Everything a deal team needs to close the file.
What belongs on a checklist, how to ask for evidence without spending your credibility, and where the weeks actually go. No invented benchmarks.
Case study
Working with counterparties
How to ask a borrower for documents without spending your credibility4 minEvery request you send is a small withdrawal from the relationship. Asking for something they already sent is a large one. A short discipline for keeping the balance positive.Asking a counterparty to connect a system, not send an export3 minA read-only connection is fresher than a PDF and cannot be selectively assembled. It is also a bigger ask, and getting it granted depends entirely on how narrowly you scope it.Diligence for grant funders: what changes when the applicant is a charity3 minThe mechanics are the same as credit — a list, evidence, acceptance, a decision. What differs is who is on the other end, and designing for that changes how the process should feel.
Reference
What belongs on a credit diligence checklist4 minA working reference for a senior secured facility — what to ask for, what you can establish yourself, and which items are owed by your own team rather than the borrower.What an investment committee pack should actually contain3 minNot a folder of everything received. A committee needs to know what was asked, what came back, what was accepted and by whom, and what was deliberately let go.Build your requirement template from your last five deals, not from a library3 minDownloaded checklists carry someone else's assumptions without their reasoning. Your own closed deals contain a better template than any library, and extracting it takes an afternoon.
Running a deal
A data room is not a checklist, and the difference costs you weeks4 minA data room answers "what have we been sent?". Diligence needs the answer to "what is still outstanding, and who is it with?" — a question no folder can answer.The half of diligence delay that happens inside your own building4 minEveryone measures how slow the counterparty is. Almost nobody measures how long a document sits with Legal, Credit or IC once it has arrived — and that is the half you can actually fix.How long should pre-close diligence take?3 minThere is no credible published benchmark, and anyone quoting one should be asked where it came from. Here is how to measure your own, and what usually turns out to be true when firms do.A waived item is not a satisfied one, and your file should say so3 minEvery real deal waives something. The failure mode is silent: a waived item that renders as complete is indistinguishable from a complete one, and nobody notices until someone is asking who decided.Where deal teams lose answers, and how a questions log fixes it3 minA question is not a task and not a requirement. It is a gap in what the team knows — and on most deals it lives in one person's head until somebody re-asks the borrower.What an AI agent should never be allowed to do in diligence3 minThe useful question is not how much a system can automate, but which acts must keep a human name against them. Three of them, and the reasoning for each.