Synopsis
- A global commercial bank lacked single-source visibility of its lending process across fifty markets.
- BP3 designed and built the Credit Workflow Tool (CWT) on Camunda, orchestrating the end-to-end lending journey from origination through to drawdown and loan management.
- The design accommodated regulatory and operational variation across markets: deeply customised in the largest, standardised in the smaller ones.
- An in-house Centre of Excellence was established to maintain and evolve the tool over time.
- Deployed successfully across fifty markets, giving the bank end-to-end operational visibility of its commercial lending business.
Article
If you run lending operations at a global bank, you've probably had a version of this morning. A senior client phones to ask about progress on their facility. You don't know the answer immediately. You ring three people internally. The relationship manager has the latest from the customer side. Credit has the latest from underwriting. Legal has the latest from the negotiation. Operations has the latest from drawdown. None of them have the whole picture, because the whole picture doesn't live anywhere — it's distributed across inboxes and a few shared spreadsheets.
This is the situation a global commercial banking group brought to BP3. Their lending operation spanned fifty markets and was generating significant volumes of new business. The process worked. Loans were getting originated, contracts were getting signed, money was getting drawn. But the coordination of that process leaned heavily on email, spreadsheets, and the institutional knowledge of a relatively small number of experienced operators. As the business continued to grow, that approach was becoming harder to sustain.
There was nothing structurally wrong with the bank or its teams. The pattern is common at this kind of scale. A lending business evolves over decades, regional operations grow up with their own conventions, regulatory regimes vary by country, and the workflow naturally fragments. At some point the cost of that fragmentation — in audit risk, in operational visibility, in the time it takes to answer a basic "where are we?" question — becomes larger than the cost of doing something about it. That's the point this bank had reached.
What we built
The Credit Workflow Tool, or CWT, is an orchestration layer built on Camunda. It sits across the lending process and owns the end-to-end journey: from initial customer contact, through credit assessment and negotiation, through contract execution, through drawdown, and into ongoing loan management.
It doesn't replace the systems the bank already uses. The credit risk engine, the customer system of record, the document repositories, the negotiation platforms, the downstream loan servicing systems — all of those remain in place. The CWT coordinates between them. Every deal becomes a tracked case with a defined state, a clear owner at every stage, and a complete audit trail. When a deal moves forward, the right people are notified, the right documents are generated, and the right downstream activities are triggered.
The point is not automation for its own sake. The point is that the bank now has a single source of truth for every commercial loan in flight, anywhere in the world. Operations leadership can see the full pipeline. Regulators get a clean, structured audit trail. Relationship managers can answer customer questions without playing internal telephone.
Designing for fifty markets
Building one orchestrated process across fifty markets is harder than it sounds, because the markets are not all the same. The larger markets — those with significant loan volumes, complex regulatory regimes, and bespoke product structures — needed a deeply customised version of the tool that respected local rules and local working practices. The smaller markets needed a lighter, standardised version they could adopt quickly and operate without a large local IT footprint.
We designed the CWT around that reality. The core orchestration engine is consistent everywhere, which is what gives the bank its single view. The configuration layer around it varies: forms, approval routing, compliance steps, document templates, and integration with local third-party systems are all parameterized. Onboarding a new market onto the standard configuration takes a fraction of the time it took to deploy the first one.
That distinction matters more than it might initially appear. It's the difference between a tool that ships once and a tool that scales. The bank can now extend its commercial lending operation into a new country without rebuilding the workflow from the ground up.
The Centre of Excellence
Alongside the CWT, we helped the bank stand up an in-house Centre of Excellence — a small, dedicated team responsible for maintaining the tool, evolving it, and supporting the markets that use it.
This is the part of the engagement we're most proud of. It would have been straightforward to build the CWT and leave the bank dependent on BP3 (or any other partner) for every future change. We chose not to do that. The CoE means the bank owns its own capability. As regulations evolve, as products change, as new markets come online, the team can respond on its own timeline rather than waiting on an external roadmap.
The CoE has since become a centre of gravity for other automation work across the bank. The skills, the discipline, and the orchestration patterns developed around the CWT are now being applied to adjacent processes.
What changed
The headline outcome is that the bank's commercial lending operation runs as a single, orchestrated process across fifty markets. Beyond that, three specific changes are worth calling out.
First, operations leaders can see the full lending pipeline in real time. The question "where is this deal sitting?" now has an answer that takes seconds rather than half a day. That visibility cascades into faster customer responses, better forecasting, and earlier intervention when something is getting stuck.
Second, audit and compliance evidence is no longer reconstructed after the fact. Every step of every deal is captured as part of the workflow itself, which has been particularly valuable as regulatory expectations around commercial lending continue to tighten.
Third, the bank has gained genuine operational leverage. Adding a new product, onboarding a new market, or accommodating a new regulatory requirement is now an iteration on a known platform rather than a fresh project from a standing start.
Why this generalizes
The specific lessons here travel further than commercial lending. The pattern of fragmentation we saw at this bank shows up across claims processing, customer onboarding, commercial payments, trade settlement, and any process that has grown organically across systems, regions, and teams over time.
What changed things at this bank was not better automation inside the individual systems. It was orchestration across them. That distinction — automation versus orchestration — is, in our experience, where most enterprise transformation program either succeed or quietly stall. Investing in the individual tools delivers local efficiency. Investing in the layer that coordinates them is what delivers operational visibility and scale.
If you're running a process at scale and the honest answer to "where is this stuck?" still depends on which colleague you ask, we should probably talk.