Learn to lend better with expert underwriting instruction

Olea Academy offers a practical roadmap of the CDFI underwriting process for loan officers and lending team managers. You’ll learn from our industry’s leading underwriting practitioners alongside fellow professionals in your field.

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Our next session starts January 2027!

Designed to fit how you work

No need to take time off

5 sessions in 5 weeks. Classes are just 90 minutes each and scheduled during business hours across all US time zones.

Remote and participatory

No matter where you’re learning, you’ll get live teaching from an attentive human instructor.

Built to cement your learning

Each class closes with a short quiz to reinforce your understanding. Participants who score 80% or better across all five will receive a certificate.

A comprehensive curriculum that fills the gaps in your underwriting education

This course is designed to help you develop a more complete understanding of underwriting in the specific context of small business lending. Across five sessions, you’ll assemble a step-by-step roadmap of the underwriting process and explore the ways it impacts every facet of small business lending:

First, we’ll establish a high-level overview of the underwriting process and its critical role in responsible lending.

  • This foundational session establishes a shared understanding of the underwriting process and its critical role in responsible lending. Participants will learn what underwriters do, why credit decisions are structured the way they are, and how underwriting protects both the borrower and the lender.

    • The lending process

    • The 5 Cs of Credit

    • What underwriters do

    • Healthy tensions in lending

Next, we’ll get into the gritty details of business and personal cash flow analysis, anchored in global repayment capacity.

  • This session provides a comprehensive introduction to analyzing business finances, understanding various business structures, and calculating business cash available for debt service (CADS). Participants will learn to read business financial statements, understand tax returns, and evaluate strengths and weaknesses in a business’s operations.

    • Global Debt Service Coverage Ratio (GDSCR)

    • Business entity types, taxes, and owner pay

    • Business tax returns, calculating cash available for debt service (CADS)

    • Reliability hierarchy: tax returns vs. interim financials vs. projections

    • Business debt: balance sheets, UCC searches, business debt schedules

    • Working capital and why it matters for loan structuring

  • Participants will learn how to verify personal income from various sources, calculate personal debt obligations, and determine whether an applicant's household has sufficient excess cash flow to support business debt or a deficit that needs to be supported by business profits.

    • Bank statement analysis (business and personal) 

    • Paystub (wage) income 

    • Alternative income sources: disability, veterans benefits, SSI, child support, alimony, rental income, and income from other businesses 

    • Personal credit reports, household expenses

    • Debt-to-Income (DTI) ratios

Then, we step back to see the forest for the trees, reviewing how credit, collateral, and business performance complete the picture of creditworthiness. 

  • This session integrates the components covered in previous sessions and teaches participants how to evaluate the complete credit picture. We will explore how cash flow, credit history, collateral, and business trajectory work together to form a comprehensive risk assessment. 

    • Credit analysis: reading credit reports, evaluating payment history, and identifying red flags 

    • Collateral verification, valuation, and discounting

    • How to evaluate start-up businesses

    • Loan structuring guidelines ( sizing, matching term to purpose, appropriate uses of funds, etc.)

    • Synthesizing the big picture: business trajectory, financial trends, mitigating factors, and articulating the story behind the numbers

Finally, we’ll help you use your grasp of underwriting to better prepare borrowers for the process, set clearer expectations, and build stronger relationships.

  • In this session, we get out of our brains and into our hearts. It’s the “EQ” component of lending! This session gives lending staff a practical framework for managing the full loan cycle, including high level strategies as well as granular tactics for pipeline and client management. 

    • Intake and prospecting conversations: building rapport and gathering information with sensitivity

    • Pipeline strategy: documenting policy, mapping and standardizing the application process

    • Phase-by-phase ownership: what happens, who owns it, and where it happens

    • Lead rating, ticklers, referral partners, and document collection strategies

    • Managing expectations with transparency and professionalism

Sign up now and level up your lending.

Olea Academy: Demystifying Underwriting
$900.00

Expand your lending expertise with a practical, behind-the-scenes course on the CDFI underwriting process, built for loan officers and lending team managers. Learn directly from experienced underwriting practitioners across five weekly 90-minute sessions.

This course is hosted twice yearly in winter and summer. Classes are held virtually on Tuesdays from 2:00-3:30pm ET.