A few years ago, I was catching up with my cousin, who ran a company that extended credit to businesses. He was complaining about how unwieldy the process of lending to businesses was — how the effort took months, the process was archaic, and the experience was miserable for both his team and their borrowers.

It all sounded absurd. First, how could anything be this slow and painful in 2020? Second, how could a process whose success relies on speed and convenience be so painstakingly slow and full of friction? I thought my cousin’s company must have been an exception. I had some spare time, so I told my cousin I’d call a few experts and tell him how “the pros” were doing it.

Those calls turned into a year-long research project that surfaced one of the most prevalent and pernicious problems the industry faces today. Each year, businesses small and large rely on banks and other financial institutions (FIs) for trillions of dollars in capital. But this capital is hidden behind mountains of paperwork that cost FIs and their customers over $120B (and innumerable heartbreaks) every year to process. No matter the technology stack, nearly every institution we spoke to had the same issues as my cousin.

We founded Able to help businesses get capital faster. Our platform expedites commercial loan processing so that everyone involved in the loan process — lenders, borrowers, lawyers, accountants, guarantors, and more — can get back to business. With Able, companies get funded sooner, FIs get improved economics, and everyone gets a much better experience.

Today, after nearly two years of development, I’m proud to announce that our platform is now available to all commercial lenders. And now, we have secured $20 million in Series A funding from Canapi, Human Capital, and a number of U.S. banks to fuel our continued growth.

The Problem We Solve: Information Collection and Processing

During the development process, our team spent hundreds of hours on-site with commercial lenders to experience the process up close. We worked with a wide variety of teams, ranging from corporate banks handling $100M syndicated loans down to lenders issuing $250k to startups.

The pervasive customer pain was easy to spot. Business owners and their partners compared the process to uncomfortable procedures like pulling teeth, prostate exams, and open-heart surgery.

The core problem was information collection and processing. FIs use systems that are largely manual, which slow processing and introduce errors.

We found that:

1) Key personnel spent up to 1/3 of their work day on tasks that could be automated — even when they were using the best tools available on the market.

2) Errors and delays added as much as a month of processing time on to fully funded loans.

Able solves all of these problems. Our platform gives FIs everything they need to collect and process information online and at scale.

How Able works is simple. Inside the FI, managers tell Able which documents to collect. Our system handles everything else. Borrowers, or their designees, submit documents online, via email, or in person. Then Able reviews and organizes everything. Automated follow-up communications keep the process moving.

With Able, loans close faster — and everyone spends less time on paperwork, from the initial screen through servicing and renewals.

How We Cleared the Document Logjam

Commercial loans require large volumes of non-standard documents, such as financials, business plans, and contracts.

Our platform uses artificial intelligence to process all of those documents. It can handle any format — PDFs, Word docs, photos, even handwritten documents and blurry images.

Our system extracts the data from each document, infers its meaning, and then asks the user to verify its conclusion. As new conclusions are reached, Able automatically conducts administrative processes that the user would have otherwise had to do manually, from systems onboarding to group notifications. Feedback from users helps the system learn and refine institution-specific patterns, making it smarter — and better — every day.

This “human-in-the-loop” architecture allows us to safely bring large amounts of automation to the process with minimal setup time and effort from our customers.

Designed to Deliver Value Quickly

The last piece of our puzzle relied on finding a way to minimize deployment times and efforts on our customers. FIs — and particularly large banks — are some of the most resource-constrained and technologically fragmented organizations in the world.

Because of this, we set out to build a platform that would be supremely easy to interconnect with existing systems (both legacy and incumbents) and would work out-of-the-box with little configuration. While the platform remains highly configurable, the end result is that most clients can get up and running quickly with minimal effort, and front-line teams see immediate efficiency gains.

Any Process, Any Business Loan

Able supports all commercial lenders, all loan types, and the complete credit cycle, ranging from small business loan originations to the servicing of massive institutional real estate portfolios.

Ready to see what Able can do for your company? Let us know. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

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