Thoughts
Identity comes before credit
Business identity fraud doesn’t beat the credit score — it chooses what the score sees. Why KYB and identity verification come before credit checks, and the three identity questions.
Thoughts
Your sales were flat. Your exposure wasn’t.
Credit exposure can grow while sales stay flat. The Two Books framework: why commercial dashboards hide the debtor book, and how merchants should monitor credit exposure.
Thoughts
Every trade account is a loan. Most just aren’t run like one.
Trade credit is unsecured business lending. Every supplier extending payment terms runs a loan book — here’s how to manage the debtor book like the lending portfolio it already is.
Thoughts
The check was never the decision
Approval feels like the decision. It’s actually the moment you know least about what happens next. Every credit process treats approval as the decision. You run the check, you approve or decline, you move on. But approval is the moment you know the customer best and your exposure to
Thoughts
Two companies, same sector, opposite risk — which one gets the tighter limit?
Two customers, same sector, same limit request. One is strengthening, one is weakening — and the sector view gives you one answer for both. Two customers sit in the same sector and ask for the same limit. One is strengthening. One is weakening. The sector view gives you the same answer
Thoughts
A reduced insurance limit is not an early warning
The email arrives on a Tuesday. Your trade-credit insurer has reduced the cover on one of your larger customers — a wholesaler you have shipped to for three years without a missed beat. Nothing has defaulted. There is no county court judgment, no news, no obvious reason. Just a number
Thoughts
The reason moves before the credit score does
Two suppliers extend credit to the same building contractor. Same trade, same region, same credit score sitting quietly at the top of both their files. One of them shortens terms in early May and caps the exposure. The other keeps shipping on thirty-day terms until a winding-up petition
Thoughts
Low risk is not a lending limit
Every credit decision asks three questions. Most tools only answer one—and we keep letting them answer all three. Think about the account that went wrong. Not the one that failed a check — the one that sailed through it. The report came back low risk. Clean score, green light. You
Thoughts
The first creditor to know gets paid. The last one writes it off.
CCJs, winding-up petitions, director changes and late filings rarely arrive without warning. The question is whether you see them in time to act. Two builders’ merchants supply the same contractor on the same 60-day terms. Same invoices, same exposure. When the contractor goes under, one merchant has been
Thoughts
How to prioritise collections using credit risk signals, not just aged debt
For most credit controllers, the aged debt report is still the starting point for the day. It shows what is overdue, how long it has been overdue, and where the biggest balances sit. But aged debt only tells you what has already happened. For experienced credit controllers, especially those managing
Thoughts
Credit risk monitoring: What UK finance teams should track
Checking credit risk is like checking the structural health of a bridge before sending heavy trucks across it. The bridge may still be open, but you need to know if cracks are forming, whether the load is getting heavier, and when it is time to slow down, reroute, or stop
Thoughts
Is AI finally fixing decades-old blind spots in credit scoring?
For decades, commercial credit assessment has suffered from the same fundamental problem. Most decisions are made using static snapshots of businesses that are constantly changing. Financial statements are outdated by the time they are filed. Credit reports often miss operational deterioration. Manual reviews depend heavily on fragmented data, analyst interpretation,