What Is a Human-in-the-Loop Review?
A human-in-the-loop review refers to the practice of inserting people into automated processes at specific points where manual oversight is needed.
In MCA and small business lending, this often means that documents or submissions that cannot be confidently processed by automation are routed to a reviewer without stopping the overall queue.
This practice usually appears in scrubbing and underwriting workflows. Operators use it to balance speed and risk by letting automation handle the majority of tasks while humans handle exceptions or ambiguous cases.
How Does a Human-in-the-Loop Review Work?
Human-in-the-loop review combines automated routing with targeted manual intervention.
- Exception detection: The system identifies cases that fall below confidence thresholds or show unusual patterns.
- Escalation: These exceptions are automatically routed into a review queue for human intervention.
- Manual resolution: Reviewers confirm or correct data, validate anomalies, or approve edge cases.
- Workflow continuation: Once resolved, the exception rejoins the flow without holding up clean submissions.
In Heron, human-in-the-loop review is built into the automation framework.
- Automated parsing: Submissions are ingested and processed automatically.
- Flagging engine: Items with low confidence or risk anomalies are flagged.
- Queue routing: Exceptions are routed to a reviewer queue, while all other submissions continue toward underwriting.
- Structured outputs: Review results are logged into the CRM, preserving an audit trail.
- Next action: Once reviewed, corrected records move back into the underwriting pipeline seamlessly.
This model keeps high-volume queues moving while still protecting accuracy.
Why Is a Human-in-the-Loop Review Important?
For brokers and funders, human-in-the-loop review is important because it combines automation efficiency with human judgment. Full automation may miss nuanced errors, but manual-only processes are too slow for high-volume environments.
Heron makes this balance practical by only escalating the minority of cases that need human input. This preserves speed, reduces backlog, and keeps underwriting reliable.
Common Use Cases
Human-in-the-loop review is widely used in submission intake and scrubbing.
- Handling low-confidence extractions, such as unreadable balances or unclear transaction entries.
- Reviewing flagged fraud indicators like mismatched names or possible tampering.
- Validating exceptions in deposit or debt patterns before advancing.
- Correcting incomplete or missing items that automation cannot resolve.
- Preserving an audit trail of manual interventions for compliance and transparency.
FAQs About Human-in-the-Loop Review
How does Heron integrate human-in-the-loop review?
Heron automatically escalates flagged or low-confidence cases into review queues, while allowing clean submissions to continue uninterrupted. Review results are logged into the CRM.
Why is human-in-the-loop review better than all-manual review?
It allows automation to handle the majority of work while reserving manual time for cases that truly require human judgment. This improves both speed and accuracy.
What outputs should teams expect from human-in-the-loop review?
Teams receive corrected or validated records, along with structured flags and notes that show where manual intervention was applied. This preserves accuracy while keeping throughput high.