Product · working today

Bridge — fairer loans for small businesses.

Around half of Latin America's small businesses can't get a loan — not because they're bad businesses, but because checking their paperwork costs banks more than the loan is worth. Bridge makes the checking fast, and keeps people in charge of every decision.

days → minutesto read and cross-check bank statements, invoices, and tax filings
100%of decisions made by people — the AI never approves or rejects anyone
0.85disparate-impact ratio — passes the fair-lending four-fifths rule

How it works

The line that defines the product

Bridge draws a hard line: language AI reads documents and drafts the memo; it never sets the score and never makes the decision. That boundary isn't a promise — it's built into the code, so the applicant's documents and any personal characteristic physically can't reach the scoring model. Lending decisions affect lives and are heavily regulated; this is the kind of AI system where the right answer to "can the model decide?" is no.

Proof it works

Bridge runs on a fully synthetic set of loan applications — realistic paperwork, no real people's data. In testing it reads the figures back with perfect accuracy, catches inflated income declarations that the bank deposits don't support (without falsely flagging honest applicants), and a 60-business portfolio passes fair-lending testing. It's also the first high-risk system registered in Guardrail's compliance inventory.

For technical readers
  • Document extraction attaches source provenance to every figure; cross-document reconciliation flags declared revenue > 1.4× bank inflows.
  • Scoring is an additive, monotonic scorecard with adverse-action reason codes — no ML black box. Its function signature takes only structured features, so text and the protected-group label cannot reach it (a unit test proves the score is identical across groups).
  • The memo drafter (template or Claude) cites evidence and leaves the recommendation blank; the human decision gate requires an override reason to depart from the score band and generates the adverse-action notice from the reason codes.
  • Two Checkpoint eval gates: extraction accuracy (10/10) and fraud detection (10/10) on labeled synthetic cases.

What it can't do yet