How a Tier-1 Bank Cleaned Up 12 Years of Loan Files

"Before Papyrus, a single CBK examination demanded six weeks of preparation. Last time, we were ready in eight working days." — Head of Compliance, Tier-1 Kenyan Bank

The numbers

47 branches consolidated
820,000+ loan documents ingested
9 months end-to-end migration
8 days to prepare for CBK examination (down from 6 weeks)
92% AI classification accuracy on loan-file types after fine-tuning

The starting position

The bank had grown through acquisition. Three legacy core banking systems, three legacy DMS deployments, and four separate physical archive sites. Loan files spanned 12 years of operations. A new CBK examination cycle was approaching.

Their challenge wasn't lack of data. It was that retrieving a specific loan file took 2-3 days on average; reconstructing the complete documentary history of a defaulted loan could take 2 weeks. Every CBK examination produced a “Records Management — Material Deficiency” finding.

The approach

Three parallel workstreams over 9 months:

Workstream 1 — Active loans (months 1-3). Every loan with activity in the last 24 months was migrated. The bank's existing loan officers became the front-line for classification correction. By month 3, every active loan had a complete Papyrus workspace.

Workstream 2 — Defaulted and watchlist loans (months 2-5). Priority for the recoveries team. The legal package for each defaulted loan was reassembled in Papyrus with full audit trail.

Workstream 3 — Cold archive (months 4-9). Historical loans went through an outsourced scanning bureau with Papyrus's Desktop Agent installed at the scanning site. Auto-classification handled the volume; spot-checking at 5% sampling rate confirmed accuracy.

The CBK examination

When the next examination arrived, the head of Internal Audit ran the examination team through Papyrus:

Auditor role granted, scoped to the examination period
Saved searches pre-built for the four loan types CBK typically samples
Loan files surfaced with complete documentation in under 30 seconds per file
Audit log produced for every requested action

CBK's finding: “Records management has improved substantially since the previous examination.” First time in three cycles the bank avoided a material deficiency on this dimension.

What the bank learned

"We thought we had a documentation problem. We actually had a discoverability problem. The documents were always there — we couldn't find them."

The Head of Compliance's quote summarises it. The technical migration was unglamorous. The behaviour change — getting loan officers to file in Papyrus, not in personal email folders — took longer than the data move.

What's next

The bank is rolling Papyrus to procurement records (currently in a Power Automate / SharePoint mix) and HR records (currently on a network drive). Targeted completion: end of 2026.