For Commercial Loan Officers ·
What you'll accomplish
You'll learn to convert a completed credit memo into a concise loan committee executive summary in under 15 minutes, eliminating the redundant work of reformatting the same analysis you just wrote into a different document.
What you'll need
Go to claude.ai, sign in, click New conversation.
You can paste the entire credit memo or just the key sections. For long memos, the most important sections to include are:
After pasting the memo, send this prompt:
Based on the credit memo above, write a 1-page executive summary for a loan committee. Format:
1. **Transaction at a Glance** (4-5 bullet points): borrower, loan type, amount, rate/term, collateral
2. **Borrower Profile** (2-3 sentences): who they are, how long in business, key strength
3. **Financial Highlights** (3-4 bullet points): DSCR, trend, key ratios
4. **Key Risks** (2-3 bullet points): primary risks only, no more than 3
5. **Mitigants**: corresponding mitigant for each risk
6. **Recommendation** (1-2 sentences): approve/decline and why
Keep the total to one printed page. Use the exact financial figures from the memo; do not paraphrase numbers.
What you should see: A single-page structured executive summary that pulls the key decision points out of the full memo.
Read the summary carefully and confirm every figure matches your credit memo. Claude is accurate when summarizing but occasionally rounds or restructures numbers, so verify before submitting to committee.
Your loan committee may have a preferred format or specific questions they always want answered. Add a follow-up prompt:
Our loan committee also always asks about: [e.g., "how this compares to similar loans in our portfolio" or "the guarantor's net worth relative to the loan amount"]. Add a brief answer to this at the end of the summary.
For a C&I loan:
Summarize this C&I credit memo for loan committee: [paste memo]. Key questions our committee always asks: working capital adequacy, key person risk, and existing bank relationship. Include answers.
For condensing a long memo:
This credit memo is 12 pages. Identify and extract only the information needed for a 1-page loan committee executive summary. Omit background detail. Just the decision-relevant facts.