Portfolio Project  ·  Conceptual Prototype

ClearPath
Cross-functional
decision intelligence
for commercial banks

A staged internal workflow tool that helps relationship managers, credit teams, treasury, legal, and executive leadership align faster on complex commercial deals — before they reach committee.

Demo scenario — Koko'olau Village
$32M
Financing request
66%
LTV at request
142
Units, mixed-use
6
Dept. lenses
Mixed-Use CRE Kailua, O'ahu Ground Lease HUD 221(d)(4) CRA Value
4
Staged workflow steps
6
Department lenses
8
Live scenario inputs
1
Source of truth for teams
The Problem

Complex deals create misaligned teams

In commercial banking, the gap between a deal's first review and committee approval is filled with fragmented information, siloed assumptions, and repeated conversations. Each department brings a different lens — and those perspectives rarely surface in the same place at the same time.

Commercial real estate deals in particular involve overlapping jurisdictions: Credit is evaluating DSCR and collateral risk. Treasury is watching concentration limits. Legal is reviewing structure. Operations is scoping servicing capacity. Relationship Management is managing the sponsor and the competitive window. And Executive Leadership is thinking about CRA, reputational risk, and strategic fit.

Without a coordination layer, these conversations happen sequentially — and late-stage friction from Legal or Treasury can derail deals that Credit had already greenlit in principle. The result is slower decisions, repeated work, and eroded sponsor relationships.

Research from McKinsey & Company found that commercial banks with strong cross-functional deal coordination processes close complex transactions up to 40% faster than institutions relying on sequential departmental review — with meaningfully lower rates of late-stage restructuring.
Source: McKinsey & Company, Commercial Banking Practice (2023)
Where deals break down internally
Credit, RM, and Treasury working from different versions of deal assumptions
Legal and compliance concerns surfacing after significant review work is already complete
No structured way to compare conservative vs. optimistic scenarios before committee
Executive summaries assembled the night before a meeting rather than built into the review process
Institutional knowledge staying with individual relationship managers rather than the team
Sponsor relationships strained by internal timelines that aren't visible to the team managing the relationship
Market Context

Why this matters now in Hawaii

The Hawaii commercial real estate market presents a specific set of coordination challenges that make internal alignment tools especially valuable. Supply constraints, ground lease complexity, and the affordable housing policy environment create deals where cross-functional friction is not just inefficient — it's costly.

Hawaii DBEDT · 2024
$2.1B
In active commercial real estate construction pipeline on O'ahu as of Q3 2024, with mixed-use and residential-anchored deals representing the largest share of new financing requests.
Hawaii DBEDT Construction Statistics, 2024
FFIEC CRA Data · 2023
Top 3
Hawaii's major commercial banks — FHB, ASB, and BOH — rank among the top CRA performers in the Pacific region, with affordable housing and community development lending a key driver of exam ratings.
FFIEC Community Reinvestment Act Disclosure Data, 2023
Hawaii State HPHA · 2024
29,000+
Units needed to meet Hawaii's 10-year affordable housing goal, creating sustained deal flow for banks with the internal infrastructure to process mixed-income and ground lease structures efficiently.
Hawaii Housing Planning Authority, 2024 Outlook
The Design

One workflow. Every perspective.

ClearPath is organized as a four-stage internal workflow that takes a deal from initial review through scenario analysis, cross-functional alignment, and executive summary generation — in a single session. Each stage has a clear job, and the output of each stage feeds the next.

01
Deal Overview
Upload supporting materials and confirm deal parameters. Establish shared context before any analytical work begins. Prevents teams from running scenarios on mismatched assumptions.
02
Scenario Analysis
Adjust financial and structural assumptions with live sliders. Eight variables across two panels — financial and market/structural. Outputs update in real time with plain-language strategic interpretation.
03
Stakeholder Lenses
See how each of six departments interprets the same deal through their own mandate, risk tolerance, and operational constraints. Surfaces cross-functional friction before it becomes a committee surprise.
04
Executive Summary
Generates a structured internal brief with scenario outputs, cross-functional considerations, and targeted discussion prompts. Exportable as a print-ready one-pager for committee preparation.
Scenario Engine

Assumptions drive interpretation — not the other way around

Every output in ClearPath is traceable to a visible assumption. Sliders map to real financial variables. The strategic interpretation paragraph updates dynamically based on where the DSCR lands. Presets let teams move between scenarios instantly — and then fine-tune from there.

Live scenario output — adjust presets to see outputs shift
Koko'olau Village  ·  $32M mixed-use CRE  ·  Kailua, O'ahu
Est. Stabilized NOI
$2.84M
Base case
DSCR Estimate
1.22x
Above 1.20x threshold
Carry Risk Exposure
$3.1M
18-month bridge period
Base case assumptions produce a deal that clears minimum DSCR thresholds with limited headroom. The primary strategic question is whether the construction timeline and retail absorption assumptions are sufficiently conservative given current Kailua market conditions.
Stakeholder Lenses

The same deal looks different depending on who's in the room

Most deal reviews surface departmental concerns after the fact — in committee, or after a term sheet. ClearPath builds those perspectives into the workflow so cross-functional friction is visible and addressable before it becomes a problem.

🛡
Credit & Risk
Primary approval lens
DSCR headroom, LTV stress scenarios, take-out certainty. The ground lease structure and entitlement status are the two issues most likely to trigger additional due diligence requirements.
DSCR headroomGround lease titleTake-out certainty
👥
Relationship Management
Sponsor and market context
Sponsor track record and long-term relationship value. Primary concern: internal timelines don't create competitive disadvantage — other regional lenders are already in review.
Sponsor relationshipCompetitive timeline
🏭
Treasury & Capital Planning
Balance sheet and liquidity fit
CRE concentration limits, duration mismatch, and whether $32M should be held on balance sheet or explored as a syndication candidate given current funding mix.
CRE concentrationSyndication candidate
Legal & Compliance
Structural and regulatory review
75-year state leasehold creates lender priority questions in a default scenario. HUD compliance requires specific covenant language. Fair lending documentation must be current.
Leasehold lender rightsHUD covenant language
Operations
Servicing and monitoring capacity
Draw schedule management during construction and HUD compliance monitoring. Retail adds a second lease-up tracking obligation. Within normal bandwidth with a dedicated monitoring plan.
Draw schedule complexityWithin capacity
📈
Executive Leadership
Strategic fit and community context
CRA positioning, community development commitments, and competitive standing in the Hawaii housing market. The affordable component is a meaningful CRA narrative asset.
CRA credit valueReputational risk if delayed
Design Decisions

Why it's built the way it is

Every structural choice in ClearPath reflects a specific reasoning about how complex deals actually move through institutional environments — and where coordination breaks down.

01
Single internal perspective — no borrower-facing path
The tool is designed entirely from the perspective of the internal bank team. A borrower-facing intake path solves a different problem — and conflating the two dilutes both. ClearPath is a coordination layer for the people who have to align internally before anything goes to committee. That clarity of audience shapes every design decision downstream.
02
Outputs are strategic interpretations, not underwriting conclusions
Every output in ClearPath is explicitly framed as a scenario-based strategic interpretation. The tool does not produce credit decisions, underwriting outputs, or approval recommendations — and it says so clearly at every stage. This framing is a deliberate design choice that positions the tool correctly as a communication and coordination layer, not a decision engine. In regulated financial institutions, that distinction matters enormously.
03
Sliders over static forms — scenario exploration requires movement
Financial assumptions are entered as sliders rather than locked form fields because the point of scenario analysis is exploration, not documentation. A team should be able to move from base case to stress test in seconds — and see what changes. The slider architecture also makes sensitivity visible: when occupancy moves and DSCR follows, the relationship between variables becomes intuitive rather than abstract. That's how assumptions get stress-tested in real conversation.
04
Hawaii-specific demo scenario — not generic placeholder data
The pre-loaded deal — a mixed-use development in Kailua with a ground lease structure and pending entitlements — reflects structural issues that appear frequently in Hawaii commercial real estate. The cap rate range, construction cost variance, and retail absorption context are grounded in current market conditions. A generic "Office Park, Anytown USA" scenario would have communicated the opposite: that the tool was designed without knowledge of the environment it's meant to serve.
05
Stakeholder perspectives are written, not scored
Each department's view is expressed as a short written interpretation with risk flags — not a numeric score or traffic light rating system. Scores imply false precision at a stage where the purpose is to surface concerns and open conversation, not quantify them. Prose is more honest about what the tool actually knows, and more useful for generating real discussion in a committee prep session. The flags provide quick visual scanning; the text provides the substance behind them.
Context

What this project demonstrates

ClearPath is a conceptual prototype built to demonstrate systems thinking, workflow design, and cross-functional operational reasoning in a commercial banking context. It reflects how I approach complex operational problems: by mapping who needs what information, at what stage, and in what form — and then building the structure that makes that transfer reliable and repeatable.

The project draws on nearly ten years of experience coordinating across operations, finance, ownership, and tenants in a commercial real estate environment — where misaligned assumptions create real delays and good process design prevents them. The tools I've built for portfolio management, deal analysis, and cross-functional reporting follow the same design logic as ClearPath: clarity of audience, traceability of outputs, and structured reasoning over vague summary.

Portfolio note
ClearPath is a conceptual prototype for portfolio purposes only. It does not contain real financial data, does not connect to any banking or financial systems, and does not perform actual underwriting, credit analysis, or compliance review. A production-ready version would require real institutional data, validated financial models, secure system integrations, formal credit policy alignment, and legal and compliance review. The prototype demonstrates workflow design, systems thinking, and cross-functional coordination logic — not a finished product.
Live Prototype
See it in action
The demo scenario is pre-loaded — walk through all four stages to see how the tool works end to end.