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GLOSSARYTERMS AS A CREDIT DESK USES THEM

Bankability

What does it mean for a business to be “bankable”?

ONE OF 80 TERMS · FREE · NO SIGNUP

BY MICHAEL SHANG · SIXTEEN YEARS IN COMMERCIAL BANKING · UPDATED

// THE SHORT ANSWER

Bankability is not a feeling about a business and not creditworthiness in the narrow sense. It is a short list of claims that hold up when read by people who were never in the room: which parts of the story are already visible in statements and contracts, whether the institution's interest is a question of whether or a question of when, and whether the structure survives four quarters in which nothing improves. A business can carry excellent earnings and still present an unbankable situation, because the request is vague or the information arrives in a form no committee can process.

BASIS  Practitioner judgment from sixteen years in commercial banking, set out in How Bankers Think (Highbank Press, 2026). Every borrower on this site is a composite constructed for teaching, not a client. The market is mid-market commercial lending as practised in New Zealand and Australia; where a convention differs elsewhere, the page says so.

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