The problem

The safeguard was losing the deals it was meant to protect.

Every prospective tenant triggered a manual due-diligence check, and gathering the financial statements, company records, bank statements and references by hand stretched underwriting into weeks, during which prospects went cold and offices stayed empty.

The checks themselves rested on gut feel. Finance staff judged credit risk from whatever data they managed to collect, often incomplete, which meant tenants with shaky cash flow slipped through and later fell behind on rent while genuinely strong ones waited in the same slow queue.

And the team was the bottleneck. At month-end the finance department buckled under the volume of approval requests, so the process that was supposed to guard the firm's income was the very thing capping how fast it could fill space.

What we did

Score the risk in seconds, and free the humans for the hard ones.

Pull the data automatically, auto-approve the clearly safe, and hand a finance manager only the applicants that actually need a judgement.

Automated intake

The data gathers itself

The applicant sends a link or a file of their documents, and the engine connects in seconds to legitimate external sources, open-banking data, a business-credit bureau and the companies registrar, so nobody spends days chasing statements and references by hand.

Risk scoring

A consistent score, not a hunch

A machine-learning model reads the applicant's trading history, cash flow and debt ratios and produces a consistent risk score, replacing the incomplete, gut-feel assessments that let shaky tenants through and made strong ones wait.

Green lane

Low risk, approved in minutes

Businesses the model classes as low-risk are approved automatically with no human touch, so a strong prospect gets a yes in minutes and signs while they are still keen, rather than cooling off over a two-week wait.

Exception dashboard

The red flags, marked for a person

Medium and high-risk applicants are routed to a finance manager with a focused summary that marks the exact warning signs, a loan maturing soon, frequent changes of chief executive, so the human spends their time on the real question, not on assembling the file.

Manager decides

People own the risky calls

The model clears the obvious and surfaces the doubtful; a finance manager still makes the call on anything borderline, so the speed never comes at the cost of who approved a risky tenant and why.

Fills space faster

Less friction, fewer voids

A smooth, modern onboarding replaces the bureaucratic slog that used to lose prospects at the last step, so more deals close on the spot and fewer offices sit empty waiting on paperwork.

The result

Ten days to fifteen minutes, and safer.

Prospects sign while they're keen, and the risky ones still get a human eye.

Live

Screening 10 days to 15 minutes, closes +25%

Due diligence fell from about ten business days to fifteen minutes for auto-approved applicants, which stopped prospects cooling off in the queue and lifted immediate deal closes 25%, turning empty offices into signed leases faster.

And safer

Bad debt −40%, finance freed

A consistent, data-driven score sharpened risk decisions and cut late payments and bad debt about 40%, while the finance team was freed from clerical data-gathering to focus on the exceptions that genuinely need judgement.

Why it holds

A green lane only works if the exceptions are caught.

Auto-approving the clearly safe is only responsible when the doubtful applicants are pulled out and handed to a person with the red flags already marked. It is the same green-lane risk-underwriting discipline behind our credit-underwriting work, aimed at commercial tenants and empty offices rather than a bank's loan book.

More case studies

Related work.

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