24–48 Hours vs. 7 Days: The Cost of Waiting for Your Credit

Every time you apply for a loan or credit line, everyone talks about rates and fees.

Almost nobody talks about something even more expensive:

While you’re waiting for a decision or disbursement, you might be losing:

• Early payment discounts

• Inventory and stock rotation

• Seasonal campaigns

• Customers who don’t wait

This is why Time-to-Finance (TTF) should be your #1 credit metric.

Why “Time to Credit” (TTF) Should Be Your #1 Metric

Time-to-Finance (TTF) measures everything from a completed request to usable cash in your account.

It includes:

• The time for analysis and decision

• The time for documentation and signatures

• The time for final disbursement

Shorter TTF means:

• You start campaigns on time

• You refill high-turnover inventory faster

• You capture early payment discounts

• You avoid penalties for late delivery

Longer TTF means lost opportunities that never come back, even if your rate is attractive on paper.

Banks vs. Fintech: Time Benchmarks (US + LATAM)

The exact numbers change by country and product, but the pattern is always the same:

Typical benchmarks:

• Traditional banks (small business loans)

  • Decisions often take several business days

  • Funding can extend to a week or more, especially with manual checks

• SBA-type programs (US reference)

  • Heavy documentation

  • End-to-end process can take several weeks

• Online lenders / fintechs (USA & LATAM)

  • Decisions in hours or 1–2 days for simple cases

  • Funding in 24–72 hours when documentation is complete

In Latin America, several fintech lenders report disbursements within 72 hours for standard working capital loans, once the file is complete.

Operational Translation

From an operational point of view, the message is simple:

The technology is available. The question is whether your process is ready.

Calculate Your Loss per Day of Waiting

You can make TTF tangible with a very simple formula:

Where:

• AmountThe amount of credit you need.

• Daily marginThe profit that capital generates per day in your business.

• Extra waiting daysHow many more days you wait compared to a faster alternative.

Example:

• Amount: US$100,000

• Daily margin: 0.3% (0.003)

• Extra days: 6

Those US$1,800 are profit that will never appear on your P&L.This connects directly with your previous guide on the opportunity cost of waiting for a loan.

Real Case: Credit Outsourcing in Colombia

In one credit BPO project in Colombia, automating only around 25% of the credit review workflow delivered:

• ≈ 246,000 hours per year released (around 128 FTE worth of capacity)

• ROI > 29,330% (recovered 293x the investment in one year)

• Payback ≈ 1 week from the go-live of the project

These numbers will vary by volume, salaries and project cost, but the pattern is clear:shortening TTF and removing manual work has an exponential effect on ROI.

5 Levers to Reduce Your TTF and Disbursement Time

If you want to move from 7–10 days to 1–3 days, these levers make the difference:

1. Map bottlenecks weeklyUse a simple Value Stream Map (VSM) to identify where days are added: missing documents, queues, manual hand-offs. Attack those steps first.

2. Automate validationsAutomate KYC, checklists and preliminary scoring with workflows, rules and APIs. Don’t let analysts spend time on obviously incomplete or ineligible requests.

3. Integrate core systemsConnect core banking, CRM, accounting and document repositories to eliminate retyping and copy-paste. Every manual transfer of data is a delay and a risk.

4. Measure TTF by stage—every sprintBreak TTF into stages (intake, analysis, approval, formalization, disbursement). Track times every sprint. Any increase is an early alert that something broke.

5. Govern the change (APMO)Treat credit automation as a product, not a one-off project:

   • Live backlog

   • Initial business case and ROI

   • Monthly tracking of time saved and capacity released

TTF Dashboard: What You Should See

A useful Time-to-Finance dashboard for your credit process should show:

• ⏱️ Duration by stage, before and after automation

• 📉 Evolution of time saved per month or quarter

• 💵 Savings in operating costs, linked to hours/FTEs released

• 👤 Capacity released (FTE equivalents) for analysts and operations

When you see TTF shrinking and capacity increasing, you know your automation efforts are paying off.

Less Paperwork, More ROI

The time your credit spends “waiting” inside your process is the time your competition spends selling.

If you want to:

• Shorten time to decision and disbursement

• Reduce manual back-and-forth

• Put a real number on the cost of waiting

👉 Schedule a Sprint Diagnostic (1 hour, free) with Time Automation Agency.

In that session we’ll:

• Map your current credit flow

• Quantify your Time-to-Finance and opportunity cost

• Build a 90-day plan to reduce TTF using workflows, RPA and APIs

Set the clock on your side.Less paperwork, more ROI.