Executive Summary

Pain Points: Highbeam, an AI-powered financial platform serving modern consumer brands, partnered with Accend to scale its credit underwriting operations as its lending and working capital products expanded. The team needed a way to analyze financial statements quickly, accurately, and consistently without creating operational bottlenecks.

Solution: By implementing Accend’s intelligent financial analysis platform including document triage, AI-driven financial spreading, case analysis, and automated credit memo generation. Highbeam transformed how its credit team evaluates deals.

Impact: Accend has already helped Highbeam support and underwrite more than $1B in GMV across credit decisions, enabling faster deal evaluation while maintaining strong risk discipline. What was previously a manual, time-intensive process is now a streamlined workflow that allows the credit team to focus on judgment and decision-making rather than data preparation.

Revenue Unlock: Accend has also become core infrastructure for Highbeam’s next phase of growth. With standardized financial analysis, custom ratios tailored to Highbeam’s underwriting approach, and consistent credit memos for leadership review, the platform is enabling Highbeam to scale credit operations to support 4-5x more deal volume ($4B - $5B in GMV) in 2026 without a proportional increase in underwriting overhead.

Together, Highbeam and Accend have turned financial analysis from an operational bottleneck into a scalable engine for growth.

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Key Stats

$1B+
in GMV processed through Accend

~60%
reduction in underwriting time

$120K
estimated annual cost savings

4 - 5x
expected credit volume growth enabled in 2026

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The Challenge

Highbeam needed to move faster without lowering underwriting quality

As Highbeam scaled its working capital business, its credit team was spending too much time on manual prep work before a real decision could even begin. Borrower financials arrived in different formats - PDFs, spreadsheets, and inconsistent exports and analysts had to normalize everything manually before using their internal models.

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“We have a lot of smart analysts, but they were dedicating a lot of time to tasks that didn’t really require senior input.”
- Phillipe Nicolas, Head of Credit Risk @ Highbeam

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Why Speed Matters in Lending

For Highbeam’s customers (ecommerce brands managing inventory cycles) access to capital often needs to happen quickly.

Brands frequently require financing to place purchase orders or secure supplier discounts within tight timelines.

If underwriting decisions take too long, borrowers may turn to alternative lenders.

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“If you miss the timing by even a day or two, that can make or break a brand’s business.”
- Phillipe Nicolas, Head of Credit Risk @ Highbeam

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For Highbeam, speed in underwriting isn’t just an operational metric, it directly affects:

• deal conversion
• customer experience
• revenue growth

The Solution

A modern underwriting workflow built around speed, consistency, and decision-ready outputs

Accend gave Highbeam an end-to-end underwriting intelligence layer, from document intake through memo-ready outputs, so the team could spend less time preparing data and more time making decisions.

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Custom Built for Highbeam

From custom ratios to standardized portfolio-wide outputs

One of the biggest advantages for Highbeam was Accend’s willingness to adapt the platform to the team’s underwriting philosophy. Highbeam provided specific financial ratios and model requirements, and Accend implemented them quickly. What started as customization became standard infrastructure across Highbeam’s portfolio.

Now, regardless of how borrower financials come in, Highbeam prefers to run them through Accend first so the team can work from the same output every time.

“We gave feedback one day and the next day it was done.”
- Daniel Pelletier, Capital & Partnerships, Highbeam

What This Unlocks in 2026

Built for the next phase of growth

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That means the team can focus on improving offers, expanding working capital solutions, and reviewing more deals not getting stuck formatting statements all day.

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“We’re very likely going to see that 4-5x in 2026, and we’re not worried at all about capacity constraints.”
- Phillipe Nicolas, Head of Credit Risk @ Highbeam

Partnership

Not vendor and customer. Partner and partner.

The Highbeam team repeatedly describes the relationship with Accend as a real partnership. Product feedback moves quickly, customization happens in close collaboration and both teams are aligned on the same goal: helping Highbeam scale credit intelligently.

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“It doesn’t feel like we’re just a customer. It feels like a back-and-forth partnership.”
- Daniel Pelletier, Capital & Partnerships, Highbeam

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Scaling credit? Start with better financial intelligence.

Accend helps banks and fintechs underwrite faster, win more deals, and grow revenue. Our end-to-end platform automates financial and tax spreading, case analysis, and credit memo generation with audit-ready AI and human-in-the-loop accuracy.

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