A scope note first, since this matters: this article is written for presales consultants, business analysts, and project teams at IT companies responding to a bank's RFP or scoping a BRD/FSD for a working capital finance module. It is not financial or lending advice, and it is not written for a business deciding how much to borrow. Bankly does not provide financial, legal, or regulatory advisory services — we provide functional domain consulting, presales support, and ready-to-use artifacts for IT delivery teams working on banking systems.
Working capital finance is one of the most commonly under-scoped line items in commercial banking RFP responses. A presales team without branch credit department background will often write "Cash Credit / Overdraft Module — supported" as a single bullet point, price it as a standard configuration item, and move on. The bank's evaluation team — often staffed by people who have actually run a credit desk — reads that single line and immediately knows the response wasn't written by people who understand the domain.
Why "Cash Credit / OD Module" Isn't a Complete Scope Line
Working capital finance is not one requirement — it's five or six distinct, interconnected computation and workflow requirements, each with its own configuration complexity. A credible RFP response or BRD separates them out explicitly, because a bank's evaluators are specifically checking whether the vendor understands that these are different problems:
- Drawing power computation — calculated monthly from the stock statement (debtors, inventory, less margins and creditors), not a static field
- MPBF methodology — configurable to RBI's Tandon Committee Method II working capital gap approach, not a hardcoded formula
- Drawing block logic — the system must enforce DP as the effective ceiling, even when it's lower than the sanctioned limit
- Stock statement non-submission handling — automatic DP reduction when a statement isn't filed on time
- SMA/IRAC cascade — automatic day-count classification through SMA-0, SMA-1, SMA-2, to NPA, without manual intervention
- Annual renewal workflow — tracking review due dates across the entire facility book without lapsing active credit lines
When these six requirements are collapsed into one line, the effort estimate underneath is wrong before development even starts. Change requests raised mid-project to "discover" the DP-vs-limit distinction, or the SMA cascade, read as scope creep to the client — even though the requirement was always there. It just wasn't captured.
What a Credible Requirements Document Actually Specifies
A BRD or FSD that will hold up through a bank's UAT cycle needs each of the six items above stated as a distinct, testable requirement — with the specific computation logic, the data sources it depends on (stock statement periodicity, sanctioned limit master, overdue day counters), and the workflow triggers (renewal due dates, non-submission penalties) named explicitly. This is requirements-stage work, done before a single test case is written — and it's the stage where domain gaps are cheapest to catch.
We review RFP responses and BRD/FSD drafts specifically for working capital finance completeness — flagging where DP, MPBF, SMA/IRAC, and renewal logic are under-specified — before they go out the door or into a sprint. We also provide ready-to-use test case and use case libraries once requirements are locked, so the same domain gaps don't resurface at UAT.
The Handoff Problem Between Presales and Delivery
Even when a presales team gets this right, the requirement can still get lost between the proposal and the delivery team picking up the sprint. Working capital finance requirements are often written once at bid stage and never revisited in detail until UAT — by which point the developer has made assumptions that weren't reviewed by anyone with banking operations background.
The fix isn't more documentation. It's having someone with commercial banking domain experience review the requirement at both ends — once at proposal stage, and once again before UAT sign-off — so the six-item scope survives the handoff intact.