For most people in the UK, applying for a loan still means waiting. While the rest of banking has moved to real-time, credit decisioning has historically remained a multi-day process of document uploads, manual reviews and delayed risk checks. Traditional banks often take up to five working days to review and approve an application, and anything that lands late at night or over a weekend simply waits in the queue until the next working day. Behind the scenes, teams are pulling information from bank statements, credit files, Companies House and uploaded documents - and when that work is done by hand, staff spend more time chasing data than analysing it.

That gap between customer expectation and operational reality is exactly the problem Enablis has set out to solve. The result is a prototype that keeps the human in charge while giving them back most of their time.

How banks usually evaluate a loan application

When someone applies for a loan, an agent at the bank has to build a picture of who the applicant is and whether the lending is sound. In practice, that means working through a stack of evidence:

  • Identity checks - confirming the applicant is who they say they are, either from third-party providers or the applicant’s own uploads.
  • Proof of address - documents such as a council tax bill or utility statement to verify where the applicant lives.
  • Affordability and risk - cross-referencing income, existing commitments and credit history against the amount requested.

Each of these is checked, read and reconciled manually. As our team put it, an agent is typically taking about 40 minutes to review each application - and that is 40 minutes for every application, one after another. Lenders take identity verification particularly seriously because of the risk of fraud, so even a small red flag, such as an address that isn’t yet on the applicant’s credit file, can push a case into slower manual underwriting.

Where the time goes

The 40 minutes rarely goes on the decision itself. It goes on the assembly: opening documents, matching them against records, spotting inconsistencies and manually stitching together a view of the applicant. It’s careful, important work - but it’s also repetitive, and it scales linearly. More applications simply means more hours, more backlog and longer waits for customers who are ready to borrow.

For the bank, that’s a hard ceiling on how many genuine customers it can serve. For the applicant, it’s the difference between getting the money when they need it and waiting days for a yes.

How Enablis is changing the equation

Our prototype targets that assembly work directly, with a goal of bringing review time down from roughly 40 minutes to around 5 minutes per application.

Crucially, the design keeps the bank’s agent in control. AI helps with the initial triage - gathering and cross-checking the identity documents, proof of address and supporting evidence - and surfaces a recommendation. But it does more than hand over an answer: it gives the reasoning behind that recommendation, so the agent can see why the AI has reached its conclusion.

Ultimately it’s the agent who works for the bank that makes the decision on whether or not to approve the loan. The AI is working with the agent, rather than for the agent.

That distinction matters in a regulated environment. The human remains accountable for the outcome, but instead of spending 40 minutes building the case from scratch, they start from a triaged, explained summary and apply their judgement. Transparency isn’t a nice-to-have bolted on afterwards - it’s the mechanism that makes the whole approach trustworthy.

Why it’s good for banks and customers alike

Speeding up review isn’t just an efficiency metric. It changes what the bank can do and what the customer experiences.

  • For the bank - agents can work through far more loans and approve more genuine customers in the same amount of time, turning a linear bottleneck into real throughput.
  • For the customer - approvals come sooner, which means people can get the money they need and use it to make a difference in their lives rather than waiting days for a decision.

It’s a rare case where the business outcome and the customer outcome point in exactly the same direction. By automating the heavy lifting of triage while keeping the human firmly in the decision seat, Enablis can help banks move at the speed their customers now expect - without giving up the control and accountability that lending demands.