What a borrower file actually looks like in Manila

I spent two weeks last quarter sitting next to credit officers at a microfinance lender in Quezon City. I wanted to understand, concretely, what shows up in their queue when an SME applies for a ₱500,000 loan.

A typical file

It is not a tidy stack of audited financials. It is, more or less, this:

Three screenshots, taken at slight angles, of the same GCash account at three points in time. A utility bill in PDF that needs to match the address on the borrower's barangay permit. And a handwritten sales ledger in a notebook. That is the file. There is no audited financial statement. There is no credit bureau pull worth pulling.

The bureau gives us nothing. The file is the bureau.

Officer Maritess told me that on day three. It stuck with me. The file is the bureau. That sentence is, if you squint, the entire thesis of LendTrace.

If you can read this file fluently — the screenshots, the bill, the ledger, in Tagalog and English, with the angles and the watermarks and the small inconsistencies — you can underwrite it. If you cannot, no amount of credit modeling will save you.

We built LendTrace to read this file.