customer stories
Expansion Capital Group scales application volume 10x and cuts review time 90% with Ocrolus
Customer Stories
Expansion Capital Group scales application volume 10x and cuts review time 90% with Ocrolus
SMB lending | Classify, Cash Flow Analysis, Detect, Docs-to-Digital, Encore
Expansion Capital Group (ECG) is a direct capital provider that has deployed more than $1.5 billion to small businesses since 2013. As application volume grew, the company recognized an opportunity to automate its underwriting workflow and surface a richer set of data signals without a proportional increase in headcount.
ECG partnered with Ocrolus, an AI-powered workflow and analytics platform, to automate top-of-funnel application processing, cash flow analytics, fraud detection and back-end document validation to scale volume without scaling headcount.
Challenge
Expansion Capital Group needed to scale application volume rapidly across small business financing while keeping decision speed and data quality at the core of the business.
Solution
Ocrolus automated top-of-funnel application processing, bank statement analysis, cash flow attributes, fraud detection and back-end docs-to-digital validation, giving ECG a single AI-powered workflow from intake through funding.
Result
• 10x: processed application volume growth on only 2.5–3x headcount
• 88% faster offers: average total in-and-out processing time from 4 hours to 30 minutes
• Up to 90% less manual review time: underwriter time per file from 20–30 minutes to a peak of 3 minutes
Challenge: Scaling volume, speed and data depth required more than additional headcount
Before partnering with Ocrolus, ECG was processing applications, bank statements and cash flow attributes manually. As volume increased, ECG saw an opportunity to automate the workflow and surface a richer set of data signals for underwriting and fraud detection.
Underwriters were spending up to half an hour inside every file.
"When we first started the business, you'd have 20 to 30 minutes in a file, kind of an underwriter thoroughly doing it," said Herk Christie, Chief Operating Officer of Expansion Capital Group.
The team was also working toward a 2-hour offer turnaround as the business grew.
"When we first started partnering with [Ocrolus], a big deal to us was trying to get our offers out consistently within 2 hours. To be honest, the range was probably 2 hours to 3+ hours, depending on the kind of volume," Christie said.
Solution: AI-powered workflow from intake through funding
ECG built Ocrolus into its workflow end-to-end. Applications, bank statements and cash flow attributes flow through Ocrolus from the top of the funnel through the initial offer stage. On the back end, Docs-to-Digital validates funding documentation and Detect flags tampered documents and surfaces cash flow patterns the team uses to identify suspicious applicants.
Docs-to-Digital is one example of what makes the partnership different. ECG brought a problem statement to Ocrolus and the two teams built the solution together.
"To have not only a partner that listens but quite honestly turns resources loose to solve the problem," Christie said. "That doesn't come from a lot of vendor relationships, that comes from working with someone who truly is vested in mutual success."
On fraud, Detect changes what's catchable and consistent underwriting data makes pattern detection possible.
"When something's been tampered with, it shows clearly and pinpoints which parts of the document were altered. The consistency of the underwriting data also lets us spot industry-level patterns, like cash flow recycling, and flag them," Christie said.
Result: 10x volume, 90% reduction in review time, 88% faster offers
The cumulative impact across ECG's operation is significant and measurable. Volume has grown more than 10x since the partnership began while headcount has grown only 2.5 to 3x, a structural efficiency gain that has reshaped the business. The data side has changed just as much, with Ocrolus surfacing the structured cash flow and document attributes that manual review couldn't.
"It's more than just getting the efficiencies, a real big lift we also got was a large quantity of data that we didn't have before when manually processing," Christie said.
Manual review time has collapsed, and end-to-end processing has followed the same curve.
"Today, underwriter time on a file is a max of 3 minutes, and our total in-and-out time averages 30 minutes," Christie said. "Going from 4 hours on a difficult day to 30 minutes pretty consistently — mostly through automation — wouldn't have been possible without our partnership with Ocrolus."
Key outcomes:
- 88% faster end-to-end processing, from 4 hours to 30 minutes on average
- Up to 90% less manual review time per underwriting file, from 20–30 minutes to a peak of 3 minutes
- 10x application volume growth (~900%) on only 2.5–3x headcount
- Higher-quality, more consistent underwriting data with a richer attribute set than manual processing could deliver
- Statement tampering and cash flow recycling surfaced automatically through Detect
- Single AI-powered workflow from application intake through funding
Why Expansion Capital Group recommends Ocrolus
For Christie, what makes Ocrolus different is the partnership.
“Ocrolus is a genuine partner. A lot of companies start out as vendors providing a specific service, and some of them morph into true partners when you engage them on hard problems and they have the talent to solve them. That's what we found in Ocrolus."
Looking ahead, ECG is leaning into Ocrolus Encore to chase a near-instant decision.
"Speed is critical to our business. Encore is designed to make the entire cash flow analytics process near-instant, which is a key step toward our goal of instant decisioning. Having Encore sit between our partners and us is a major step forward."
"When we started partnering with Ocrolus, our goal was to get offers out within two hours. We've gone from four hours on a difficult day to 30 minutes pretty consistently — and a huge chunk of that is our partnership with Ocrolus."
Herk Christie, Chief Operating Officer at Expansion Capital Group
