Stop re-checking the file every time a document changes
Some SME credit answers in seconds from transaction data. Some takes weeks, a committee, and three documents that have not arrived yet. You need both, and they belong in one system.
Transactionanalysis
Policyrules
Case file
Registries &filings
Two speeds of SME credit
The product sets the tempo. Factoring against a receivable is not the same decision as a five-year term loan to a group of companies.
Factoring and invoice finance
Decide against the receivable and the debtor rather than a six-week credit file. Invoice and transaction data in, a limit and a price out, inside one request. See factoring approvals for how the controls stay in place.
Cash-flow lending
The bank feed is the credit file. One pass answers both questions: can they service it, and is the turnover real. Circular payments and round tripping surface at decision time, not in a report a month later.
Complex and term lending
Filed accounts, management figures, group structure, director checks, security. Evidence lands over weeks, a corrected document invalidates work already done, and a human view has to be recorded.
Fast where it can be, thorough where it must be
The dividing line is not SME against consumer. It is whether the answer can be reached from data you already hold.
- Real time for the transaction-led products. Factoring, invoice finance and cash-flow lending decide from data you already receive, in milliseconds, through real-time decisioning - the same engine consumer lending runs on.
- Case work for the complex file. A term loan to a group, with accounts arriving over weeks and a corrected balance sheet on day nine, is case work: every fact knows which task produced it, and anything that depended on a document that changed re-runs automatically.
- The same rules in both. A decision logic task inside a case runs the same versioned rule set your instant decisions use, so the committee and the API cannot disagree about policy.
Evidence, not just a decision
Commercial lending sits inside the same DORA obligations as the rest of your ICT estate, and where an SME file involves a personal guarantee or an owner-manager assessment, the AI Act creditworthiness provisions are in scope too. The case activity trail is the evidence: what was known, when, who concluded what on the basis of which document, and what changed afterwards.
Questions we get asked
Can a factoring or cash-flow decision be instant?
Yes. Where the signal is already in the invoice and transaction data you receive, the decision runs as a real-time flow and answers in milliseconds. Long timelines are a property of certain SME products, not of SME lending as a whole.
How do you catch round tripping and invented turnover?
With pattern rules over the transaction set, evaluated inside the decision rather than in a report someone reads afterwards. Circular payments between related parties are the classic case, and they are detectable at decision time.
What happens when a corrected document arrives on day nine?
Everything that read the old version is out of date automatically and re-runs: the extraction, the screening, the rules, and the human review, which re-opens with the changed evidence flagged. Nobody has to remember what depended on it.
Can we see which open files a policy change would affect?
Yes. Impact analysis tells you which tasks would re-run and which open cases would re-open, before you publish the change.
How do we handle files that need a credit committee?
A human review task routes to the right queue by role, with the whole case file and every automated task trace attached. What the committee saw at the time stays on the record.
Does this replace our underwriters?
No. It gives the underwriting team one place to define, test and change policy, and it does the assembling and re-checking that people are bad at remembering to redo.
Can we start with real-time decisions and add case work later?
Yes, and most do. The rule sets and scorecards you build for instant decisions are the same artifacts a case task calls.