At a Glance
SME Capital is a specialized growth finance provider offering bespoke funding solutions of £0.5m to £5m for established UK SMEs. Built “by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs,” they provide flexible long-term finance without equity dilution or collateral requirements, with interest rates from 7% p.a. and terms of 3-7 years.
With Sea.dev’s embedded AI financial document automation, SME Capital achieved:
- 95% faster month-end spreading for covenant checks (35 hrs → 2 hrs per analyst)
- 99% extraction accuracy with layered validation and human-in-the-loop QC
- 3x monitoring capacity shifting time from data entry to revenue-generating portfolio actions
The Challenge: 35 hours of monthly spreading killing growth
SME Capital’s portfolio had grown to nearly 80 loans of between £0.5m and £5m. SME Capital had to balance origination with portfolio management. Every month, covenant monitoring and financial spreading ate up to 35 hours per analyst. Analysts manually reviewed statements, calculated ratios and checked covenants across hundreds of companies.
The team of highly skilled analysts were stuck digging through PDFs instead of building relationships with borrowers. Their target market of businesses with £250k+ earnings needed both careful underwriting and ongoing monitoring against the loan covenants. Manual processes were choking growth.
The key challenge was the financial spreading and analysis, which was too complex to automate. Companies usually prepared financials individually, and these multi-entity consolidations are tedious and error-prone. Borrowers often sent financial statements that were a copy of the Financial Director’s latest analysis rather than any standard template.
Every month, our entire monitoring team was completely blocked for a full week, just on portfolio spreading and covenant checks. It was unsustainable. We have tried many alternatives including nCino, Heron, Codat and others in the hunt to free our analysts from the spreading of these complex SMBs, but none fit the bill. We needed a solution that would allow our team to focus on what really matters, which is understanding our clients' businesses and supporting their growth.
Kate Kennedy, COO at SME Capital
Credit leadership watched their teams spend the first week of every month in Excel instead of talking to new clients. SME Capital needed to automate the grunt work of financial spreading without losing the human judgment that mattered.
The Solution: Embedding an AI financial spreading solution
SME Capital chose Sea.dev for its financial spreading and powerful human-in-the-loop capabilities and covenant monitoring know-how.
SME Capital already have their own in-house tech platform for loan monitoring. This is an LOS they built to monitor borrowers. The borrowers upload documents to their platform, and they accumulate each month until they are manually reviewed and spread by one of the analysts.
Phase one: Embed & ingest
Sea.dev integrated directly into SME Capital’s LOS to automate monthly statement collection and spreading across the whole book. The system ingests income statements, balance sheets, and cashflows for every borrower; auto-flags gaps or anomalies; and routes extractions for quick human review. Any corrections feed an automatic learning loop so accuracy improves every cycle, reaching 98% in days, and now at 99%.
Phase two: Nuanced calculations & rigorous validation
Sea.dev pulls information from different formats and performs calculations with deal-specific nuance: EBITDA adjustments, multi-entity consolidation, FX/revenue alignment, and debt service coverage. Financial figures run through a number of validation checks: cross-statement consistency, period matching, variance/outlier detection against history, and unit/currency normalization. A human-in-the-loop review plus full audit trails ensure errors are caught early and corrections propagate across the portfolio where appropriate.
Phase three: Portfolio intelligence
On top of the workflow, Sea.dev’s embedded agentic capabilities support the SME Capital team’s portfolio-wide analytics. Management gets instant visibility into portfolio health, borrower trends, concentration risk, and sector performance, turning covenant monitoring from a month-end chore into a real-time control panel.
Embedded alongside SME Capital’s operations and technology teams, we went from fit to impact quickly: a solution shaped to their process, extensible for growth, and returning visible ROI immediately.
The Outcome: 35 hours down to 2
Monthly covenant monitoring went from 35 hours per analyst down to 2. A 95% acceleration. What took a week now takes less than a credit committee meeting. The team also now reached 99% accuracy and the basis to do deeper analysis.
Thirty three hours freed up every month. Like adding a full analyst without hiring anyone. Those hours went straight into better managing the portfolio, identifying follow-on funding opportunities, supporting borrowers, and increasing portfolio capacity. The team now focuses on value add instead of data entry.
The automated system hits 99% accuracy extracting financial metrics. Covenant breaches get flagged in hours, not weeks. Early warnings now catch struggling borrowers before they breach. Management sees portfolio health in real-time, not quarterly.
Reducing our monthly spreading from 35 hours to just 2 hours has transformed our business. We've tripled our capacity without adding headcount, and our portfolio management is stronger than ever. Our analysts now have time to truly understand each borrower's performance rather than just processing numbers. It's exactly the efficiency gain we needed to scale.
Kate Kennedy, COO at SME Capital
Analysts stopped doing spreadsheet marathons and started managing relationships. This shift shows how cross-sell opportunities open up when teams have time for actual client work. The structured insights from Sea.dev enables portfolio analytics and predictive modeling that manual processes couldn’t touch. SME Capital can grow their book knowing covenant monitoring scales automatically.
The 95% reduction in spreading time is just the beginning. With Sea.dev's technology handling the mechanical work, we're now building predictive models to identify covenant breaches before they happen. We can offer our borrowers proactive support based on real-time financial trends. This is how modern portfolio management should work. Technology handling the numbers while we focus on relationships and growth.
Mike Millington, Regional Director for the Midlands at SME Capital
SME Capital keeps pushing forward: predictive covenant breach modeling, automated health scores, real-time stress testing. The 95% time savings means they can double their portfolio with the same team.
Our next step is a deeper partnership with IO Finance Partners to roll out spreading across their workflows: expanding coverage, compounding insights, and growing together.
