Industries

The business customer: what your branch has to organise differently

A company is not an individual with more money. Its file is permanent, and its decision is not taken at your desk.

Published on 30 July 2026 — Algeria Agency

The article beside this one is about the individual: the list of documents, the branch queue, the card, the incomplete file. All of it is right, and all of it assumes a customer who comes once for one thing.

A company does not do that. It comes back every week, it has several needs at once, its file is not an event but a permanent state, and the decision concerning it is often taken somewhere other than your branch.

This article is about that customer: the named contact, the permanent file, the six stages of a credit application and the one where everything stops, guarantees, the daily account, and the moment the company outgrows you.

It gives no quantified lead time, and section 10 explains why: the customer counts from the first conversation and the bank counts from a complete file, and both call it "the delay".

A company is not an individual with more money

The reflex is to treat a company as an ordinary file for a larger amount. That is wrong on four points, and each of the four changes a procedure.

The first is frequency. An individual comes for an event; a company has a continuous relationship of deposits, transfers, overdrafts and questions, and that relationship is judged on the ordinary week rather than at the moment of a signature.

The second is multiplicity. A company rarely has one need: an account, a means of collection, a working-capital line and sometimes foreign trade, often at once. Treating them as four separate files produces four queues and four lead times.

The third is the nature of the file. Theirs is not a document to supply but a state to keep current: articles, register, accounts, powers of attorney. It expires partially every year, and that is the whole difference in method.

The fourth is where the decision is taken. Above a certain commitment, the person receiving the customer is not the one deciding, and the customer does not know. Everything else in this article follows from those four gaps.

The contact: why a name beats a counter

A business customer must have a name to speak to, and that name has to be written down somewhere. It is not a commercial favour, it is a condition of efficiency: a continuous relationship that restarts from zero at every visit consumes time on both sides.

The reason is concrete. A business owner explaining the structure of their capital for the fourth time teaches nobody anything and loses an hour; so does the officer listening for the fourth time. That hour exists on both sides of the desk and it repeats.

The name needs a deputy the customer knows about. A single contact on three weeks’ leave means a blocked customer, and a customer blocked at a cash-flow moment never forgets it — that is the memory that changes banks two years later.

What the contact needs to hold is modest: the history of the relationship, the state of the permanent file, and what is in progress. The third is what is most often missing, and its absence produces the sentence every business customer has heard — "let me find out and call you back".

Finally, that name must not be a personal mobile number. The rule is the one other trades in this series follow: a professional relationship must be resumable by a colleague without the customer feeling they are starting over.

The permanent file: prepared once, used ten times

A company’s file is not a list of documents assembled for one operation. It is a set that exists permanently, ages, and of which each operation uses only a part.

It always contains the same families: legal existence, representation, financial position, tax and social position, and the reality of the activity. The exact designations and their validity are matters for regulation and for your institution, and they change; we do not enumerate them here for that reason.

What is managed instead is expiry. Every document has a period of validity, and the costliest defect in the whole relationship is discovering that one has expired at the moment it is needed — that is, at the moment the customer is in a hurry.

The method that settles it is one column: the expiry date of each document, and a contact to the customer six weeks before. That turns a recurring emergency into an announced formality, and it is the service business customers cite most when asked why they stay.

The corollary is an internal discipline: never ask again for a document the file already holds and that is still valid. It is the leading source of irritation in this relationship, and it is entirely avoidable.

Credit: the six stages, and the one where everything stops

A financing request goes through a sequence of stages, and the customer sees only one. They see the conversation; they see neither the assembly of the file, nor the analysis, nor the decision, nor the formalisation of guarantees, nor the drawdown.

Each stage is blocking, which is the most important property of the sequence: you do not recover time at stage 5 because stage 2 was fast. A file advances at the speed of its slowest stage and stops entirely at the first missing document.

The stage where everything stops, almost always, is the second: completeness. Not because customers are careless, but because they do not know what is required until they have supplied it once — exactly the mechanism the neighbouring article describes for the individual, at greater length.

The operational consequence is to put the effort at the beginning. An hour spent checking completeness before opening the file saves several round trips of several days each, and it is the only trade-off in this article that demonstrates itself within a month.

What the customer needs to know is where their file has got to, in one word. "In analysis", "awaiting a document", "in decision", "at guarantees". A customer told about the block waits; a customer told nothing telephones every two days, which costs everybody.

Guarantees: the conversation held too late

The conversation about security almost always comes after agreement in principle, and that is where projects die. The customer has heard "this is doable", organised their cash flow around it, and then discovers a requirement they cannot meet.

That is not a problem of rules, it is a problem of sequence. The forms of security a facility calls for are known from the first conversation; the only unknown is the level, and an order of magnitude can be given without committing the decision.

The honest wording is this: here are the forms of security this kind of facility usually calls for, here is what in your situation creates a difficulty, and here is what you should be preparing now. It promises nothing and it avoids the worst.

The worst, in this relationship, is not a refusal. It is agreement in principle followed by a block on security three weeks later: the customer has lost three weeks they could have spent elsewhere, and they will hold it against you long past the file.

Formalisation itself takes time and depends on third parties — notaries, registries, insurers. That time has to be announced as a separate stage rather than folded into "the delay", because it is not yours and you will not accelerate it.

The daily account: what is judged every week

A relationship with a company is not judged on the credit it once obtained. It is judged on the ordinary week: a transfer that went through or did not, a deposit credited when it should have been, a chequebook available, a stop order handled.

This is where a bank wins or loses a customer without ever noticing, because none of it escalates. A customer unhappy with daily handling does not complain: they open a second account elsewhere and move their flows across gradually.

Three things explain most of the irritation and all three are questions of information rather than of processing: when an operation is taken into account, when it is actually available, and what happens when it is rejected.

Rejection is the worst handled of the three. An operation rejected without the customer being told produces an incident with their own customer, which turns a banking problem into a commercial one — and it is the latter they will remember.

The useful rule is short: anything that does not go as expected is said before the customer discovers it. That requires no tool; it requires deciding who calls and when.

Foreign trade: what the branch must know before the customer

A company that imports or exports enters a domain where the bank is not a supplier but a compulsory passage, and where the rules are neither negotiable nor stable. It is also the domain where the information gap is widest.

The customer arrives with an order and a deadline; the operation presupposes a domiciliation, documents, controls and lead times that do not depend on them. They almost always discover this after having given their word to a supplier.

The practical consequence is that a branch receiving importing companies must explain the sequence before the first operation, not during it. Half an hour of conversation up front beats three weeks of catching up.

We enumerate neither the documents nor the applicable lead times. They are matters of exchange and foreign trade regulation, they evolve, and an article that lists them becomes wrong without saying so — the same reason another article in this series does not list labelling requirements.

What can be said without risk of expiry: the sequence exists, it is longer than the customer imagines, it depends on third parties, and the only moment it can usefully be prepared is before the commercial commitment.

What you may not promise a company

The temptation to reassure is stronger with a company than with an individual, because the person is in a hurry, the amount is significant and they ask direct questions. That is precisely why the limit has to be written down.

Do not promise a decision. An account officer who says "this will go through" commits a decision they do not take, and the company arranges its cash flow on that sentence. The refusal that follows is not merely a disappointment: it is damage.

Do not promise a lead time that depends on a third party. A registration, an entry, a document from an administration: announcing a date on those amounts to claiming a power you do not have, and the customer will attribute the delay to the bank.

Do not promise a rate or terms before they are settled. An indication of magnitude is useful and honest; a precise figure given early becomes the reference against which every later term is read as a deterioration.

What can be said, by contrast, is more useful than what is withheld: where the file has got to, what is missing, what is blocking, and what the customer can prepare now. That is what a company is actually looking for, and it is almost always available.

Your customers’ seasonality is your seasonality

A branch that receives companies inherits their cycles. Tax and social deadlines, periods of heavy activity, Ramadan and the feasts, the start of the school year: all your business customers have the same needs at the same moments.

That produces a predictable concentration that is rarely anticipated. Cash needs arrive in a block, chequebook requests too, and the branch handles in three days what it could have spread over three weeks.

The method is the one other trades in this series use: read the calendar backwards. Six weeks before a known deadline, contact the customers concerned rather than waiting for them all to call on the same morning.

That advance contact has a second value, greater than the smoothing: it is the occasion to check the permanent file before it is needed. Both jobs happen in one conversation, and neither is urgent at the moment you hold it.

The calendar is written once a year, on one page, from your own customers. There is no usable general version: the seasonality of a book of tradesmen is not that of a book of importers.

When the company grows and leaves you

A successful company eventually outgrows what a branch can decide on its own. The moment is identifiable, it arrives earlier than people expect, and it is badly experienced on both sides because nobody announced it.

From the customer’s side, the symptom is unexplained lengthening of lead times and less clear-cut answers. They conclude that the bank no longer wants their business, when the reality is that their file has changed decision level.

Saying so is more useful than hiding it. "Above this amount your file is no longer decided here; this is how it works and this is what it changes for you" is a sentence that costs a little pride and keeps a customer.

The risk of not saying it is concrete: the company opens an account at an institution that receives it at another level, moves one flow across first, then all of them. The departure is gradual and invisible, exactly as section 6 describes for daily handling.

It is also the moment the permanent file proves its worth. A company that has spent five years supplying current documents to a contact who kept them properly hesitates more before starting over elsewhere — and that hesitation is the only loyalty a bank can honestly build.

What is measured, and the delay nobody measures the same way

Three things are counted in a business book, and all three by hand. How many permanent files contain an expired document, how many live applications are blocked for want of an item, and how many customers have not been contacted in six months.

The first is an organisational indicator and it predicts next quarter’s emergencies. The second is the only one that says where the time goes. The third predicts departures, because a business customer gives no warning.

The number we will not give is the average time on a financing request, and the reason is not that it is unknown. It is measured, often, and it is measured in two incompatible ways.

The customer counts from their first conversation; the institution counts from the file deemed complete. Between the two sit the completeness round trips — precisely the longest and most variable part — so the two figures carry the same name, the same unit, and do not measure the same interval.

That is worse than an unknown quantity, because this one looks comparable. So measure both separately and name them differently: time since first request, and time since completeness. The gap between them is the only figure in this article that teaches you anything about your own branch.

What we do, and what we refuse to do

What we do is organisation and writing: tracking expiry dates on the permanent file, wording the four progress states a customer should be able to receive in one word, and the annual deadline calendar for your own book.

We give no advice on lending, security or exchange regulation. These are governed matters where an error is not corrected by rewording, and we have neither the competence nor the standing to intervene. We say so before being paid.

We do not build a tool that stores your customers’ data before the question of where it is hosted and who can reach it has been settled. A business file contains financial information, and it does not go on a shared spreadsheet because that was quicker.

We will promise no processing time, including as an internal target, until the two measurements in the previous section are separated. A target set on an ambiguous figure improves the figure and not the service.

Finally, most of this article needs nobody. Writing a name and a deputy on every file, keeping a column of expiry dates, calling six weeks ahead, and telling a customer where their file stands in one word: that is free, and it is what business customers cite when asked why they stay.

Frequently asked questions

Why a named contact rather than a counter?

Because a continuous relationship that restarts from zero at every visit consumes time on both sides of the desk. A business owner explaining their capital structure for the fourth time loses an hour, and so does the officer listening. The name needs a deputy the customer knows about: a single contact on three weeks’ leave means a blocked customer.

How do we avoid emergencies caused by expired documents?

A column of expiry dates in the permanent file, and a contact to the customer six weeks ahead. That turns a recurring emergency into an announced formality. The corollary is an internal discipline: never ask again for a document the file already holds and that is still valid — the leading source of irritation in this relationship.

When should security be discussed?

At the first conversation, in orders of magnitude. The possible forms are known in advance; only the level depends on the file. The worst case is not a refusal, it is agreement in principle followed by a block on security three weeks later: the customer has arranged their cash flow on a sentence and lost three weeks they could have spent elsewhere.

What average lead time should we quote on a financing request?

None, until you measure two distinct ones. The customer counts from their first conversation, the institution from the complete file, and between them sit the completeness round trips — the longest and most variable part. Two figures, same unit, same name, different intervals. Measure them separately; the gap between them is the useful number.

What do we tell a company whose file exceeds the branch’s level?

Tell them. "Above this amount your file is no longer decided here, this is how it works and this is what it changes for you." Hiding it produces unexplained delays and less clear answers, from which the customer concludes the bank no longer wants their business — and they open an account elsewhere, for one flow first, then for all of them.

Do we need a tool to manage a business book?

Not before the hosting and access question is settled. A business file contains financial information and does not go on a shared spreadsheet because that was quicker. The three useful counts — expired documents, blocked files, customers with no contact in six months — are done by hand.

Where we come in

How many of your standing files carry an expired document predicts most of the rest, and it can be counted today.

We set up expiry tracking, with a reminder before the date.
We reduce your progress states to four words a client understands.
We record an owner and a stand-in on every standing file.

Lending decisions, guarantees, exchange regulation: we will not touch them, and an approximate opinion from us would cost you more than it earned.

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