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GLOSSARYTERMS AS A CREDIT DESK USES THEM

Hardcore (overdraft)

What is hardcore on a business overdraft?

ONE OF 80 TERMS · FREE · NO SIGNUP

BY MICHAEL SHANG · SIXTEEN YEARS IN COMMERCIAL BANKING · UPDATED

// THE SHORT ANSWER

Hardcore is the portion of an overdraft that never repays — the floor under the fluctuation. A healthy overdraft oscillates through zero as receipts and payments pass; one that has not seen the right side of a certain balance in a year is really a core debt of that size with a smaller true overdraft on top. Hardcore is the overdraft's version of a failed clean-down: permanent need wearing a short-term product, on the most expensive and least dependable money available — and the desk's response is the same in both cases, which is to name it and restructure the permanent part into a product built for permanence.

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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