Banking

Detecting unauthorised changes in loan agreements and sanction letters

How credit and operations teams compare returned loan agreements, sanction letters and KYC forms against the issued version to catch edited figures before disbursement.

Published 2026-09-212 min readSimpleFileTools

One changed number

A loan agreement goes out with an interest rate, a tenure, a repayment schedule and a set of covenants. It comes back signed. If any figure changed between the two, the bank has either a fraud, a dispute, or an audit finding waiting to happen. Reading forty pages for a changed decimal is not a control; it is hope.

Where the changes hide

A comparison as a pre-disbursement control

The control is simple to state: before disbursement, the signed agreement is compared against the issued agreement, and the comparison result is attached to the file. The expected result is no substantive change. The comparison engine on this site produces exactly that: a change list with page numbers, a redlined PDF and a side-by-side view. Running headers, footers, page numbers and unchanged schedules are held out, so a clean document produces an empty list rather than forty pages of noise.

Sanction letters, KYC forms and policies

The same control applies to any document that goes out and comes back. Sanction letters returned with acceptance, account-opening forms returned by the customer, and internal credit policies re-issued after committee all benefit from a change list that a checker can read in a minute.

Keeping documents inside the bank

Loan documents should not leave the institution. Enterprise deployments run the comparison engine inside the bank's own VPC or on-premises, with no outbound traffic. The REST API then lets the loan origination or document management system trigger the comparison automatically on every returned document.

Try it on your own documents. Upload two versions on the homepage. Documents up to 30 pages need no account, and nothing is stored.

Industry page: PDF comparison for banks and NBFCs

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