For community banks · Credit memo workflow
Your analysts spend 25 hours on a commercial credit memo. National banks spend two. The gap is not talent — it is tooling.
We build the credit memo workflow and teach your team to run it. Financial spreading pre-populated, narrative drafted from structured data, covenant tracking continuous, SR 11-7 documentation standard. Your analysts run the system themselves.
The problem
A credit analyst at a $2 billion community bank spends 25 hours on a memo. At a national bank, it takes two.
Your analyst spreads the financials. Writes the narrative. Formats the package. Chases the covenant history. Reconciles against last year's review. Twenty-five hours, one memo.
The national bank's analyst has AI systems that draft the narrative from structured data, flag covenant exceptions automatically, and produce a formatted package ready for review. Your analyst does the same work by hand. She is not less capable. She just does not have access to the same instruments.
This matters beyond productivity. Your credit team is carrying a backlog. Memos stack up before committee. The pipeline slows. Relationship managers wait. Borrowers notice. And the analysts doing the most complex underwriting work in the bank spend half their time on formatting instead of judgment.
What changes
Commercial credit memos in 15 hours instead of 25. Your analysts run the system themselves.
Your analysts do not hand the work to a vendor or a black box. They run the workflow themselves. They understand what the system does, where it helps, and where it stops.
Financial spreading is pre-populated. The system ingests the borrower's financial statements and produces a draft spread. The analyst reviews, adjusts, and approves. She is not typing numbers into cells. She is checking the numbers against her knowledge of the borrower.
The narrative draft exists before the analyst opens the file. The system produces a first draft of the credit narrative from the structured data — loan terms, collateral, industry conditions, historical performance. The analyst rewrites, sharpens, and adds the judgment that only she can provide. She starts at the 60% mark instead of a blank page.
Covenant tracking is continuous. The system flags exceptions as financial data arrives, not during the annual review. The analyst sees deterioration earlier. The credit discussion happens sooner.
The governance documentation is standard. Every memo produced through the workflow carries the SR 11-7 documentation your CRO needs. The effective-challenge framework is built into the review process — not bolted on after the fact, not sold as an add-on. When the examiner asks how the bank governs the AI tools in its credit process, the documentation is already in the file.
Your analysts understand the tools. They know what the system does, where it helps, and where it stops. They adapt the workflow when a new loan type comes through or when the committee changes the memo format. Six months after the engagement ends, they run the system without calling anyone. The capability stays because the people have it.
How the build works
Two to four months. Fixed scope. Your analysts participate in the build.
The engagement runs two to four months depending on portfolio complexity and the number of credit products in scope.
01
Assessment and vendor evaluation
Month 1
We inventory your current credit workflow — every step, every handoff, every bottleneck. We evaluate the tools that fit your core system and your credit process. nCino, Moody's, Abrigo, Finastra — the right answer depends on your stack and your team. We recommend. You decide.
02
Pilot design and build
Month 2
We build the workflow for one credit portfolio segment — typically C&I or CRE, whichever carries the highest volume. Your analysts participate in the build. They are not watching a demonstration. They are learning how the system works by helping configure it.
03
Expansion, training, documentation
Months 3–4
We extend the workflow to additional portfolio segments. Your credit team trains on the tools — not a one-day session, but working alongside us on live memos until the process is natural. We produce the full SR 11-7 documentation package: model inventory entry, validation framework, effective-challenge narrative, and the examiner-facing summary.
What your team learns. Your analysts learn how to use the AI tools in their daily workflow. They learn how to evaluate the system's output — where to trust it, where to override it, where to flag a problem. Your credit administration staff learns how to maintain the workflow and update it when requirements change. Your CRO's team learns how the governance documentation works and how to keep it current.
What you receive. A working credit memo workflow your team uses on the next memo. Training your analysts retain. Governance documentation that survives examination. A system your people own.
Industry reference points
The tools exist. The question is who builds the governance layer.
Baker Hill's work with Marquette Bank produced a 25% credit memo time reduction and eliminated 70% of paper reports. nCino's Banking Advisor, generally available since June 2024, is in production at Northern Bank. Moody's disclosed that its modular AI compressed one memo preparation workflow from 40 hours to two minutes.
The tools exist. The question is who builds the governance layer, trains your team, and makes the work survive examination.
Next step
Book a 90-minute working session.
Bring your Chief Credit Officer if she is available. You describe how your credit process works today — the bottlenecks, the backlog, the committee timeline. We describe how we would build the workflow for your bank.
You leave with a written assessment within 48 hours.