Team 2 · SME Banking

SME Banking Pack

"The 14-Day Problem"

🏦About Aurora Nexus Global

Aurora Nexus Global is a mid-sized financial services group operating across Malaysia and the APAC region. The SME Banking division serves thousands of small and medium businesses across manufacturing, retail, services, and construction, providing working capital loans, trade finance, and cash management. SME lending is the cornerstone of Project Nexus 2027, but the process meant to win business clients is, in practice, driving them away.

⚠️Business Pain Point

Aurora Nexus Global's target turnaround for SME loan decisions is 5 working days. The reality is 14. For a business owner waiting on a working capital line to pay salaries or secure a contract, that gap is the difference between staying with ANG and moving to a competitor.

The bottleneck is not credit risk; ANG's approval rates are healthy. It is the process. Relationship Managers manually compile documents from customers, type credit memos from scratch for every application, chase internal approvals over email, and follow up on missing documents through WhatsApp. Every step is manual, every step introduces delay, and every step pulls RMs away from their core job: growing client relationships.

Two large manufacturing clients cited "slow response compared to competitors" when moving their facilities in Q1 2025. RMs are aware of the problem. Leadership is aware of the problem. But no one has systematically mapped where the time actually goes, or made it someone's job to fix it.

📊SME Loan Application Processing Log: Q1 2025

App ID	RM	Segment	Loan Amt (MYR)	Submitted	Approved	Days	Bottleneck Stage	Outcome
SME-2501	Hafiz R.	Manufacturing	800,000	03-Jan	21-Jan	18	Document collection	Approved
SME-2502	Lee C.K.	Retail	250,000	07-Jan	16-Jan	9	Credit memo drafting	Approved
SME-2503	Anita M.	Services	500,000	10-Jan	28-Jan	18	Approval sign-off	Approved
SME-2504	Hafiz R.	Construction	1,200,000	14-Jan	03-Feb	20	Missing documents	Withdrawn
SME-2505	Lee C.K.	F&B	180,000	20-Jan	29-Jan	9	Credit memo drafting	Approved
SME-2506	Anita M.	Manufacturing	950,000	22-Jan	10-Feb	19	Approval sign-off	Approved
SME-2507	Raj S.	Retail	320,000	28-Jan	11-Feb	14	Document collection	Approved
SME-2508	Hafiz R.	Services	420,000	01-Feb	19-Feb	18	Credit memo drafting	Approved
SME-2509	Raj S.	Construction	2,100,000	05-Feb	24-Feb	19	Approval sign-off	Approved
SME-2510	Lee C.K.	Manufacturing	650,000	10-Feb	20-Feb	10	Credit memo drafting	Approved
SME-2511	Anita M.	F&B	290,000	14-Feb	03-Mar	17	Missing documents	Approved
SME-2512	Raj S.	Retail	410,000	18-Feb	06-Mar	16	Document collection	Approved

📧Email Thread

From: David Loh, Head of SME Banking, Aurora Nexus Global
To: Regional SME Managers
Subject: We Are Losing Deals We Should Be Winning

I received confirmation this week that one of our anchor manufacturing clients, a relationship we have held since 2019, has moved their facility to a competitor. Their feedback: "ANG is too slow." We were their first call. We were not their last answer.

This is not a pricing problem. Our rates are competitive. This is a process problem. I've asked operations to pull the Q1 application log. I want every RM to examine their own applications and identify where we lost days we should not have lost. We cannot win the SME segment with a 14-day process when competitors are promising 48 hours.

💬Chat Extract: SME RM Team Channel

Hafiz 09:32

SME-2504 just withdrew. Three weeks and we still had missing docs on day 18. They couldn't wait anymore.

Anita 09:35

I spent four hours yesterday chasing one customer for their audited accounts. Then another hour typing the credit memo.

Lee C.K. 09:38

Credit memo alone takes 2-3 hours per application. We type the same structure every time.

Raj 09:41

The approval chain is the worst part. You submit and then wait days just to hear "more info needed."

Hafiz 09:44

We all know where the time goes. The question is whether anyone will fix it.

🎯Your Tasks

Based on the application log and team conversations, identify the stages where Aurora Nexus Global is losing the most time, and distinguish between delays caused by process design versus delays caused by customer behaviour.

Design an ideal SME loan journey, from the moment an RM receives an application to the moment a decision is communicated, that removes unnecessary manual steps without compromising credit quality.

Recommend what Aurora Nexus Global must change first to move from a 14-day average toward a 5-day target, and what success would look like 90 days after those changes are made.

📝Your Working File

Your working folder contains 2 files for your team:

📊 BLANK – Promptathon Team Pack: your main working file. Use this to document your prompts, Copilot outputs, and key insights throughout the challenge. You will present from this at the end.
⚖️ Peer Judging Sheet: used during the presentation segment. You will score the other teams while they present their work.

🔗 Open Your Working Folder

Opens in OneDrive. Use Incognito / InPrivate mode.

🕵️

Important: Open the working file in an Incognito (Chrome) or InPrivate (Edge) window. This ensures you are working from the correct shared folder and your work is saved properly.

⚡🔒⚡

Power Ups: Locked

Power Ups are your next step — take what you built today and think about how to bring it back to your real work at Alliance Bank.
Complete your challenge tasks first, then unlock them here.

⚡ Power Up: Adopt It

You have used Copilot to solve a scenario. Now bring it back to your real work at Alliance Bank.

1 Pick Your Use Case · 5 min

In Tasks 1 and 2, you mapped where time is lost across the SME loan journey and designed a faster path from RM to credit decision. You found that manual document gathering, inconsistent call notes, and handover gaps are the primary reasons the journey takes 14 days when it should take 5. Alliance Bank's SME Banking teams face the same bottlenecks.

Use cases from SME banking teams at banks like yours. React to these: swap, add, or keep.

Summarise an SME loan application package and flag missing or incomplete documents before it reaches the credit team
Draft a structured call note from RM meeting notes, formatted for CRM entry and ready for credit submission
Generate a document checklist for a specific SME loan product, tailored to the customer's industry and facility type
Compare two SME credit applications with similar profiles and highlight the key risk differentiators to speed up credit decisioning
Write a weekly pipeline status update for the RM team, covering stage, days in pipeline, and the next required action for each live deal

As a team, pick your top 3, then paste this into Copilot:

"We work in SME banking at a bank. Here are 3 Copilot use cases we identified: [list them]. Score each on: time saved per week, how often we'd use it, and ease of implementation. Rank them and explain your top pick."

2 Build the Prompt · 5 min

Your winning use case needs a great prompt. Paste this into Copilot:

"For this use case: [describe your winning use case]. What data or input would we need? Write the best Copilot prompt to make this work. Then show a sample output."

Test it. Refine it. Make it yours.

3 Pitch It · 5 min

Draft your adoption pitch:

"Draft a short adoption pitch for our SME banking manager: what the use case is, what problem it solves, what data or content we'd give Copilot, and what the first step is to roll it out to the team."

This is not your team pack.

Team Pack Locked