Large financial institutions provide financing for countless numbers of customers, including individual customers and companies. In the case where a financial institution provides financing for companies, credit requests can be for amounts in the tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Further, financial institutions can receive a great number of these requests in a short amount of time, and decisions on these requests are often needed rapidly. Conventionally, however, decisions on these credit requests are reserved for the top credit executives, which are few in number. Accordingly, a typical financial institution often has a small team of credit executives empowered to approve high exposure requests, i.e., requests for a large amount of credit that would expose the financial institution to a significant amount of risk. This combination of having a small number of credit executives in proportion to the number of incoming requests creates a bottleneck in the approval process.
Therefore, a need in the art exists for a way to decrease the response time for credit requests while maintaining the integrity of the process of evaluating these requests in order to ensure that proper decisions are being made.