“Freedom to Create” Tour

As you can probably tell by now, I am 200% all in LendAPI. As the leader of this company, I must be the face of the company at every turn. Good, bad or ugly, I am responsible and I am proud to take on this responsibility.  

That said, I am sitting in my aisle seat and writing this week’s release notes and giving our friends and family a deeper look at what it takes to provide a platform you can trust and rely on. I won’t stop until you are satisfied with our work.

This leg of the tour is 6 days long. I landed in New York City tonight for Finovate Fall. This is the first time we are doing a live demo in front of thousands of people and I am ready to show off v3.0.0. Accompanying me is our Chief of Staff, Eric King. We are sponsoring a happy hour with Praxant, one of the best known System Integrators in our space. This is also the first time we are co-hosting events at the sideline of a conference. There’s a lot of “firsts” for us on this trip.

I am taking off from Finovate to Minneapolis where I will be part of Great North Venture’s investor day. Rob Weber, the founder of Great North Ventures has invited me to do a fireside chat with their LPs and I am very gracious to have this opportunity. Rob has been a staunch supporter of LendAPI since day one and I love him for it. We couldn’t ask for a better investor and a true friend of the firm.

After Minneapolis, I am headed back to the San Francisco Bay Area to meet with clients, partners, venture capitalists and attend my first official board meeting at San Jose State University, my alma mater. If you know me well, you know that I came from a family of professors and intellectuals. Education is my passion and our family’s priority as well.     

LendAPI Platform News

It is hard to believe that we have finished our 300th release. We increment our release in an x.x.x format and we have finally arrived at 3.0.0.

In this release, we included 160 tickets. It is a monster of a release. This release covers huge improvements from a completely new UI architecture and framework as well as our first release of our SMS Platform-to-Dice Texting Platform. I am going to share some more details in the sections below.

We have 4 new engineers joining us both onshore and offshore to support our platform development and we can’t wait for them to be integrated with our team and add additional capacity. We have a lot of work ahead of us and we need all the good people we can find.

We are also exploring Cursor and other A.I. tools for helping our engineers to gain more insights and capacity to build more. We are open for your feedback as well on which tools works the best to gain more capacity and knowledge.

LendAPI Partner Podcast

We have a fantastic episode by the Founder and CEO of SOLO, Georgina Merhom. She has a fascinating founding story and I hope you enjoy this episode below. SOLO is of course a member of our LendAPI FinTech Marketplace.

LendAPI Partner Podcast with Georgina Merhom CEO & Founder of SOLO

SOLO is creating a database of everything lending related to say the least and organized in a way that makes sense to banks and lenders. We recommend you check them out and get some ideas on how your financing database is organized. 

If you want to join our podcast, please connect with Rutgers van Fassen. Rutger has produced over 30 episodes of LendAPI Podcast and he’s a very popular fintech influencer and we are grateful for him to produce these episodes for us. Thank you Rutgers!

LendAPI Academy

We have a ton of people watching these episodes and we are excited to make them for you as well. This past week, both Kay and I were super busy with customer onboarding and demo calls and we didn’t have the time to record new episodes. But fear not, let’s review and visit our Risk Management content here:

LendAPI Academy - Credit Risk Management - 3 Episodes

We are not just building software for banks and lenders, we also need to understand their business deeply and therefore Credit Risk Management is central to what we do. These episodes will give folks a jump start on how to manage fraud and credit risk.  

We’d love to hear more of your feedback on how we can structure these episodes for you. For now, please enjoy over 20 academy episodes. Also, some of the old episodes are no longer relevant because our platform has gone through significant changes.

LendAPI FinTech Marketplace

I am going to work on these new marketplace members this weekend. I am terribly sorry for this delay, we just got way too busy with our new partnerships and clients. I will have a moment in New York City and I will work on these pronto.

Our members make a lot of money through us and If you want to join our FinTech Marketplace, please email us at info@lendapi.com or go to our marketplace website and there’s a membership form.

LendAPI Platform Release Notes - v3.0.0

User Interface Upgrade

Our entire user interface was upgraded with a brand new UI architecture and libraries. With this upgrade, we refactored all of our major features such as our Agent Dashboard, we also moved customers into the agent dashboard to reduce the clutter. 

We also refactored how to block bad applicants and customers as well. For our existing clients, you are also enjoying the new and speedier version of our platform with a new unified look and feel of all our features.

SMS Platform-to-Text Messaging Platform

• Introducing a brand new SMS Texting feature within our Agent Dashboard. In the new dashboard, you can now text the clients directly from our platform. This is a powerful tool where our clients can text their clients directly on their mobile services.

• We are managing all of the backend texting infrastructure so you don’t need to worry about the complexity of various texting technology needs. This is a free product for our Scale Plan users and, for all other users on the platform, please reach out to us and we can give you a texting plan. Let us know if you want to try it out.

• As part of the SMS Texting Platform, we’ve developed a chat room database where all the text messages are saved and you can track multiple agents chatting with the same end client.

Third Party Integrations:

• We’ve built a brand new Equifax Reseller API platform for us to deliver Equifax products securely and with scale. We are onboarding our first reseller clients and the pipeline is ready to go.  

• We finally integrated with Checkbook.io as an integrated partner. Checkbook is selected by one of our personal loans clients to be used as a payment processor. We are glad that they are now integrated into our platform for everyone to enjoy.

• We added more TransUnion variables from CRS Credit integration for our clients. These additional variables support more in-depth credit underwriting models for our clients. 

• We made a few fixes with Plaid Monitor for one of our Auto Lending clients. We are still struggling with Plaid’s IDV product. I think there are some major issues with Plaid’s platform. They are moving too fast and their support staff aren’t up to snuff with their own products. We also made a few adjustments to call Plaid’s webhook at each tenant level.

• We also added a few more Pave variables for our clients to support their ongoing underwriting process. Pave is a great cash flow analytics company and I think you should check them out at PaveFi.com.

• We also resolved some LoanPro integration issues for our clients as well with their amortization API. It’s all good now. We love LoanPro and we have a ton of common clients.

• We also fixed a few things around the Prove widget for one of our clients. It’s all better now.

• We also pulled hundreds of more variables from Experian to support one of our larger lead generation clients.

• We finished our integration with OmniaPay finally for one of our medical financing clients. Thank you guys for the coordination.

• We made a few enhancements to our Salesforce Integration on behalf of our commercial real estate clients.

• We also tighten up the Flinks integration as well. Its working better now.

Doc AI

• Doc AI has been a popular feature for almost all of our clients and we are making improvements. In this release, we made enhancements to the download format.

• We’ve added SSN Card and Driver Licenses to Doc AI as new document formats supported by Doc AI platform. We’ve made improvements to how Bank Statements are scanned and extracted. There’s improvement in how credits and debits as well as beginning and ending balances. 

What’s Next?

What I wrote last week is still very relevant to our overall product roadmap. We hear from our clients time and again asking for these features and believe us, we want to get their as soon as possible as well.

Please take a look at these four features we are developing in v3.0.1 and v3.0.2 and let us if we are missing anything and you would like to see on our immediate product roadmap.

• The Co-Applicant: We are picking this back up again after our historic v3.0.0 release. So hopefully we will get this feature out for clients to design their own dynamic co-applicant flow.

• Lead Generator Control Panel: We will dedicate resources in the coming release to get this Lead Gen control panel out in the hands of our lenders that buy leads from lead generators. We will show this off to a select number of clients to gain more insights and feedback.

• Reporting infrastructure. We are building a secure and speedy reporting platform. Not just a hastily made reporting tool that is slow and cumbersome to use. This is a high priority for us this coming release and we want this to get done as soon as possible to give the data back to the people, in real time. 

• Lender/Bank Control. Lenders are asking us to configure waterfalls and randomization with their bank partners and we are working on these controls as well. Not too dissimilar to our Lead Gen Control Panel. Sam and I have given a lot of thoughts to how this could be done and give all of the configurations to our clients to direct traffic.

About LendAPI

LendAPI is a super orchestration platform that helps banks, fintechs and retailers to build their application and manage their applications with tools that are easy to use and powerful at the same time. Our platform is connected to all enterprise applications as well as fraud, credit and open banking applications. You can launch and manage all your products and applicants in one place. A completely private labeled platform you’ve been waiting for. 

Follow us on Linkedin, X, YouTube, and check out our Decision Engine, Product Studio, Underwrite AI, Doc AI, Agent Dashboard, SMS Platform as well myOCR.ai. Check out more content at LendAPI Academy, Podcast, and our Weekly Newsletter with our Marketplace Slack Community.