The call came in on a Tuesday afternoon.
A mid-sized invoice finance company — let’s call them Meridian Capital — had just onboarded a new client. Decent revenue, clean credit score, professional website. Ticked all the boxes.
Three months later, the client defaulted. When Meridian dug into it, they found the director had been appointed to seven other companies in the past 18 months. Four of them dissolved. Two had county court judgments. One was under investigation.
None of this was hidden. It was all public record. They just never looked.
The problem wasn’t fraud. It was friction.
Running proper director checks manually meant jumping between Companies House, court records, and credit databases — sometimes 45 minutes per application. So corners got cut. High-volume periods meant lighter screening. That’s when the bad actors slipped through.
Meridian started using Borsch.ai to pull director histories, connected company networks, filing patterns, and risk signals into a single view — automatically, at the point of application.
What changed:
Average screening time dropped from 45 minutes to under 4. Their underwriting team went from checking 12 applications a day to 30+. In the first quarter, they flagged 23 applications that would have previously passed initial review — including three with directors who had dissolved companies leaving six-figure creditor debts unpaid.
One of those three would have been their largest deal that month.
The math isn’t complicated. One avoided bad debt pays for the platform many times over. The rest is just running a tighter operation.
Most lending risk isn’t sophisticated. It’s just undiscovered.
See what’s hiding in plain sight on your next application: https://borsch.ai