Deal Screening
Every deal, scored against your credit policy.
LendPipe runs DSCR, LTV, debt service, leverage, and concentration thresholds against your written credit policy the moment a deal arrives — and flags every exception with the supporting evidence already attached.
Apex Manufacturing LLC
$2.5M Equipment
C&I Standard v3
Customer concentration above policy gate4
Top 3 customers represent 48% of FY25 revenue. C&I Standard v3 caps concentration at 35%. Mitigants: 10-yr relationship, contractual minimums through 2026.
What it does
Policy screening that runs before review, not as an afterthought.
Most lenders have a credit policy that says, in plain English, what makes a deal underwritable: minimum DSCR, maximum LTV, maximum debt-to-tangible-net-worth, customer concentration limits, industry exposure caps, geographic exposure rules. In practice, those gates are checked manually — after the spread is done, after the analyst has already spent hours on the deal, sometimes after the deal has gone to committee. Exceptions get caught late, or not at all. LendPipe applies your written credit policy to every deal automatically, the moment the spreading and bank statement analysis complete. Each ratio is computed using your institution's definition — fully amortized debt service, stressed interest rate, the right cap-rate convention for CRE — and checked against the threshold your policy actually specifies. Exceptions are surfaced with the supporting evidence already linked: which line of which document drove the breach, what the mitigants are, and whether your policy allows the analyst to proceed with documented justification or routes the deal to a higher approval authority.
Capabilities
What gets screened, and how
DSCR computed your way
Fully amortized, stressed-rate, interest-only — whichever convention your policy specifies, applied consistently. Existing debt service from the bank statement analysis included automatically.
LTV and LTC against current appraisals
Loan-to-value computed from the appraisal in the deal package, with appraiser, date, and methodology pulled into the screening report. LTC tracked separately for construction deals.
Leverage and coverage ratios
Debt-to-tangible-net-worth, debt-to-EBITDA, fixed-charge coverage, and your institution's other leverage gates — each computed from the spread and checked against the policy threshold.
Concentration limits
Customer concentration, industry exposure, geographic exposure, and single-borrower limits checked against your portfolio policy. Exposure is computed across existing relationships, not just the new ask.
Verdict per gate, verdict per deal
Each gate returns a pass / manual review / decline verdict. The deal verdict aggregates the gates using your policy's escalation rules — three failures routes to senior credit, one mitigated exception goes to the analyst.
Exception evidence pre-attached
Every failed gate carries the source citation — the line on the spread, the page in the bank statement, the appraisal section — so the analyst doesn't go hunting. Mitigants from the underwriting policy are listed.
How it works
Screening runs in four steps, before the analyst opens the deal
- 01
Spread and bank analysis complete
Deal screening fires automatically when the upstream spreading and bank-statement analysis finish. There's no separate "run screening" button — by the time the deal lands in the analyst's queue, the screening report is already attached. Gates that need data not yet available wait and re-run when it arrives.
- 02
Policy parameters loaded
Your institution's credit policy is encoded as configurable parameters: DSCR minimum, LTV maximum, debt-service convention, concentration thresholds, escalation rules. Different product types — owner-occupied CRE, investor CRE, C&I, equipment, SBA — can carry their own gate sets, and the system selects the right policy based on the deal's product code.
- 03
Gates checked with cited evidence
Each gate is checked against the computed value. The check is deterministic: if your DSCR floor is 1.20x and the computed DSCR is 1.18x, the gate fails — and the failure is annotated with the contributing lines from the spread and the existing debt service detected from bank statements. No black-box scoring.
- 04
Verdict + routing produced
The verdict — Pass, Manual Review with N exceptions, or Decline — is written to the deal record. Routing follows your policy: clean deals advance to memo drafting; deals with mitigatable exceptions go to the originating analyst; deals breaching unilateral-authority thresholds route to senior credit. The audit trail captures which gate fired which routing decision.
What you get back
Screening artifacts your committee can rely on
Policy-gate report
Every gate listed with the computed value, the policy threshold, the verdict, and a one-line evidence note. Exportable to Excel for committee packets or appended to the credit memo automatically.
Exception register with mitigants
Each policy exception documented with the breach amount, the source evidence, and the policy-defined mitigants the analyst should evaluate. Replaces ad-hoc Word documents and email threads.
Deal verdict and routing decision
Single verdict — Pass / Manual Review / Decline — with the routing authority required for approval. Posted to the deal record and the analyst queue, not in a separate inbox.
Audit trail of every gate firing
Examiner-ready record of which gates ran, what values they checked, which policy version they used, and what evidence they referenced. Reproducible months later when the deal is reviewed.
Built for lenders
Screening that respects how community banks and credit unions write policy
Credit policy at a community bank or credit union is rarely a single document — it's a master credit policy plus product addenda plus committee minutes plus exam findings plus the institutional memory of who set what threshold and why. The screening engines that come bundled with legacy loan-origination systems force lenders to encode policy in a rigid form and update it through change requests, which is why most banks don't actually use them and end up screening deals in Excel instead. LendPipe encodes your policy in plain-language parameters that your chief credit officer can read, edit, and version. Different product types carry different gate sets without forcing every deal through the same screening template. Examiners see a clear audit trail that ties every screening decision to a specific policy version. The result is screening that actually happens — not a screening tool that gets bypassed because it's faster to do the work by hand.
Common questions
What lenders ask before they switch
How is the screening different from the ratio panel in our existing spread?
A ratio panel computes numbers. Screening compares those numbers to your policy and decides what happens next. The spread might show DSCR of 1.18x; screening recognizes that 1.18x falls below your 1.20x floor for owner-occupied CRE, classifies the breach as a documented exception (not a decline), routes the deal to the originating analyst rather than senior credit, and pre-fills the exception write-up section of the credit memo with the supporting evidence. The work the analyst does after that is credit judgment, not gate-checking.
Can different loan products use different policy thresholds?
Yes. Owner-occupied CRE, investor CRE, C&I, equipment, SBA 7(a), SBA 504, working capital lines, and your other product types can each carry their own gate set with their own thresholds. The deal's product code selects the right policy at screening time. Policies can also inherit from a master policy and override specific gates — useful when most of the gate logic is shared but, say, DSCR floor differs by product.
How does screening handle exceptions that have committee-approved mitigants?
Each gate carries a list of policy-defined mitigants — for a DSCR breach, that might include guarantor strength, liquid reserves, contractual revenue minimums, or interest reserves. Screening doesn't decide whether mitigants are sufficient; it surfaces them for the analyst to evaluate and document. The exception write-up in the memo is pre-populated with the policy language and the supporting evidence, so the analyst is editing rather than starting from scratch.
What happens when our credit policy changes mid-quarter?
Policy versions are first-class objects in LendPipe. When credit policy changes, the new policy version is activated with an effective date, and screening uses the version in effect on the deal's underwriting date. Past screening reports remain tied to the policy version that was active when they ran — so examiner review can verify the deal was screened against the policy in force at the time, not a later version.
Does the screening verdict drive automated approval or decline?
No. Screening produces a verdict and a routing recommendation, but humans approve or decline. The verdict surfaces what needs human attention and what's clean; it does not commit the institution. Lenders that have experimented with auto-approve thresholds for very small deals can configure that in policy, but the default — and the default for every commercial deal — is that an authorized person makes the credit decision.
How does this integrate with our LOS?
Screening output — the verdict, the gate report, and the exception register — can be pushed into your LOS as a structured payload at the deal level, or attached as a PDF to the loan file. Most teams use both: structured fields drive dashboard reporting and exam pulls; the PDF satisfies the documentation requirement for the credit file. Integration adapters exist for nCino, Encompass, and LoanVantage; CSV export covers everything else.
Related capabilities
Built to work together, not in isolation
See it run on a real borrower file.
Walk through one of your own deals — document drop to committee-ready output, end to end.
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