I Need to Close in Three Weeks. The Bank Wants Two Months.
A gap between two dates is not a financing problem in the abstract. It becomes one when a deposit and an exclusivity period sit inside the gap. The purchase has a completion date fixed by contract. The money that will pay for it has an arrival date fixed by someone else’s process. Neither date consulted the other, and the distance between them is now the most important fact in the transaction.
That is the situation in its purest form: a buyer who has to close in three weeks while the bank that knows him best is asking for two months. Nothing about it involves bad planning or weak finances. It involves two calendars that were never going to agree, and the question of what happens in the space between them.
The situation that creates it
A group has to complete an acquisition before the proceeds of a sale it has already signed arrive. The money exists and the buyer is committed. It simply is not there yet. Between the two dates sit the deposit and the exclusivity on the asset, and both are at risk. If the completion date passes, the deposit is exposed and the exclusivity lapses, and the contract does not ask whose process was slow.
The same structure appears in other forms. The incoming funds may be a refinancing with terms already issued, a distribution already resolved inside the group, or the completion of another transaction further along a chain. What the variations share is the shape: a payment that is certain but late, a purchase that cannot wait, and a buyer who is solvent everywhere except on the one date that matters. Illiquidity on a specific day is not weakness. It is timing. But contracts are enforced on days, not on balance sheets.
What is at risk deserves to be stated precisely, because it is more than the deposit. An exclusivity period is the seller’s promise not to talk to anyone else, and it expires. Once it does, the price, the terms and the calendar all reopen, and they reopen in front of whoever else has been waiting for the chance. A buyer who misses a completion date has also spent something harder to recover: the seller’s confidence that the next date will be met. Extensions are sometimes granted. They are rarely granted twice, and never negotiated from strength.
The first instinct is usually to ask the existing bank to hurry. It is the wrong instinct, not because the bank is unwilling, but because the request misunderstands what the bank is doing. The two months are not a queue that goodwill can jump. They are the process by which that kind of lender decides that kind of loan. Pressing it to go faster does not shorten the process. It only adds a nervous borrower to the file.
Why the bank needs two months
A conventional lender underwrites the borrower. It examines income, existing debt, the behaviour of the asset, the history of the group, because it expects to live with the loan for years and to be repaid gradually out of everything it has examined. Each step in its process exists to answer part of that question: the valuation, the committee, the compliance review, the documentation. None of those steps is decorative, and none of them compresses well, because the risk they measure does not compress. Two months is not obstruction. For the question the bank is answering, it is often the honest timescale.
The mistake is to conclude that the transaction has a bank problem. It has a mismatch problem. The instrument being requested is built for decades of holding, and the need is built for weeks of waiting. No amount of urgency converts one into the other. Conventional lending is not built for that timescale. Bridge finance is.
A bridge lender can move inside the deadline because it is answering a smaller question. It is not underwriting a decade of the borrower’s life. It is underwriting an interval, and the event at the end of the interval that repays the loan. The scope is narrower, so the examination is narrower, and the examination is what takes the time. Speed here is not a corner cut. It is the natural consequence of asking a question that can be answered quickly, provided the answer exists.
That last condition is the whole subject. A bridge lender is fast when there is something verifiable to be fast about. The signed sale, the issued refinancing terms, the resolved distribution: these can be read, checked and relied on within a tight calendar. Hope cannot. The speed of the instrument is inseparable from the quality of the exit, and everything that follows turns on it.
What a bridge lender actually checks
Not the borrower’s long-term credit profile, which is what a bank would examine. A bridge is assessed on the exit: the specific event that will repay it. In the case of the signed sale, that means verifying the sale contract itself, the identity and capacity of the buyer, the conditions still outstanding, and the payment schedule. Each check has the same purpose: to establish that the event at the end of the interval is real, dated and enforceable, because the loan has no other source of repayment worth the name.
The financing is then tied directly to those proceeds. The bridge is sized against what the event will produce, its maturity is set against the verified schedule with room beyond it, and the repayment travels from the event to the lender by design rather than by later goodwill. The loan and the event become one mechanism. That is what distinguishes a structured bridge from an expensive loan that happens to be short, and it is what the lender’s speed is buying.
The security is limited to the companies and assets genuinely required. Nothing more, because a bridge that encumbers the whole group to solve a timing problem has created a larger problem than the one it solved. Under deadline pressure there is a temptation to concede whatever is asked, on the theory that the loan will be gone in months anyway. The pledge outlives the theory. Security given in a hurry has to be released later, one asset at a time, and the releasing is never anyone’s priority once the money has moved.
For the borrower with three weeks, this list is also a work plan. The interval is consumed by verification, so a file that arrives already assembled, the sale contract, the corporate documents, the schedule of conditions with the status of each, is the single largest factor in whether the deadline is realistic. A bridge lender can read a complete file inside a tight calendar. It cannot read a file that is still being written, and the days lost assembling it are taken from the only budget that matters here, which is time.
When a bridge is the wrong answer
When there is no exit, only hope of one. A bridge repaid by a sale that is signed is a timing instrument. A bridge repaid by a sale that is expected is a bet with a deadline and a high interest rate attached. The distinction is easy to state and uncomfortable to apply, because under deadline pressure everything looks like a timing problem. The pressure does not change what the exit is. It only changes how much the borrower wants to avoid looking at it.
There is a test that survives the pressure. Ask what happens at the maturity of the bridge if nothing else improves: no market recovery, no negotiation concluded, no interested party converted into a committed one. If the answer is that the signed event completes and the loan repays, the bridge is doing its job. If the answer is that something will surely have turned up by then, the bridge is not financing an interval. It is financing a wish, at a price set by a lender who can see the difference even when the borrower prefers not to.
Sometimes the right answer is not a loan at all. If the exit is genuinely uncertain, the honest move may be to buy time from the seller instead of money from a lender: renegotiate the completion date, restructure the deposit, accept a concession in exchange for a later closing. Those conversations are unpleasant. They are considerably less unpleasant than a defaulted bridge, and cheaper. The instrument deserves to be chosen, not defaulted into because it was the only counterparty still saying yes three weeks from completion.
The question to ask before signing is not what it costs. It is what repays it, and what happens if that event is late. A borrower who can answer both has a transaction with a gap in it, and gaps can be financed. A borrower who can answer neither has a different transaction from the one they think they have, and the deadline is about to prove it.
Designing the exit first
The exit is designed before the bridge is drawn, not after. Where the repayment comes from, on what date, and what the alternative is if it slips. Under a three-week deadline that design work feels like a luxury, and it is the opposite. The pressure that makes it tempting to skip is precisely the pressure that makes it decisive, because every weakness that is not found now will be found at maturity, when nothing can be done about it and everything about it costs more.
The margin for delay belongs in the design from the start. Completions slip for ordinary reasons: a notarial diary, an outstanding approval, a counterparty’s own arrangements running late. A maturity set beyond the expected date of the event, and an identified answer to what carries the loan if the event runs late, cost little to agree before signature and a great deal to request afterwards. Ordinary lateness should be a non-event inside the structure. Whether it is one is decided now, not then.
None of this is theoretical. In one transaction we structured, a group had to complete an acquisition before the proceeds of a signed sale arrived, with the deposit and the exclusivity sitting inside the gap. The bridge was tied to those proceeds, the security was confined to what the purchase required, and the loan was repaid when the sale was collected. The acquisition completed on schedule and the structure of the group was untouched. The financing changed nothing about the transaction except its calendar, which was the only thing wrong with it.
So the situation in the title has an answer, and it is not to argue with the two months. The bank is answering its own question honestly. The three weeks belong to a different instrument, one that is assessed on the event that repays it and moves at the speed of that event’s verifiability. A bridge with a documented exit and a margin for delay is one of the most useful instruments available. One without either is the most expensive way to lose an asset. The deadline decides how fast the work has to be done. It has never once decided whether the work was worth doing.
Montclare does not act as a lender. It structures transactions, prepares the file and coordinates financing with authorised institutions.