The appraisal
The appraisal your credit committee reads.
This part of the service works today.
After the file is read, the analysis becomes the memo your committee argues from. Once you decide, the answer goes back to wherever the file came from.
Nothing here asks an institution to change the form its committee reads.
The memo
The analysis your officer works on is written up as a memo for your credit committee.
Your officer works through the analysis on screen, in panels. The memo sets it out, from the opening summary to the recommendation your committee argues over. If your committee uses the five Cs, the memo can be arranged by them.
The panels are where the work is done, and the memo is what leaves the officer's desk. Both show the same analysis, so there is nothing to keep in step.
You can export the memo in the form each recipient needs: the committee's copy, the officer's file copy and a copy for someone outside your institution are rarely the same. If your committee's own paper has a different layout, export the memo and move its sections across.
Sources
Every figure shows where it came from.
Each figure is either read from a named document, calculated from inputs that are shown, or labelled as an assumption.
A sentence with no source does not go into the memo. A committee member can put a finger on any line and find its source printed beside it, and the officer who wrote it never has to go back and work out where it came from.
The appraisal uses only the pages that could be read.
Confidence
The confidence figure measures how complete the evidence is.
It is the only number the appraisal gives about its own work.
Nothing else goes into it, so the same file gives the same figure for any lender, on any day.
It shows how much of the analysis is backed by evidence and how much is still open because of gaps in the file. It says nothing about the borrower or the loan, and it does not change with the conclusion.
Our page on what we do not do lists what an appraisal never says about a borrower.
Risk
Each ratio shows whose definition it follows.
Two officers computing the same coverage ratio for the same borrower can reach different numbers: one included an obligation the other did not, started from a different line, or looked back over a different period. Both worked to a definition; the file never said which governs.
So the memo states the definition. Where the loan agreement defines the terms, that definition is used and cited. Where it does not, the ratio is still calculated, and the definition used is labelled an assumption. Covenant limits are treated the same way.
In one situation we give no number at all: the file shows an existing loan, and nothing says whether it counts in the ratio. The ratio comes out very differently with it and without it, and a guess could give a wrong number that looks right. So we leave the ratio blank for your officer to check whether that loan counts.
Every party to the loan is checked against the published sanctions lists and lists of politically exposed persons, and our copies are refreshed on a set schedule. If a name matches, your officer decides what it means; we draw no conclusion from it.
Climate finance
A climate finance appraisal starts as an ordinary appraisal.
We read the same evidence and ask the same question, whether the borrower can and will repay. Then we add an eligibility check, an environmental and social safeguards check, the case for additionality and the impact plan.
We work in English or Swahili, from the published texts. The investment criteria that international climate funds publish are worked through one by one: impact potential, paradigm shift potential, sustainable development potential, the needs of the recipient, country ownership (including the national designated authority's no-objection letter), and efficiency and effectiveness. We also follow the environmental and social performance standards behind the safeguards check, what is published on climate rationale and additionality, and the published principles and taxonomy for green loans.
We know these criteria from what is published. LitFin Intelligence has no relationship with the bodies that publish them.
Next steps
What your officer can do with a file that is not finished.
Each move is recorded before it is sent, so no question goes missing.
Ask the applicant.
The question goes back to the person who can actually answer it, instead of sitting in the officer's head until the next meeting.
Forward it.
To one colleague the officer chooses, or to the whole institution when nobody knows who holds the knowledge, as with a crop or value chain the institution has not lent to before.
Return it to the sender.
A return must carry a question and name the step of preparation it concerns, so the recipient knows what to fix. It cannot be a bare rejection.
The officer can see where each message has got to.
For a message not yet sent, the officer is told whether they need to act or whether it is already in hand.
The outcome
Your decision goes back to whoever sent the file.
When a file reaches you through a signed connection from the system that prepared it, your decision goes back to that system as one of five outcomes: approved, approved with conditions, declined, withdrawn or referred to committee. Keeping to these five means every outcome can be counted the same way.
If that system has not yet been set up to receive it, the outcome is kept and shown as waiting, and it is delivered once it can be received.
You can see which files are open, closed or returned, and which decisions were recorded here but never reached the system that sent the file.
The decision itself stays with you and your committee.
Related pages
- How a file is read
How each kind of document is read, including photographed pages, and how a page we could not read is named.
- The record you keep
The record of how the file was worked, and how the next officer sees it.
- What we do not do
What an appraisal never contains, listed in full.