Company Overview
Above Lending is a forward-thinking financial services company that offers a range of innovative products designed to empower individuals to manage their finances effectively, make informed decisions, and ultimately achieve financial stability.
Project Overview
Go Between partnered with Above Lending as they began preparations to rebuild their loan origination platform. While their existing system had proven the viability of the product, it became clear that it would not support the organization's long-term growth and maintainability objectives. Our team collaborated with key members of Above Lending's engineering and product leadership to design and build a new version of this system. The core features needed to encompass the entire loan lifecycle, from lead import through application, verification, and underwriting processes, to final loan onboarding in LoanPro, their loan servicing platform.
Above Lending had initially planned to leverage an off-the-shelf CRM platform as the foundation for this system, aiming to offload core responsibilities such as agent task management, email marketing, and workflow automation to expedite the rebuild. After evaluating several CRM systems, Quickbase was initially selected. However, our detailed evaluation and prototype revealed significant limitations, including low API rate limits, limited development/deployment management tools, and general API complexity. Based on these findings, our team recommended re-evaluating the CRM selection.
After further analysis, we identified Freshsales as a better fit for the project. Over the next four months, our team of four engineers implemented the Above Lending origination process within a new Ruby on Rails backend service. Our key contributions included:
Architecture Proposal
The initial scope required replicating the existing functionality of the legacy platform. With limited documentation and a challenging codebase, our team conducted a thorough analysis of the existing system. We documented the architecture, including component roles, third-party integrations, data models, and workflow diagrams outlining loan origination operations. This formed the foundation for our implementation proposal, detailing how the CRM system would be integrated into the new platform.
Decision Engine API Design
Working with a third-party platform that manages Above Lending's decision engine, our team collaborated with their engineering team to design a JSON-based API. This API provides offers for prospective borrowers and identifies required underwriting activities for each application.
Lead Ingestion
We designed and developed a robust process for handling daily lead imports via SFTP. The system retrieves, parses, and validates CSV files, creating or updating records in both the backend service's database and Freshsales. Our implementation prioritized fault tolerance, observability, and performance throughout this critical daily operation.
Contract Management
After identifying limitations in DocuSign's standard integration, our team built a custom solution for managing borrower contract signing. This included implementing DocuSign API calls, developing webhook endpoints for contract updates, and integrating an embedded signing workflow into Above Lending's frontend application.
Loan Onboarding
We tackled the challenge of integrating with Above Lending's existing loan servicing systems, where the handoff process was poorly documented. Through careful analysis of the legacy system, our team documented the necessary sequence of steps for onboarding approved applications. We translated this into a clear design for the new platform and created structured implementation tasks.
The new originations platform has been deployed alongside the existing system, with traffic being gradually migrated over. This approach has minimized risk and allowed early detection and correction of any gaps or incorrect assumptions in the implementation. As utilization of the new platform increases, we continue to leverage its enhanced capabilities and efficiently implement new features as business opportunities arise.