How the Cases Are Made

No case is a real borrower. Each one is assembled from patterns seen across sixteen years of commercial banking practice, in Beijing and Auckland, and then built as a business that could exist: a sector, a size, a request, and three years of numbers. The names are invented — drawn from New Zealand's geography and flora — and every new one is checked against the New Zealand Companies Register before it is used, so that no case shares a name with a company that trades.

The bank in the cases is never named, and the people in them keep their descriptions rather than acquiring names: the founder-MD, the relationship manager, the accountant. That is a rule, not an omission. No case represents the policy, practice, or position of any institution.

The cases are set in one continuing world, the Highbank Universe. A borrower that came to the desk in one issue can come back in a later one, and what the bank decided the first time is still in force. That continuity is kept in a register — every published case's borrower, request and outcome — so a later issue cannot quietly contradict an earlier one. The register holds published cases only; nothing on the site runs ahead of what a reader has been able to read.

A case's figures are built to hang together: revenue, margin, working-capital days and cash flow derive from one another, and a facility is sized from the cycle it funds. Before an issue is published its numbers are re-derived from the case's own inputs, and the figures a page prints are checked against the register they come from, so that a number changed in one place and not the other fails before it is published rather than after.

The reading on each case is one senior banker's judgment — not a committee's, and not a consensus. It is signed, and every case carries the date it was published and the date its text last changed. Before publication each case is read adversarially: against its own numbers, against the register, and against the question of whether a reader with the file in front of them could reach the read from what the page shows.

After you answer a case, the page shows how readers have answered it. That distribution is real or absent: until at least thirty readers have answered an issue, the page says so instead of drawing a bar. No page on this site carries a star rating or a reader count. The endorsements quoted on this site are of the book, by named practitioners, and were given in writing.

If a figure, a name or a reading is wrong, write to hello@bankingjudgmentlab.com. A correction is made on the page itself and moves the page's last-updated date, which is printed on every case and on this page. A composite case is not corrected to match any real business, because none describes one.

The site publishes what the book names — the frameworks, their parts, and the ruling each one turns on — and not what the book teaches. Where a framework breaks, and what a senior banker does when it does, stay in How Bankers Think. The site does not name the author's employers, past or present; what it offers instead is a signed read on every case, the book, and the record of the cases themselves.