customer stories
Payro Finance triples funding volume while maintaining headcount with Ocrolus
Customer Stories
Payro Finance triples funding volume while maintaining headcount with Ocrolus
Small business lending | Classify, Cash flow analysis, Detect
Payro Finance provides payroll financing for businesses, delivering instant funding to run payroll on time even when cash flow is thin. Their clients often need funds within hours, sometimes the same day, to cover payroll obligations. As application volume grew, the team needed a way to maintain underwriting speed and accuracy without scaling headcount.
Payro Finance turned to Ocrolus, a vertical AI workflow and analytics platform, to automate bank statement analysis and fraud detection. The result: a lean, one-underwriter operation that has tripled funding volume over three years while maintaining the fast decision cycle its clients depend on.
Challenge
Manual bank statement reviews stretched processing time to three hours per application, constraining Payro Finance's ability to fund payroll clients at the speed they needed.
Solution
Ocrolus automated document analysis and fraud detection, cutting review time by two-thirds and surfacing tampering signals in minutes.
Result
• 3x funding volume: Tripled funding output over three years while maintaining the same underwriting headcount
• 67% reduction in review time: Bank statement analysis dropped from 2.5 to 3 hours to under 1 hour
• Fraud detected in minutes: Detect risk status clears applications in under 5 minutes and flags document tampering, including the editing software used, before capital is issued
• Same-day funding: Clients apply in the morning and receive a wire transfer the same afternoon
Challenge: Manual reviews couldn't keep pace with client urgency
For a payroll lender, time is everything. Clients apply when they need funds, not when it's convenient for the underwriting team. Before Ocrolus, Payro Finance's bank statement review process was entirely manual, with each application requiring two and a half to three hours of analysis.
"It would take them roughly two and a half to three hours just on the statement review alone," said Austin Favero, Lead Loan Underwriter at Payro Finance. Sorting transactions, identifying transfers, calculating payroll expenses and manually adding up figures one by one all competed for time that should have been spent on decisions. As volume grew, the gap between client expectations and operational capacity widened.
Fraud was another pressure point. Without automated verification, the team relied on manual bank verification workflows, including screen shares and line-by-line review, to catch altered documents. These checks were time-intensive and subject to human error, especially when fraudsters made targeted, minimal changes designed to pass visual inspection.
Solution: Automated analysis and fraud signals at the underwriter's fingertips
Payro Finance integrated Ocrolus to replace manual bank statement review with automated document analysis. The platform pulls transaction data into a consistent, sortable spreadsheet every time, regardless of the bank, account structure or statement format. The team runs Excel scripts on top of the Ocrolus output to calculate payroll expenses, flag transfers and structure data for decisioning in seconds.
"We're able to get everything in one spreadsheet formatted the same every time," Favero said. "We don't have to manually take out expenses, transfers, manually adding them up one by one." Annual payroll expense, for example, can now be calculated in approximately 20 seconds by filtering and sorting a single column.
On the fraud side, Ocrolus Detect replaced manual bank verification entirely. Any application with a risk score of 90 or above clears automatically, with no screen share required, reducing fraud review to roughly five minutes per application. The platform has also proven capable of catching sophisticated alterations that would be nearly impossible to identify visually.
"We had one client who submitted a 2022 bank statement but they replaced all of the data in the corner, the months at the top, with 2025," Favero said. "It was a legitimate statement but the dates were faked. Ocrolus detected it within two minutes and we were able to decline before we put capital on the street for a fraudulent account."
Result: Three times the volume, same team
The efficiency gains from Ocrolus have compounded over three years into a fundamental shift in how Payro Finance operates. The team has tripled its funding volume without adding a single underwriter, maintaining the same capacity and underwriting structure throughout.
"We're extremely efficient with Ocrolus. We've been able to scale 3x the volume with the same capacity and underwriting department," Favero said. He estimates the current infrastructure could absorb three times the existing application volume before requiring additional capacity.
For clients, the impact is measured in hours. A borrower who applied at 11:30 a.m. Eastern had a wire in his account by 2:00 p.m. the same day, in time for a payroll run due at 3:30 that afternoon.
Key outcomes:
- 3x funding volume over three years while maintaining underwriting headcount
- 67% reduction in bank statement review time (2.5 to 3 hours to under 1 hour)
- Fraud detected in minutes: Detect risk status clears applications in under 5 minutes and flags document tampering, including the editing software used, before capital is issued
- Same-day funding enabled by a 30-minute decisioning cycle once documents are processed
- 20-second payroll expense calculation surfaced instantly from Ocrolus transaction data
Why Payro Finance recommends Ocrolus
Favero's recommendation to other lenders is direct: give it a shot. The platform has caught every fraudulent attempt Payro Finance has put in front of it and has continued to get better.
"Ocrolus has caught every fraud that we put in front of it, and I expect it to continue," he said. "The most recent update to Detect is great and working flawlessly in our workflow. I would recommend giving it a try because you never know what's going to come around the corner in this industry with the tactics that people use."
The company is continuing to grow, with new payroll partners onboarded and application volume expected to rise. Favero is watching to see how far the model can scale and how much further one underwriter can reach with Ocrolus in the stack.
"We're extremely efficient with Ocrolus. We've been able to scale 3x the volume with the same capacity and underwriting department."
Austin Favero, Lead Loan Underwriter at Payro Finance
