Judgement that stays with the file
Every file leaves a record of how it was worked, and the record stays with you when an officer leaves.
This record is available today, along with the reading and the appraisal of the file.
Your credit officer opens an agricultural loan application and works through it with Mwikila, our AI Senior Agriculture & Finance Consultant.
Officers learn to judge a file by working files with someone experienced.
Someone who can tell whether a farmer's harvest will pay the loan has spent years in the field and in the credit department. Few people have that experience, and each of them can only be in one branch at a time. When an institution loses one of them, its policies and forms stay, because they are written down. What leaves with them is knowing which question this file raises, which figure to distrust, which silence matters, and when an application that looks clean is clean.
The usual answer is a training course: a curriculum, an exam at the end, and officers taken away from their work for a week. A course teaches the framework, and the framework is worth teaching. The rest is learnt at the desk, file by file, so we do not ask for the week. Mwikila works with your officer on the file they already have open, and leaves a record of the work behind. The standard he works to was set by our two mentors from their own careers: Anderson in credit, Aloys in agricultural production.
What comes with an application sent to you.
The documents come with a record of how the application was prepared, which the finished documents cannot show on their own.
Everything in the record is about the application
Preparation
Messages exchanged, gaps raised, closed and reopened, figures revised, and the evidence produced when a claim was questioned.
Gaps, and how each one closed
Every gap in the order it was dealt with: when it was raised, whether it is still open, closed or replaced by another, how the applicant closed it in their own words, how often it came back, and the evidence attached.
What changed, and whether a reason was given
Each revised figure with its old value, its new value and the reason the applicant gave. A change with no stated reason is recorded as exactly that.
The messages that mattered, word for word
The messages that mattered most to the preparation, in the order they came, quoted word for word in the language they were written in, never translated, each with a note on why it mattered.
Photographs, video and audio
What the photographs, video and audio the applicant chose to attach show, what they support, and where they disagree with the rest of the file.
The documents it refers to
Every document, quoted passage, photograph, video and recording the record refers to, each named so your officer can ask Mwikila about any of them.
What it leaves out
Where the sending institution limited what the record holds, your officer is told it is a summary, not the whole history.
Short notes on each application, written to three rules.
From that record, Mwikila writes a few short notes about the application, such as evidence the applicant produced when questioned, which gaps were closed and how, a figure that changed with no reason given, or photographs that disagree with the rest of the file. Each note is one sentence, and your officer can check it in one click.
Every note comes from the record.
No word describing the applicant is used unless the record supports it. Evasive, credible and cooperative are left out: they read as findings, but each is only an impression, handed back with a system's authority.
Every note shows where it came from, or it is left out.
A note that cannot point to the message, document or record entry it came from is removed before anyone sees it, because a note your officer cannot check looks exactly like one that was made up.
If there is nothing to note, it says so.
If the record supports no note, the section stays empty and says so in words, and points your officer to the messages and documents so they can form their own view at the interview. A section that invents content to avoid looking empty is worse than an empty one.
Nothing is added up into one number
The notes are listed one by one and never added together, and nothing about a person is turned into a number. They always appear in the same order, following the page, so a note listed first is not more important than the one after it.
Anyone who reviews the file later can see what each conclusion was based on.
The record counts the application's messages, its revisions and the evidence produced when it was questioned. It holds nothing about the officer.
What your institution gets is a file whose reasoning can be checked. Someone else reviewing the file (you, your credit committee, an internal auditor or a supervisor) can see what a conclusion was based on as well as what it was, and open the message or document behind it in one click, months later, without the officer who worked it.
So you can supervise without watching anyone. A junior officer works a file that already carries notes written to an experienced standard, any file in the queue can be opened and checked the same way, and the reasoning stays when an officer leaves.
Where the record stops
It records how the application was prepared and gives no verdict. Nothing in it confirms who the applicant is or decides the loan. The appraisal, interview, farm visit, and identity and anti-money-laundering checks are your officer's, and the decision is your institution's.
Related pages
- How a file is read
How files are opened, read and checked, and how each unread page is named.
- What the committee reads
The credit memo, how much evidence is behind each part, the climate check, and the answer sent back to the sender.
- What we do not do
Each thing we will not do, and how far each one goes.