Financial Services Approval Process
An approval chain rebuilt as an auditable workflow, taking a five-day turnaround down to under one
Five days, mostly waiting
A commercial credit application passed through four approvers. None of the four was slow; the process was. Each handover was an email with an attachment, and each approver’s queue was their own inbox.
- Median turnaround was 5.1 working days, of which under three hours was actual review.
- Version confusion was routine: two approvers regularly worked from different copies of the same file.
- Answering “where is this application?” took a phone call.
The constraint that shaped everything
In a regulated process, the audit trail is not a feature you add afterwards. Every automated step had to record who decided what, on which version, with what visible to them at the time — and that requirement, taken seriously, ruled out several otherwise attractive shortcuts.
- One record per application. The file stops moving. Approvers come to it.
- Parallel where the policy allows. Two of the four reviews had no dependency between them and now run at the same time.
- Complete packets. An application will not enter a queue until every required document is present and readable, which removed the single most common cause of a return.
- An immutable log. Every state change is appended, never edited, and the log is what the monthly control report is built from.
The saving did not come from making anyone review faster. It came from deleting the waiting.
What we deliberately did not automate
The credit decision itself, and any exception. An application that falls outside policy is routed to a person with the reason attached, and stays there until a person resolves it. Automating the exceptional path is how an automated process quietly starts making decisions nobody chose.
Results
- Median turnaround fell from 5.1 days to 0.8 days
- Returned-for-documents rate fell by 71%
- The quarterly control report is generated from the log rather than assembled by hand
Afterwards
Six months on, the biggest change the client reports is not the speed. It is that the pipeline is visible, so capacity can be planned instead of discovered.
