From a nine-day loan decision to six hours

1 The problem

Kestrel Bank's loan process moved on paper and email. An application passed through five departments, each with its own spreadsheet, and the median decision took nine working days. Competitors were approving in under a day and Kestrel was losing good applicants at the point of waiting.

2 Our approach

We mapped the real path an application takes — including the informal steps nobody had documented — and rebuilt it as one workflow with automated credit bureau checks, rule-based scoring and parallel rather than sequential approvals. Anything the rules could decide alone was decided in seconds; anything genuinely needing judgement went to a human with everything already gathered.

3 What we built

• Digital application with document upload and OCR extraction
• Automated credit bureau and sanctions screening
• Configurable scoring rules maintained by the risk team, not developers
• Parallel approval routing with two-person sign-off above threshold
• Immutable audit log of every decision and who made it
• SMS and email status updates to applicants at each stage

4 Technology