media channel
Brokers and comparison sites
Both send cases you did not qualify. Both can be given the same instrument with a different result page. The broker then sees how a case ranks against your appetite before submitting it, not a week after.
What it takes
Your credit policy is the scoring model, and it already exists
Somebody in your business can already say which applications are worth an underwriter’s hour. That knowledge is the model, and most of the work is getting it onto one page.
The part that takes longest is not the build. It is agreeing which two answers are allowed to fail a case on their own. That is a policy decision, and it belongs to your credit function rather than to your marketing team.
Three packages, fixed scope. The prices are not published yet because they are not final, and when they are they go on the packages page in numbers rather than behind a form.
Questions
What origination and credit teams ask first
It does if the wording is careless, which is why the wording is a deliverable rather than an afterthought. The output is an indication based on unverified answers. It is not a decision or an offer, and it says so where the number is rather than in a footer. Your compliance function signs that copy before anything goes live, the same way it signs a rate table.
Your turn
Your applicants are not the only people who apply without knowing the answer
Ours scores the four things that decide whether the traffic you buy turns into anything, and the report names the one costing you the most. It takes about four minutes.
Not open yet. When it opens, the score and the report are yours whether or not we ever speak.