iLending Direct: Auto Refi Platform
Challenge overview
iLendingDirect set out to modernize its existing loan application process which had numerous manual components with the goal of increasing the depth of features, create an improved user experience for both agents and end-customers, boost performance, and lower operations and maintenance costs. To that end, in 2017, they started working with a third-party development partner on a web application. It became clear after some months that the project was failing in numerous areas – development timeline, budget, features, and performance. iLendingDirect brought in the Tech Fabric team to evaluate what had been built, and to partner with the internal team to reimagine the solution and identify a way forward that would achieve the original goals as well as be improved upon over time.
“The experience of working with TechFabric has been really productive and valuable on a lot of levels – they’ve helped the internal team grow by showing us how to utilize the cloud and Azure, bringing new technology and demonstrating how to leverage all of that functionality.”
Solutions
Improving the Lead to Loan Process
To accommodate iLendingDirect’s customer-focused business strategy, TechFabric helped develop the Auto Refi Platform (web application) using the ASP.NET MVC framework, Azure Cloud Services using an integrated Agile development process.
The application, which went live in April 2018, is designed to accommodate the continuously changing workflow and help iLendingDirect’s call center agents turn potential leads into loans. The Auto Refi system includes features such as real-time web-based chat built using Twilio. TechFabric helped in further improving the application by suggesting the client use Event Store, a functional database, and service bus architecture design to improve the Lead to Loan process.
“With our manual system, our loan consultants had to understand partners’ rate sheets and all the rules that went into these rate sheets and how they process loans,” said Mark Lindley, Managing Director of Information Technology and Systems. “Now that we’ve automated a lot of this, not only have we been able to cut down on our agent onboarding time, but because the system already has access to the current rate information, our loan consultants are able to provide customers loan options far more quickly and accurately than before.”
The data (leads) received from various sources are imported into the Auto Refi Platform using REST APIs. TechFabric helped in the successful migration of highly secure data from on-premises (SQL Server database) to Azure Cloud database and setup CI/CD for code management using VSTS.
Results
Results
Like TechFabric, iLendingDIRECT followed an Agile development process introducing new functions and features every month. From a technology perspective iLendingDirect has been able to scale the application and add feature functionality without significant rewrites. From a business perspective iLendingDirect can quickly grow its lead base within the system and can provide the products their customers are looking for more quickly and accurately.
