What's new about Insolnet
Why a forensic-quality bank analysis is now possible in minutes, why we built it into our case management system, and why we're sharing it with introducing accountants pre-appointment.
The bank-analysis problem, before now
On every insolvency case, the IP needs to understand how the company's bank account behaved over the trading life of the business. Where did the money go? Were drawings consistent with declared remuneration? Were dividends supported by reserves? Were any payments made preferentially to connected parties in the months before the company failed? Are there transactions at undervalue?
Historically this was done by hand. A case manager would receive paper or PDF bank statements, build a transaction log in Excel, classify each line manually, cross-reference Companies House for connected entities, and produce a written findings report. On a typical small-company case (eighteen months of statements, several hundred transactions) the work took three to four days of a competent case manager's time. Bigger or messier cases took longer.
That cost meant the analysis happened post-appointment, not before. The case had to already be in our hands — with the fee structure agreed — before the work was economic.
What changed
Two technologies matured at the same time and changed the economics:
- Open banking. A regulated mechanism for the company (with the director's consent) to authorise read-only access to its bank data, returning a structured machine-readable transaction feed. We use Armalytix as the integration layer.
- Large language models with sufficient capability. Modern frontier models — we use Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 — can read a categorised transaction log and apply IP-specific reasoning that would previously have required a senior insolvency professional. They're not a replacement for the IP, but they're a credible substitute for the case-manager-with-Excel work.
Combined, the analysis that used to take three to four days takes a few minutes. The change is real and substantial.
What we built
Insolnet is the case management platform Insolvency Direct uses internally. We've integrated open banking and Claude Opus 4.7 into a single workflow inside the platform. Each case ingests the bank data automatically, a deterministic categoriser classifies every transaction (seeded with the directors' Companies House appointments and known counterparties), and the AI produces a severity-graded findings report.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first integrated AI bank-analysis module built into a case management system by a firm of insolvency practitioners. There are general-purpose bank-analysis tools (Armalytix itself, others) and there are case management systems (IPS Cloud, others), but the integration of the two with an IP-specific AI lens is, as far as we can tell, novel.
Why give accountants pre-appointment access
Once the IP is appointed, the analysis is going to happen. The findings will be produced. The implications for the director will be identified. The question is: when does the introducing accountant get to see them?
If it's post-appointment, the accountant learns about the issues at the same time the director does — through statutory reports and, in some cases, recovery proceedings. By that point, the options have narrowed. Repayment plans have to be negotiated under pressure. Restructuring is no longer available. The director's exposure is fixed by what the bank statements show.
If it's pre-appointment, the accountant can review the findings, identify any accounting adjustments that should be made (a DLA repaid, a dividend reclassified, a prior period entry corrected), brief the client honestly on what the analysis shows, and decide whether liquidation is even the right path. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes there are restructuring options the client and accountant should consider that aren't visible without this kind of forensic clarity.
We think pre-appointment is the right time. So we make it available.
Your role and ours
The accountant's time should be spent on accounting work — reviewing the findings, making any adjustments, advising the client. Not on building Excel transaction logs.
Our time is spent on the analysis (automated by the system) and, where the case proceeds, the liquidation under our IP licence. Two professional services, in their proper lanes, with the technology doing the heavy lifting in between.
The commercial model
We provide the platform and the analysis at no cost to your firm. In return, where the case proceeds to liquidation, you recommend Insolvency Direct as the liquidator. That's the whole arrangement. No platform fees, no per-seat charges, no setup. We're transparent about it because there's nothing complicated to hide.
Some cases won't proceed to liquidation — the analysis surfaces something that changes the recommendation, or a restructuring option becomes viable. That's fine. The system is still earning its keep by giving the accountant and client the information they need.