The Real Timeline of a Financing, Phase by Phase
A financing does not have a duration. It has a sequence, and most of what determines how long that sequence runs is decided before any lender has seen a single page. Borrowers ask how long the process will take and expect a number in reply. The number does not exist, because the same transaction, with the same asset and the same borrower, moves at entirely different speeds depending on how it was prepared and who it was shown to.
What does exist is a set of phases that occur in the same order every time, each with its own owner and its own limiting factor. Some of those phases belong to the borrower, and they are the ones that can be shortened. Others belong to valuers, lawyers, notaries, registries, compliance functions and credit committees, and they cannot be compressed by pressure, only by preparation. Knowing which is which is the difference between managing a timetable and waiting for one.
Phase one: preparation, which is most of the timetable
The first phase is entirely the borrower’s, it is invisible to the lender, and it decides more of the calendar than every other phase combined. It consists of assembling the credit file before anyone is approached: the ownership chain up to the beneficial owners, the corporate documents and powers of every company in that chain, the sources and uses, the cash flow and the capacity to service the debt, the security on offer, the adverse scenarios and the repayment strategy. None of this requires a lender’s involvement. All of it will be required eventually.
Borrowers compress this phase because it feels like preparation for a race that has not started. The effect is the opposite of the one intended. Every document not gathered here is gathered later, under time pressure, while an institution waits, and documents gathered under pressure arrive in the wrong form and have to be gathered again. A complete file moves through the phases that follow in a single pass. A file assembled during underwriting moves in as many passes as it has gaps, and each pass costs a return to the back of somebody else’s queue.
This phase also contains work the borrower cannot do alone, and that work has lead times of its own: corporate certificates from registries in more than one country, powers of representation, apostilles, sworn translations, an accountant’s confirmation of the figures, a lawyer’s view on which security is actually available. These items are ordered from third parties, and third parties answer on their own schedule. Ordered now, they arrive alongside everything else and cost nothing in calendar terms. Ordered when a lender asks for them, they become the only thing standing between the transaction and its date.
The last element of preparation is deciding who will read the file. Testing appetite with a short, anonymised description of the transaction commits nothing and removes from the list the institutions that were never going to underwrite this asset, in this jurisdiction, at this size, for this borrower. That test belongs here, before anything is sent, because a submission to an institution with no appetite does not simply fail. It consumes the calendar first, and it returns no information the borrower can use.
Phase two: the indicative response, and what it is not
Once a complete file reaches a well matched institution, the first substantive answer comes quickly. An indicative response within five business days is realistic in those conditions. The lender confirms whether the transaction is of interest, in roughly what structure, against what security, and with which questions still open. It is a genuine milestone, and it is the moment at which a borrower stops guessing about the financeability of what they are trying to do.
It is not an approval, and no distinction in this process matters more. An indication is a professional’s reading of a file, given before the institution has verified anything at all. No valuation has been carried out, no title has been examined, no compliance file has been cleared, no committee has met. Everything in the indication is conditional on all of that, and every serious lender says so in writing. Borrowers who treat an indication as a commitment go on to sign deposits, release conditions and give undertakings on the strength of a document that was never built to carry that weight.
What the indication is genuinely good for is elimination and direction. It tells the borrower whether the transaction is financeable in the shape it is currently in, what the lender will need to see verified, and where the structure is going to be tested. Two or three indications from well matched institutions, all working from the same file, can be set against one another, and that comparison is the last easy decision in the process. After it, the transaction commits itself to one reader and the cost of changing reader rises steeply.
The speed of this phase is a property of the file rather than of the institution. The same lender that answers a complete file quickly will take far longer over one that obliges it to establish the basic facts first, because before it can indicate anything it has to reconstruct the transaction from fragments. Borrowers experience that as institutional slowness and describe it that way afterwards. It is nothing of the sort. It is the preparation phase being paid for late, at a worse price.
Phase three: underwriting, where the borrower stops owning the calendar
Once a transaction is accepted for underwriting, control passes outward. The lender instructs a valuer. Lawyers examine title, existing charges, leases and the corporate chain. Compliance verifies identity, beneficial ownership and the origin of the equity. A technical adviser may inspect the asset, and in a development will review the budget and the construction programme. These processes run partly in parallel and partly in sequence, and each belongs to a professional with a queue and a standard to meet.
This is the longest phase in most transactions and the one borrowers most often try to accelerate. It resists acceleration almost completely. A valuer will not inspect sooner because a purchase date is approaching, and a registry will not issue a certificate faster because a deposit is at risk. What can be influenced is whether each of these processes runs once or runs twice. A valuer given the lease, the rent roll, the technical file and access on the first attempt produces a report on the first attempt. One who has to request documents and arrange a second visit produces the same report, much later, for the same fee.
Compliance deserves separate mention because it surprises borrowers more than any other step. It examines the chain of ownership up to the natural persons at the end of it, and the origin of the money already committed, and it does not proceed on explanation. It proceeds on documents, in acceptable form, translated and legalised where the receiving jurisdiction requires it. A cross-border chain generates a great deal of this material, and a single missing link stops the whole verification rather than slowing it. Nothing else in a financing behaves that way.
The borrower’s role in this phase is not to push. It is to answer completely and at once, to keep a single version of every figure in circulation, and to make sure the professionals involved can reach the advisers who hold the underlying documents without routing every request through the borrower personally. A file that answers immediately holds its place in every queue it is sitting in. A file that answers slowly is put down, and picking it up again costs more than the answer would have.
Phase four: the credit decision
Underwriting produces a recommendation. The decision belongs to somebody else. In a traditional bank it belongs to a committee that meets on a fixed calendar and reads a memorandum written by an analyst who has never met the borrower. In a family office it belongs to a principal or an investment committee deciding on judgment rather than on a checklist. In a specialist credit institution it belongs to a small credit function that sits closer to the transaction and can move faster, which is a large part of what the borrower is paying for.
The committee calendar is the most underestimated feature of the entire process. A file that is complete when the committee sits is decided then. A file missing one item is not decided late, it is decided at the following sitting, whenever that falls. The borrower experiences the interval as inexplicable silence and often fills it with pressure, which achieves nothing, because the constraint is a diary rather than an attitude. That calendar is not confidential, and any banker will give it to a borrower who asks directly, which makes it the cheapest piece of scheduling information available anywhere in the process.
What the decision maker reads is the analyst’s memorandum, not the borrower’s file. Everything explained verbally, in a meeting or on a call, is absent from that room unless the analyst wrote it down and understood it correctly. This is the practical reason a structure that needs explaining has to be explained in a document inside the file, written for a reader with no context and no opportunity to ask. A financing is frequently decided by people the borrower will never speak to, on the basis of a text the borrower will never see.
A decision at this stage is rarely a plain yes or no. It is usually a yes with conditions, and the conditions are the real content of the answer: additional security, a smaller amount, a covenant, a guarantee, a reserve account, a further report. Reading them closely is the borrower’s last genuine opportunity to influence the shape of the transaction. Once the offer is accepted they are documented, and thereafter they are simply the deal.
Phase five: offer, conditions precedent and drawdown
The formal offer converts the decision into a document and introduces the conditions precedent, the list of things that must be true before money moves. Some are administrative. Others require action that takes real time: registering a corporate change, discharging an existing charge, obtaining a tax or registry certificate, restructuring an intragroup loan, putting insurance in place with the lender’s interest noted on it. The list is knowable the day it arrives, and the borrowers who complete on time are the ones who read it immediately as a work programme rather than leaving it as paperwork for the end.
Then comes execution, which in Spain and in the Netherlands means a notary, and a notary is not an administrative formality. Powers of representation are examined, apostilles are checked, translations are verified, corporate authority is confirmed against the documents of every company in the chain. Anything defective at that table stops the signing, and a stopped signing is not the kind of delay that can be recovered by working harder, because it usually requires a document to be reissued abroad and returned. A financing that has run cleanly throughout its life can lose more calendar here than in every earlier phase together.
Drawdown follows execution, and in a development it follows repeatedly, against certified progress rather than in one movement. Each disposal carries its own conditions and its own verification, so what looked like a single completion date is in fact a series of them, each governed by the same discipline as the first. A transaction that will draw in stages should be built and staffed on that basis from the beginning, not discovered to work that way after the first certificate is issued.
Seen from end to end, the timetable of a financing is not a countdown that starts when a lender is contacted. It starts much earlier, in a phase nobody outside the borrower’s own office can see, and everything that follows is largely a settlement of the debts incurred there. The parts of the process the borrower controls are concentrated at the beginning. The parts that cannot be compressed are concentrated at the end. That is the whole of the lesson in any honest timeline. Preparation is not what happens before the process. It is the only part of it that can still be moved.
Montclare does not act as a lender. It structures transactions, prepares the file and coordinates financing with authorised institutions.