A Synchronos vertical
The Smallbanc Workstation: a sealed machine in your building that reads the borrower's file, spreads it by your method, drafts the memo, and cites the page behind every number. Your lender decides. Nothing leaves the bank.
Community and regional banks, credit unions · C&I and CRE · Pilots begin 2027
A commercial loan request arrives as three years of business tax returns, interim statements, a personal financial statement, a debt schedule, a rent roll or an equipment quote, and a stack of bank statements. An analyst reads all of it, keys it into a spread, reconciles what disagrees, and writes a memo that restates it a third time.
The same work repeats at every annual review, every renewal, every borrowing base certificate. It is the largest block of skilled hours in the lending department, and almost none of it is judgment.
The judgment is the lender's job. The reading and keying is the machine's.
Cloud lending AI will do the reading if you send borrower tax returns, personal financial statements and bank statements to someone else's servers and trust a promise. Smallbanc keeps them in the building. Nothing uploads, because the machine has no way to.
It sits in a locked room or on a desk in credit administration. Files go in by hand. Your staff sign in under their own names. The network jack stays empty.
Illustrative. Every cable stays on the desk. The wall jack stays empty.
Load the package. The machine reads it and returns the documents your analyst would have built by hand, each figure linked to the page it came from.
Exhibit · traced spread, operating company (illustrative figures)
| Line | FY2024 return | FY2025 return | Interim 6/26 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gross revenue | $8,412,300 | $9,105,880 | $4,790,210 | 1120-S L1a · CPA p.3 |
| Officer compensation | $420,000 | $465,000 | $232,500 | 1120-S L7 · GL p.11 |
| Depreciation (add-back) | $311,400 | $298,750 | $149,000 | Form 4562 L22 |
| Interest expense | $187,200 | $241,600 | $131,900 | 1120-S L13 |
| Distributions | $380,000 | $610,000 | not shown | Sch K L16d · PFS p.2 differs |
| EBITDA | $1,214,900 | $1,302,350 | $641,400 | computed · Policy §6.1 |
| Debt service coverage | 1.41x | 1.22x | 1.19x | Debt schedule p.1 · Policy min 1.25x |
Rows in red are discrepancies between documents, or between a document and the bank's written method. They are listed, not ranked. The underwriter decides what they mean.
Business and personal tax returns, K-1s, CPA statements, interim financials, PFS, debt schedules, rent rolls, bank statements, accounting-system exports, A/R and inventory agings. Scanned, faxed or handwritten.
Multi-year statement and tax return spreads, global cash flow across the borrower, guarantors and related entities, rent roll and trailing-twelve for real estate. Normalized by your written method, not ours.
The factual sections of the credit memo and the annual review, with the analysis left for a named person to write and sign.
Tax returns against statements. Statements against bank deposits. The debt schedule against the credit report. Agings against the borrowing base. Mismatches listed with both pages cited.
Appraisal, Phase I, title, insurance, equipment quotes, purchase agreements, reduced to the facts a committee needs and traced back.
Covenant tests, borrowing base reviews, maturity, insurance and financial-statement ticklers, built from the same file.
Deal abstract and missing-items list from whatever the borrower or broker sent.
Traced spread with ratios shown beside the policy line, from the prelim package.
Your lender structures the requestYour template, filled with the figures your lender chose.
Every incoming document classified, filed and checked for staleness. Third-party reports abstracted as they arrive.
Full spread, global cash flow, tie-outs, and the factual half of the credit memo. A second pass that flags gaps in the draft.
Your credit officer writes the analysisPackage assembled, policy exceptions listed with mitigants, conditions of approval recorded.
Your committee decidesDiscrepancy list between loan documents and approved terms. Closing checklist cleared.
Annual reviews drafted from new financials. Covenants tested. Borrowing bases reconciled. Risk rating memo prepared for the lender's signature.
Your lender assigns the ratingEquipment, lines of credit, owner-occupied and investor real estate, agricultural operating lines, SBA: the documents differ, the method is the same. Read, spread, cite, draft, sign.
Before a letter of interest, your lender needs to know whether a deal fits. The workstation builds that picture from whatever the borrower sent. Your lender decides.
Documents sorted, a deal summary, and the missing items for that loan type. Reg B dates tracked from the day an application is complete.
A quick spread with each ratio beside your policy line. Trade area, loan size, property type and eligibility shown as met, not met, or cannot check, each with its evidence.
Your rate sheet applied as written: the payment, coverage at the proposed rate, and coverage under a rate shock. Exceptions to the grid are flagged, so similar borrowers are priced alike. Index rates are loaded by hand and dated.
Your portfolio as it would look with this loan: CRE to capital, by property type and geography, exposure to the whole relationship, and room under the lending limit, from a dated core extract.
Where the deal sits against your own rating benchmarks, in numbers. The proposed rating is your officer's. The workstation never assigns one.
Then the letter of interest, drafted from your template with the terms your lender chose.
Every desk reads the same files with the same reader. Each person signs in under their own name and sees only their desk, so the record shows who did what.
Spreads, tie-outs, global cash flow, exceptions and the factual half of the credit memo. Your analysts and credit officer work here, and only here is a credit decision recorded.
Annual reviews, covenant tests, borrowing bases, ticklers, rating support and exam preparation. In a downturn, the whole book re-spread as new financials arrive.
Package checklists, a pre-credit spread so requests arrive complete, a plain-language summary to walk through with the owner, and the full relationship on one page. It prepares and explains; it never pre-approves.
Nothing crosses the wall. Files go in by hand, signed work comes out by hand, and every move is logged. Updates arrive the same way, dated and reviewed before anyone applies them.
What the machine will not do.
It will not score a borrower, recommend an approval, or assign a risk rating. It lists what the documents say and where they disagree. The judgment stays with your people, and the file shows who exercised it.
It will not connect to the internet, to your core, or to anything outside the room. Core exports, credit reports and outside appraisals come in as files, loaded by your staff.
It runs a model built in the United States, named and dated, and it changes only when your bank decides.
An examiner can open any loan and see what the machine produced, who changed it, who signed it, and what the machine knew on that date. That record is the product. Everything else is how we build it.
Hand it the stack at five. It works through the night on its own hardware, with no bill per page. Your analysts spend the morning reading and signing instead of keying.
There is no per-token charge because you are not renting someone else's machine. You can own this one outright. If we disappear, nothing of yours moves.
Credit memos live in binders. Once the machine has read them, they become a record you can question.
Every borrower with coverage under your floor. Every exception still open. Every review past due. Every guarantor standing behind more than one relationship. Each answer points to a page.
Load a dated extract from your core, and yield sits beside credit quality, segment by segment. Not a score. A description of the book you hold, the way an examiner would describe it, a month before they do.
That is the direction. The spreads come first, and a bank earns its way there one annual cycle at a time.
The SOP is the checklist, and for a delegated lender the file is the only review a loan gets until a guaranty is purchased. Every requirement met, cited to the page that proves it, under the SOP version in force when the loan was approved.
The rent roll tied to the leases, the operating statement to the appraisal, the sponsor's schedule of real estate owned to their tax returns. Your method sets the floors; the machine shows where each file stands against them.
Both rest on the same core: tax returns, guarantors and global cash flow, read once and cited throughout.
A week in your credit department finding where the hours go. Then one job, done properly.
Fifty to a hundred closed or performing files. The machine spreads them. Your analysts' own hand spreads are the answer key, and the accuracy number is yours to see.
How you treat add-backs, distributions, guarantor cash flow, vacancy and reserves goes on the machine before it reads a live file. Compliance and vendor management are in the room from the first week.
Recurring, lower risk than new credit, and the fastest hours to win back. Then the pipeline, one stage at a time.
Everyone building this has sat on the lending side of the desk. It is built with a bank, not for one.
A small number of pilots beginning in 2027, one bank and one region at a time.
eric@synchronos.com