The origination playbook

Commercial origination has always been a coordination problem. A deal touches a borrower, a broker, and several lenders — and for years that coordination lived in inboxes and spreadsheets. This playbook lays out how leading desks run the whole lifecycle from one shared record.

Start with one record

The single biggest change is moving every deal into one place. When intake, structure, routing, and funding all reference the same record, nothing has to be re-keyed and no one has to ask where a file stands.

Standardize status

A shared status language means a deal reads the same way to everyone. Five clear states — draft, in review, action needed, approved, declined — end the ‘where is this?’ emails.

Route, don't re-key

Map your intake fields to each lender once, then submit a single deal to several lenders in parallel. Answers flow back into the same record.

• Map fields per program, per lender
• Submit to your whole panel at once
• Compare responses side by side

Measure the cycle

Finally, watch time-to-term-sheet and time-to-fund. Once the workflow is in one place, the metrics that matter become visible — and improvable.