LOS Underwriting Decision Hub & Risk Workbench

The bank had invested in a commercial LOS, but actual underwriting decisions still depended heavily on spreadsheets, emails and offline judgement.

• Different business units maintained their own Excel scorecards and “shadow policies”.
• RMs pushed for exceptions via email; underwriters tracked them in personal folders.
• Multiple LOS instances per region, each with slightly different rules and screens.
• Risk could not see a single view of overrides, conditions and portfolio impact.
• Audit teams struggled to reconstruct “why this loan was approved” months later.

On paper, underwriting was “system-driven”. In reality, it was a patchwork of LOS screens, emails, attachments and Excel trackers.

Sapnity was asked to build a unified Underwriting Decision Hub that works with the existing LOS — not against it.

• Create a single underwriting workbench used by RMs and underwriters across products and regions.
• Centralize policy rules, decision tables and exception logic outside the LOS screens.
• Connect bureau data, internal risk scores and collateral valuations into one decision view.
• Send final decisions and conditions back into LOS and core banking automatically.
• Provide an audit-ready timeline for every decision, including who overrode what and why.

A “typical” SME loan decision looked structured from the outside — an LOS, a set of policies, and a credit committee. But the internal journey told a different story:

• RMs keyed partial data into LOS and then emailed missing documents separately.
• Underwriters exported cases into Excel to run their own scorecards and sensitivity checks, often using different versions of the same template.
• Exceptions (policy breaches, high-risk sectors, marginal scores) were negotiated via email, with LOS comments fields updated at the last minute.
• Risk and portfolio teams saw the impact of these exceptions weeks later in static reports.

By the time a regulator or internal audit asked, “Why was this exposure approved?”, the best answer was often: “We’ll try to reconstruct it from emails.”

Sapnity introduced a Decision Hub pattern that sits between front-line origination and the LOS / core banking stack. Instead of pushing all logic into LOS screens, the bank now runs underwriting from a unified workbench:

This pattern is now the bank’s reference blueprint for new products, new regions and future LOS upgrades — the LOS changes, but the Decision Hub stays.

Phase 1 — Discovery & Policy Mapping

• Shadowed RMs and underwriters across three regions for SME and retail products.
• Documented “actual” decision paths vs. documented policy; identified unofficial Excel tools.
• Grouped rules into eligibility, scoring, pricing and exception categories.

Phase 2 — Data & Decision Model

• Designed Dataverse entities for applications, exposures, policies, exceptions, conditions and approvals.
• Defined decision table structures so risk teams could later tweak thresholds without code.
• Mapped bureau and internal risk attributes into a unified data contract per application.

Phase 3 — Underwriting Workbench

• Built a model-driven app with RM and Underwriter personas, each with focused views.
• Introduced a “case narrative” timeline capturing key events, notes and decisions.
• Embedded document links from DMS/SharePoint so no files live on desktops.

Phase 4 — Rules & Integration

• Implemented eligibility and pricing rules via Power Automate and Azure Functions.
• Connected LOS and core banking via REST APIs and integration middleware.
• Ensured that any manual override triggers a structured exception record with justification.

Phase 5 — Rollout & Governance

• Ran pilot with one SME product and one region; then scaled to additional regions.
• Created a joint “Policy & Underwriting Studio” where risk can maintain rules.
• Moved all configurations through Dev → Test → Prod with managed solutions.

• Decision Hub, not just LOS customization: We created a reusable underwriting pattern that survives LOS upgrades and vendor changes.
• Risk-owned rules: Policy and pricing thresholds are stored in governed tables, giving risk teams control without code changes.
• End-to-end traceability: Every override, condition and approver is captured in a single narrative view for each application.
• Deep integration without lock-in: LOS and core banking communicate via APIs, but the decision logic lives in the bank’s own tenant.
• Pattern-first expansion: The same blueprint is now rolling out to mortgage, card and dealer finance portfolios.

Sapnity didn’t “rip and replace” the LOS. We added a governed underwriting brain that finally made LOS, risk and portfolio teams behave like one system.