Business Lending at Scale: How Forward Funding Uses Rules Engines

From Manual Review to Instant Decisions

In business lending, speed is often the difference between winning or losing a deal.

Traditional underwriting relies on analysts reviewing PDFs, spreadsheets, and financial statements — a process that takes days and costs lenders deals.

Forward Funding faced this exact challenge: high-volume SMB applications, slow decision cycles, and inconsistent approvals.

Then they adopted Carousel’s rules engine — a configurable automation layer that evaluates applications in seconds.

Turning Chaos Into Logic

Instead of having underwriters manually score every borrower, Forward Funding now uses Carousel’s decision engineto apply their own business logic automatically.

• Verify ID, credit, and bank data in parallel

• Apply weighted rules per borrower profile

• Instantly flag outliers for manual review

• Auto-approve clean applications

This same framework is explored in Underwriting 2.0: Using a Decision Engine to Approve Faster, where parallel verification and rule logic merge into one continuous flow.

Scaling Without Compromising Compliance

As loan volume grew, Forward Funding needed consistency and transparency — two things that typically conflict in manual systems.

Carousel’s built-in KYC, AML, and audit trail logging keeps every automated decision traceable and compliant.

Learn how we maintain that standard in Serious Security Built In: How Carousel Handles KYC, AML & Audit Trails.

Each decision path — accepted, declined, or conditional — is recorded in real time, complete with timestamped validation.

Integrations Powering the Flow

The magic behind Forward Funding’s automation comes from Carousel’s integrations:

• Identity: Onfido, Trulioo, Veriff

• Bank Connectivity: Plaid, Flinks, Finicity

• Credit: Equifax, TransUnion

• Fraud Prevention: ComplyAdvantage, Persona

These connect seamlessly via our Integration Guide, allowing Carousel to act as a central orchestration layer for all lending data — the same principle covered in Integration Strategies for Lending, Insurance & Property Tech.

The Rules Behind the Results

Forward Funding configured their own rules engine inside Carousel to match their underwriting logic:

With these in place, decisions went from hours to seconds — and underwriters shifted from data entry to strategic oversight.

We unpack the broader philosophy behind this in Business Lending Under the Hood: Compliance + Instant Decisions.

Results That Scale

Since integrating Carousel, Forward Funding achieved:

✅ 4× faster underwriting turnaround

✅ 2× more funded deals per month

✅ 100% audit visibility

✅ No additional compliance overhead

By moving from human review to human-supervised automation, Forward Funding scaled its portfolio while keeping risk low and accuracy high.

What This Means for Modern Lenders

The Forward Funding story isn’t unique — it’s a blueprint.

Every business lender can define their own approval logic, plug in their integrations, and start approving in minutes.

Learn more about configuring your first flow in our Docs Introduction or experience it live in a 5-minute demo.

Other helpful pages:

• Pricing

• Changelog

• Contact Us

Internal References in This Article

• Underwriting 2.0: Using a Decision Engine to Approve Faster

• Serious Security Built In: How Carousel Handles KYC, AML & Audit Trails

• Integration Strategies for Lending, Insurance & Property Tech

• Business Lending Under the Hood: Compliance + Instant Decisions

• Forward Funding Case Study: Scaling Through Automation