Cadence
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How a decision is made, end to end

Cadence turns an applicant's account data into an explainable lending decision through a fixed, ordered sequence.

The sequence

From an inbound lead to an issued decision

The order matters. Consent precedes retrieval, retrieval precedes categorisation, and categorisation precedes affordability.

  1. Applicant arrives

    Inbound lead

    An applicant reaches Cadence from a comparison-portal lead carrying a requested amount and term. The session is created and isolated from the first interaction; nothing is shared across applicants.

  2. Consent is granted

    AIS consent · 180-day expiry

    The applicant authorises account-information access against Demo Bank under an explicit, time-boxed consent. The grant is scoped to read-only statement data and expires; it is recorded as the legal basis for everything downstream.

  3. Account data is retrieved

    Berlin Group account data

    With consent in place, the engine pulls accounts, balances and several months of transactions over a standardised account-information interface. The raw wire format is mapped into Cadence's internal transaction model.

  4. Transactions are categorised

    Model categorisation

    Each transaction line is labelled into one of 16 categories, with flags for income, recurrence and obligation. The model supplies a grounded rationale per label; it categorises the evidence but never decides the loan.

  5. Affordability is computed

    Haushaltsrechnung

    Categorised cash flow feeds the Haushaltsrechnung: net income minus a standard living-cost allowance, rent and existing obligations yields available income. Deterministic rules then test the requested instalment against buffer, ratio, stability and stress thresholds.

  6. A decision is issued

    Transparent · auditable

    The engine returns approve, refer or decline with the exact figures and rule outcomes behind it. Every input, label and threshold is captured in an append-only audit log an officer or auditor can replay end to end.

Boundary

The third-party and account-holder boundary

Open-banking access has 2 sides, and Cadence is firmly on one of them.

Third-party provider (TPP)

Cadence is the third-party provider: the regulated party that requests access, consumes account data and runs the decisioning. It holds the consent, performs categorisation and affordability, and owns the decision and its audit trail. The intelligence lives here.

Account servicer (ASPSP)

Demo Bank is the account-servicing institution: it holds the applicant's accounts and exposes them, only after consent, through a standardised account-information interface. Cadence reads; it never writes. Account access is a commodity, and the decisioning layer is the work.

Keeping this boundary clean is what makes the system auditable: the account servicer is the single source of truth for the data, and Cadence is the single source of truth for the reasoning applied to it.

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The affordability engine