Summary

• Credibly removes a time-consuming and variable process by automating bank statement reviews
• Automation allowed Credibly to 4x the number of applications reviewed with a reduction in review time

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Credibly has positioned itself as a leader in the small business financing space by leveraging innovative approaches to risk assessment. Unlike many other financing providers, Credibly factors in data points like business cash flow to approve businesses with lower FICO scores. For example, a younger business may not have the strongest FICO score, but business performance can be a good indicator as to whether they are succeeding and able to make remittances on their financing.

A key part of gauging business performance is looking at their recent bank statements to understand whether they’ve been able to maintain healthy and consistent cash flow. However, bank statements can have hundreds if not thousands of transactions on them, which can be time consuming and inconsistent to analyze manually.

In 2023, to support the growing number of applications for financing from Credibly and to improve the speed to decision, Credibly built a model to automatically analyze the information in bank statements and help the underwriting team understand the merchant’s cash flow.

How it works

Credibly trained a model to extract the necessary information from the business owner's bank statements. If the model found any potential issues based on provided criteria, an underwriter would be flagged to manually review the file. If there were no issues to review, the file would be able to continue in the underwriting process.

Scaling with automation

Automating the analysis of bank statements has allowed Credibly to scale up operations while also reducing the time from submission to offer. Since implementing this automation, Credibly has been able to 4x the number of applications processed while reducing average submission to offer time to 4 business hours.

Expanding automation for more

Bank statements and the transactions in them can vary widely and Credibly is continuing to look for ways to reduce the number of files that require manual review so more businesses can experience faster decisions on their applications.