What's new about Insolnet
Why a forensic-quality, initial-draft bank analysis is now possible without days of case-manager time, why we built it into our case management system, and why we're sharing it with introducing accountants pre-appointment.
Published April 2026 · Updated July 2026
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. The findings — s.239 preferences, s.238 transactions at undervalue, overdrawn DLAs, unlawful dividends — were the ones described in the pre-insolvency adjustments framework.
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, work that used to take a case manager three to four days is now a short automated run. The change is real and substantial — though the analysis is gated behind identity verification (every officer matched to the Companies House list) and the director's recorded consent, which is properly where the elapsed time now sits.
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, reconcile them to the books and correct any genuine errors (a mis-posted entry, a prior period correction), have the director repay or regularise what can be regularised, 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. What it does not do is rewrite history: retrospective re-papering of drawings as dividends or remuneration is ineffective, and the liquidator's investigation on appointment is carried out as normal.
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, reconciling them to the books, 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, with no conditions attached. No platform fees, no per-seat charges, and nothing paid or given for introductions; the Insolvency Code of Ethics prohibits it. Where a client proceeds to liquidation with Insolvency Direct and your firm takes the client through onboarding, the questionnaire and the Statement of Affairs on Insolnet, your firm is paid for that work at rates from our partner rate card, agreed with Joe Whiley case by case and disclosed to creditors.
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. In complex cases that don't proceed to an Insolvency Direct instruction but where we are retained as advisors, we may agree an advisory fee where that is fair to both sides.
If usage of the platform becomes too costly to support on a free basis, we reserve the right to review the arrangement and move to a charging model.