What makes a funding file move quickly
Most funding requests do not fail on merit. They stall because the file cannot be credit-assessed as submitted. What a credit committee needs to see, and the order it needs to see it in.
Sponsors tend to assume a facility is won or lost on the strength of the project. In practice a great many good projects sit unfunded for months, and a fair number of ordinary ones close quickly. The difference is usually not the asset. It is whether the file arrives in a condition that lets a credit officer form a view.
A lender’s first question is never “is this a good project?” It is “can I get this through committee, and what will I be asked that I cannot answer?”
The file has one job
An information memorandum is not a brochure. It is the document a credit officer will summarise for people who will never meet you. Everything that makes that summary harder to write slows the process, and anything the officer has to go back to the sponsor for costs a week.
That means the awkward facts belong in the file, positioned and explained, rather than discovered later. A known weakness disclosed with a mitigation reads as competence. The same weakness surfaced in diligence reads as either disorganisation or concealment, and both are expensive.
The model has to be interrogable
Models are rejected less for being wrong than for being closed. Hard-coded figures inside formulas, assumptions scattered across sheets, no way to flex a variable without breaking the file — each of these forces the lender to rebuild the model themselves, and a lender who has to rebuild your model is a lender forming their own, more conservative view.
- Assumptions in one place, each with a source and a date.
- Base, downside and stress cases already built, not promised.
- Cover ratios calculated on the definition the facility will actually use.
- A clean audit trail from revenue driver to cash available for debt service.
Security is a structuring question, not a formality
Security tends to be treated as documentation to be sorted after terms are agreed. It is more useful to work in the other direction: establish what security can genuinely be granted — what is unencumbered, what can be perfected in the relevant jurisdiction, what consents are required and how long they take — and design the structure around that.
Projects across multiple jurisdictions are where this most often derails. A package that is straightforward in one country may be slow, partial or unenforceable in another, and the discovery typically arrives after the term sheet, when everybody has already committed time.
Sponsor equity and the order of money
How much equity, in what form, and crucially when it goes in. Equity contributed up front reads very differently from equity promised at a later milestone. Where some of the contribution is in kind — land, work already done, contributed assets — the valuation of that contribution will be tested, and an aggressive figure undermines the rest of the file.
Answer the committee before it asks
Every sector has a short list of questions a credit committee always reaches. In project finance it is the offtake counterparty and construction risk. In real estate it is absorption evidence and delivery obligations. In manufacturing it is the working capital cycle and input security. A file that answers those questions in its own structure, with evidence attached, moves at a different speed to one that waits to be asked.
Where we come in
We build the proposition first — memorandum, model, diligence pack — and only then take it to the desks most likely to transact, which is not the same as taking it to everybody. Banks, private credit funds, family offices, private investor networks and specialty financiers all write different things, and going straight to the right one is most of the speed.
And because we are engaged by capital partners as well as by the companies raising it, we already know how a file will read when it lands. That is the difference between a process that is run and one that is simply sent out and waited on.