Review event
What is a review event in a facility agreement?
ONE OF 180 TERMS · FREE · NO SIGNUP
BY MICHAEL SHANG · SIXTEEN YEARS IN COMMERCIAL BANKING · UPDATED
// THE SHORT ANSWER
A review event is a circumstance written into a facility agreement — commonly a change of control, the loss of a key licence or contract, a change in the business's main activity, a qualified audit opinion — that entitles the bank to review the facility rather than to declare a default. On review the bank may carry on, reprice or ask for more security, and if the two sides cannot agree within the stated period it may require repayment. For a borrower it is the better clause to have wherever something outside its control could happen: a review event opens a negotiation, where an event of default would hand the bank its remedies.
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.
// WHAT IT IS NOT
A review event is not an event of default: it gives the bank a right to reconsider and, failing agreement, to require repayment after notice — not an immediate right to enforce.
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