The Challenge

AirFinance is an export credit financing specialist. Founded in 2011, the firm has financed hundreds of newly manufactured business jets, helicopters, and general aviation aircraft across 37 countries, more than $2 billion in total, all of it run by a small, lean team. Every deal the firm closes requires a credit memo: 15 to 30 pages covering the customer, the aircraft, the financing structure, and a full credit analysis of the borrower's financials, drawn from a pack of deal documents.

AirFinance's credit process is based on institutional knowledge rather than specific procedures. Drafting speed depended on who was writing and how recently they had done a similar deal. On the sales side, the team issues hundreds of term sheets a year, most of them started by copying a prior deal, with the overwrite errors that come with it. The goal was to take the manual assembly out of every draft, freeing that time to pursue more deals with the same team.

The Solution

AirFinance has no in-house technical IT team and no one whose job is software. Mixture of Experts partnered with the firm to run a focused co-design and enablement program that combined hands-on delivery with internal capability building, ensuring the system could be owned, run, and extended by the analysts themselves after the engagement ended.

Because there was no in-house technology function, the first decisions were about what to build on. We guided AirFinance through model and vendor selection, weighing the options against how well they handled the firm's document types, what the ongoing cost looked like at their deal volume, and where the firm's deal data would live. Our recommendation was Claude Cowork, with the drafting system delivered as a versioned plugin: no application to host or maintain, the analysts working in an interface they already understood, and every drafting rule written in plain language they could open and change themselves. That settled the platform before a line of drafting logic was written, and it is what made handing the system over at the end of the engagement possible.

From there, the program started with line-by-line co-design sessions across the firm's real memos. The credit team directed the conversations while we mapped which text stays constant across deals and which fields trace to the term sheet, the purchase agreement, the exporter certificate, and the firm's own Excel financial models. Each draft went back to the team for markup in Word, matching their existing review workflow, and every round of comments was folded into drafting rules before the next deal.

Key solutions included:

  • A memo drafting agent producing drafts from a deal's document pack, from the transaction summary through the full financial analysis, with a gap report mapping every missing input to its affected section
  • Deterministic evaluation against real deals held back from the build, keeping accuracy measured and reproducible rather than eyeballed
  • Term sheet automation co-designed with the sales reps who use it, driving the firm's own amortization workbook from roughly 20 questions and filling branded term sheets for AirFinance
  • Delivery as a versioned plugin in Claude Cowork, written in plain language so AirFinance's analysts can read, edit, and extend the drafting rules themselves
  • Enablement sessions equipping the team to install, run, and version the plugin, supporting long-term self-sufficiency without ongoing dependence on us

The Impact

The engagement set a hard acceptance bar before any build work began: the system had to hit a defined accuracy threshold on sample deals it had never seen. It cleared that bar in the first week of the build and kept clearing it as coverage expanded into the financial-analysis sections. Within a month of kickoff, AirFinance was running the system in-house.

Every memo and term sheet now starts in the firm's own format and language instead of a blank page or a copied prior deal, and the process no longer depends on memory. Across the memos and term sheets the firm produces each year, that adds up to roughly 600 hours saved on memo drafting, hours that go back into the deals themselves. Besides time saved, there are additional benefits, including reduction in errors and standardization of formats. Both sides of the business run it: the credit team on memos and the sales team on term sheets, without us in the loop.