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. 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. With xMap Flows, Ethan built Waypoint. Every morning at six, Waypoint reads the city’s business news and keeps stories about fires, closures, layoffs and lawsuits, matches them with the bank’s borrowers, writes what each story could mean for the loan, and posts it to the credit team’s channel. 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.

The story in words