Greensill Capital
Greensill Capital Collapse
Estimated impact: $10B+ in frozen funds; 3,000+ jobs at risk in GFG Alliance
Supply chain finance firm collapsed when Credit Suisse froze $10B in linked funds. Greensill had been financing "prospective receivables" (invoices that didn't yet exist) and concentrated exposure in Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance.
Decision context
Founder Lex Greensill convinced Credit Suisse asset management and SoftBank to back increasingly aggressive lending against future receivables. Insurance coverage from Tokio Marine was not renewed but this was not disclosed to fund investors.
Decision anatomy
Red = risk factor present · Green = protective factor present
Biases present in the decision
★ Primary driver · Severity estimated from bias type and decision outcome
Toxic combinations
Reference class base rates
Across all 143 curated case studies in our library:
Lessons learned
- Supply chain finance against prospective receivables is unsecured lending in disguise
- Insurance coverage status must be continuously verified, not assumed
- Concentration risk in a single counterparty defeats the purpose of diversified trade finance
Source: UK Parliament Treasury Committee report on Greensill Capital, 2021; FT investigation (News Investigation)
We caught these patterns in Greensill Capital's own record — before the outcome.
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Workflows that fire on decisions like Greensill Capital’s
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