The Three Translations
What are the Three Translations between a business and its bank?
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BY MICHAEL SHANG · SIXTEEN YEARS IN COMMERCIAL BANKING · UPDATED
// THE SHORT ANSWER
The Three Translations name the three places where a sound business and a lending process most reliably fail to understand each other. Cycle versus calendar: the business runs on its own clock, the bank reads it on quarter-ends. Visible versus actual: documents capture accounts and receivables, not the owner judgment and supplier relationships that carry a business through a hard year. Slice versus flow: the bank evaluates one transaction, the client is living an ongoing relationship of which this request is the next instalment.
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.
// IN THE BOOK
Developed in chapter 8, Reading the Room: The Banker as Translator.
// WORKED IN
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