Trouble at a borrower, read the same morning
Ethan leads credit monitoring for small business loans at a big Chicago bank. His team watches over two thousand borrowers.
Listen to the story:
The challenge
A borrower’s trouble usually shows up in the local news weeks before a missed payment: a fire, a lawsuit, a plant closing. Nobody has time to read every paper. Last winter a warehouse fire made the evening news, and the bank found out a month later.
How the flow works
With xMap Flows, Ethan built Waypoint. Waypoint is an AI employee: a flow of 5 blocks.
Every morning at six,
Every morning at 6 (Schedule)
Waypoint reads the city’s business news and keeps stories about fires, closures, layoffs and lawsuits,
Chicago business news (News)
matches them with the bank’s borrowers,
Is it one of ours? (Match with my table)
writes what each story could mean for the loan,
What it means for the loan (xMap LLM)
and posts it to the credit team’s channel.
To the credit channel (Microsoft Teams)
What it solves
- No time for the news: solved by News
- Bad news, found late: solved by Schedule and Match with my table
- A month behind: solved by xMap LLM and Microsoft Teams
The result
On Wednesday, Waypoint read three hundred stories and found two about borrowers: a fire at a bakery supplier in Pilsen and layoffs at a printing firm. Ethan’s team called both owners before lunch, and reworked one loan before a payment was missed.
Ethan’s team used to read about trouble a month late. Now they call the same morning.
An illustrative scenario: the figures are modelled to show what the flow produces, not a customer's results.
The flow, block by block
- 1
- 2
Chicago business news
Stories from news feeds (RSS or Atom) or a website’s news page: title, link, when, the source and a short summary.
- 3
Is it one of ours?
Looks each incoming item up in one of your tables or saved lists (My data), for example your customers.
- 4
- 5
Templates to build it
Ready-made flows with the same blocks. Open one, change the city and the kind of place, and run it.
- Mergers, lawsuits and fines in the business newsMergers, lawsuits and fines in the news each morning, with the practice that could help.
- New festivals, tours and conferences in the newsFestivals, tours and conferences announced in the news, each with a sales angle.
- Disaster and relief news every morning, on a mapDisasters in the morning news, placed on a map, in a short brief.
- Climate and environment news, every weekdayThe climate and environment news each weekday, on a map, in a short brief.
- Supply chain disruptions in the newsStrikes, closures and shortages in the news that could hit your suppliers, each morning.
- Tech companies raising money or expanding, from the newsCompanies raising money or expanding in the tech news, each with a sales angle.
Industries
Learn how it works
- How to build a B2B lead list from the mapEvery business of a type in your territory, with contacts, scored, in a sheet or CRM.
- Location intelligenceUsing where things are, and what is around them, to make business decisions.
- Site selectionChoosing where to open a store, branch, clinic or facility.
- Build your first flow in ten minutesFrom a blank page to a flow that emails you a ranked list every morning.
- Enrich a list onceA CSV of addresses or companies back with phone, website, rating and an AI score.
- Bring in news storiesRead news feeds or a news page, keep what matters, put the places on a map.
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- A loan officer who sees the street before she lendsThandi is a loan officer at a small lender in Durban. She lends to spaza shops, salons and takeaways in the townships.
- Cash machines that follow the street, not last yearMei runs the cash machine network for one of Shanghai’s largest banks. Her team looks after four hundred machines across the city.
- New money agents where people already gatherGrace leads agent growth at a mobile money company in Kigali. Its agents are the corner shops where people put cash in and take it out.
Build this flow on your own city
Run a live search on the home page without an account, or let Ask xMap build the flow from one sentence.