Fathom vs. Fireflies for Specialty Asset-Based Lenders

A borrower explaining their collateral base or cash flow on an underwriting call is providing information that a credit team will rely on to structure a facility. If that explanation gets paraphrased loosely into the underwriting file, a detail that later turns out to matter, a customer concentration risk, a seasonal cash flow pattern, can get lost between the call and the written memo.

Keep the full transcript, not just a summary, for underwriting calls specifically, and have the credit team cross-reference it directly rather than relying entirely on a loan officer's notes when building the underwriting file. A borrower's own phrasing often carries useful context, hedging language or a specific caveat, that a polished summary can accidentally smooth away.

When a borrower calls to discuss a covenant that is at risk of being breached, exactly what they say about the cause and their plan to fix it often shapes the lender's response, whether that is a waiver, a modified covenant, or a more serious conversation. Months or years later, if the same issue recurs, being able to pull up exactly what was said the first time is valuable both for consistency and for spotting a pattern the lender should have caught sooner. A borrower who has explained away the same issue twice, a year apart, is telling the lender something a single call would never reveal on its own.

Picture a borrower who believes a covenant issue was verbally waived on a call, while the lender's file shows no formal waiver was ever issued. Without a transcript, this becomes a difficult conversation built on two different memories of an informal exchange, and it tends to damage trust regardless of which side turns out to be right.

With the call transcript available, the lender can quickly clarify what was actually said, whether it was a genuine waiver, a statement of intent to consider one, or simply an acknowledgment of the issue, and resolve the disagreement with the borrower's own words rather than a contested recollection. That resolution usually takes minutes once the transcript is in hand, compared to a drawn-out exchange of conflicting recollections between the borrower and the lender's credit team.

Not every borrower call needs the full transcript-and-review treatment, but a lender that never distinguishes between a routine check-in and a call where real credit information changes hands will either drown in unnecessary documentation or, more likely, stop reviewing anything closely at all, which defeats the purpose of keeping records in the first place. Set a clear internal rule for which call types get full transcript review versus a quick summary, so the calls that actually matter to a credit decision get the attention they deserve. A useful rule of thumb is that any call where a number in the underwriting file could change deserves the full treatment, and most routine check-ins do not.

Set an internal rule for which borrower calls get full review:

• Routine check-ins get a light recap and are not reviewed line by line, which keeps the documentation load manageable.
• Calls where real credit information changes hands, such as collateral, cash flow or receivables, get the full transcript and a review.
• Calls where a borrower raises a covenant problem keep the full transcript, along with a clear statement on whether anything was formally waived.
• Revisit the rule regularly so the team neither drowns in documentation nor stops reviewing anything closely.

A small lending shop where one or two credit officers handle both underwriting and portfolio monitoring can manage with a simpler, faster recap tool paired with disciplined manual review of anything consequential. Once a lender has a larger portfolio with several people monitoring different borrower relationships, searchable call history across the whole book becomes valuable for spotting patterns across borrowers, not just within a single relationship. A credit team reviewing the whole book ahead of a market downturn benefits from being able to search for a specific phrase or concern across every borrower at once, catching an emerging risk before it shows up as a missed payment.