For the people who run outsourced underwriting for credit unions
You sell your clients’ rulebooks, applied exactly, around the clock, at a variable cost. You deliver it with people, by the hour. This page is about that gap.
Two minutes. Your score on the spot, no form.
| Day | Applications | Staffed hours |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 10% | 14% |
| Tuesday | 9% | 14% |
| Wednesday | 9% | 14% |
| Thursday | 9% | 14% |
| Friday | 13% | 14% |
| Saturday | 35% | 16% |
| Sunday | 15% | 14% |
The problem
“Decisions around the clock. Nights, weekends, holidays.”
A flat roster against a demand curve drawn by car dealers. Your people already work Saturdays and take a weekday off, and Saturday still runs several times a midweek day, past anything the roster covers.
“Decisions made to your written lending policy.”
Every client’s policy: dozens or hundreds of hotsheets, rate sheets, and addenda, each different where it matters, kept in a shared drive and in whichever heads know it best.
“Turn your fixed cost into a variable cost.”
The fixed cost. Volume moves. Payroll does not. Spikes are bought from temp agencies.
“We work in your systems, under your name.”
Systems you cannot configure. In your platform or theirs, the policy, the decision engine, and the right to change either all belong to the client. You get the work the engine could not clear.
None of this is a failure of management. It is the shape of the business.
Why it is still manual
The credit union owns the policy and the loan origination system. You own the labor, so you carry the full cost of variety with no right to simplify its source.
Nobody built for the desk that runs many clients’ policies, with its own people, on systems it does not control. So the knowledge stayed where it always was. In people.
On the floor
Walk the queue with one of your underwriters.
An application lands from a credit union she works twice a month. She knows the policy exists. She does not know it. Turn time across comparable clients varies about twofold. The spread tracks familiarity, not complexity: some of the hardest guideline sets are the fastest served, because their experts are on shift.
The hotsheet is a PDF with no search that understands it. One rule means a few pages to find it and a few more to confirm nothing later overrides it. Multiply by every rule that matters on the deal.
Declines are more than half of the desk’s decisions and more than half of its time: the most rule-driven, document-heavy work on the floor. Under pressure she finds the first failing rule, writes it up, and moves on. The adverse-action reasons come out thinner than the policy, and the approvable deal behind it waits.
The deal misses loan-to-value by a little. The right answer is a counter: the cash down or reduced amount financed that brings it inside the cap, at the tier’s rate. Calculator math by hand, against a rate sheet that may have changed last month.
A meaningful share of applications are deals already worked, back with a new structure or a co-borrower. She starts from the top, because nothing shows what changed.
A client tweaks a rule. It arrives as an email and a new PDF, and someone updates the shared drive. Nobody can say afterward which version applied to last Tuesday’s decisions.
A meaningful share of decisions are recorded after the application has left the queue. The dealer has moved on. The client sees the turn time. You see it later.
What it costs
In the terms your P&L uses.
Growth here is linear in people: every new client, program, or percent of volume costs matching payroll. Margin cannot expand. Yet the mandate to automate a meaningful share of inbound sits on your desk with no headcount behind it.
Funding
The same rulebooks get executed again at funding and document stacking, by a different team, from the same PDFs. Underwriting is the front door.
The other side
Not a product. A day.
Two seats
They should find themselves here too.
Your problem is accuracy and your people’s day. Thirty of a hundred rules checked is your nightmare: silence on the other seventy is worse than a wrong answer. Resubmissions are pure rework.
You will not accept anything that
Your test: check every rule, every time, show the work, and let my people decide.
Your problem is boundary and proof.
Dead on arrival: anything that
You will ask for
The right questions. This page was written expecting them.
Diagnostic
Five questions. Two minutes. Your score on the spot, no form. Tell us who you are and we will send you how comparable desks answered.
Your result
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Sidecar
Sidecar helps you field more business without additional headcount. Bring one client’s hotsheet and one recent application. We walk your workflow, not ours. No deck.