“Freedom to Create” Tour

I’ve been on the road since Tuesday (first flight out) and I got home Thursday, past mid-night. I got to visit investors, potential and current clients and most importantly to me, visiting our teammates. 

Maybe I am an old school guy now, but in person meeting is absolutely the best. There are things that your simplicity can convey over a camera. So the tour must go on. Next week I will be speaking at FinTech South in Atlanta on Embedded Lending. This is one of my most favorite subjects. 

We have a lot of retail clients that use our embedded finance technology to take control of their lives. They can interact with their customers, have full control of underwriting, pricing, compliance and funding. And they truly own the clients' relationships.

There are many embedded lenders that are a great checkout experience for retailers but they don’t provide full control, transparency and customization to retailers that want more. LendAPI provides a fundamental embedded finance infrastructure that allows retailers to have hyper focused customer experience, finely tuned underwriting and customized user experience as well as administrative experience through and through. Most importantly, they can now operate under their own branding. Retailers with LendAPI’s Embedded Finance Platform can now have the “freedom to create”.  

“The Platform”

LendAPI’s platform is getting better by the day and our v2.9.9 is on the horizon to be released this coming Wednesday. It’s packed with new features, enhancements that you will touch and feel.

I’ve been playing with the new build in our demo environment and providing feedback to Sam on a constant basis and it’s very polished. I am pleased with this build. There are just a few more tickets to be finished. Bob and Sam are putting the final touches on it before releasing the build into the QA and UAT environment.

I want to remind all of our readers that LendAPI is a software company and we are led by engineers with deep tech and industry experience that’s unparalleled in every way. And the benefit of our product is helping large banks, retailers to launch their products quicker to stay ahead of their competition.

LendAPI v2.9.9 will consist of over 100 tickets, epics and stories that are client focused. In the coming weeks, we will expand our engineering and product team again with one single goal of helping our clients to launch and grow. Nothing else matters. 

“New Team Members and New Advisors”

I want to welcome Andy Ivey to the team. He’s one of the most respected Decision Science Technologies in our industry. Most recently, he was the former Decision Engine staff engineer at One Main Financial. Prior to one main Andy was stationed at Provenier, Elevate Credit, Think Finance and State Farm. 

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Andy Ivey at Think Finance decades ago and I am superbly happy that he’s now joining LendAPI as our Head of Decision Science Technology.

Andy will be working with our Engineering Team and Customer Success Team to advance our platform delivery team with his decades of experience. We will officially announce Andy’s arrival in the coming weeks.

I also want to welcome Colin Darke, CEO of CompliSun and former General Counsel of RocketLoans to our advisory board. Colin and I have known each other for close to a decade and he’s a personal friend as well as a professional mentor to me. Colin runs a fantastic advisory firm as well as being an active member of our industry, working closely with the American FinTech Council to highlight issues impacting our industry. I am grateful for this willingness to serve on our advisory board. Colin is a fantastic artist and you can take a look at his creations on Instagram.

Next, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome Sharla Godbehere to our Advisory Board. Sharla and I have known each other for more than a decade. She is one of the most respected leaders and executives in our industry. Sharla has been with Equifax for almost 30 years. She’s made an incredible impact on the entire fintech industry and all of us owe her a debt of gratitude for helping our industry grow into an undeniable force. We are blessed to have Sharla joining our advisory board.

LendAPI Partner Podcast

I’ve been inviting and writing emails to folks on our platform to join our Podcast. There’s a lot of mic shy folks out there, but we got a few, the proud to join Rutger van Fassen, our esteemed host to grace our podcast studio. I hope new episodes will come soon.

Today, let’s go back in time and listen to one of our advisor Peter Renton. 

LendAPI Partner Podcast with Peter Renton, Founder of Renton & Co.

Peter Renton is one of the tallest figures in our industry and the word “pioneer” doesn’t do him justice. One of the forefathers of our space and a staunch supporter of our ecosystem. Please give it a listen and head on to Peter’s FinTech One on One Podcast, one of the oldest and longest lasting podcast series in FinTech.

LendAPI Academy

I was away but Kay is picking up the pace with LendAPI Academy, one of the most popular education series in FinTech infrastructure. This week, Kay dives deeper in our Product Studio and teaches us how to connect to Widgets and Connectors. I’ve watched it myself and gosh we’ve done a lot in the past year and a half. Please give this episode a proper look over and browse through the rest of our library. 

LendAPI Academy - Product Studio - Connecting Widgets & Integrations

I am going to be on the road again next week and I may not be able to produce more episodes, but I will get back in front of the camera soon!

LendAPI FinTech Marketplace

We have a bunch of marketplace joiners that I didn’t get a chance to onboard. It’s my fault for this giant delay! I am sorry.

I will get you guys listed in the coming weeks and again, I do apologize for the inconvenience. If you want to join our FinTech Marketplace, please email us at info@lendapi.com or go to our marketplace website and click on Join Marketplace. 

LendAPI Platform Release Notes - v2.9.9

Here’s a short preview of what’s coming in our next platform release. We will have a full release note published next weekend. 

In this release, we’ve given our trusty Pricing Engine a total facelift. In accordance with our new design language, I've been waiting for this for a long time. We are also in the process of facelifting other parts of our platform such as Outcomes and Email Builder. Those will come in our v3.0.0 release.

This up and coming release addresses a lot of customer related issues. We have small but powerful functionalities to help our clients live a better life. Kay calls them "Quality of Life” tickets. And she is absolutely right, it’s all about quality of life.

We also have a lot of new integration partners coming to our platform such as Equifax Digital Identity Trust, new Flinks products, Ice Kredit, Trust Science’s new scores, ValidiFi’s new scores and Ocrolus, plus many more.

We pride ourselves in having over 100 integrated partners in the coming weeks and enabling our technology partners is key to help our clients to launch their product as quickly as possible. We’ve got this web of APIs, solved.

What’s Next?

There are big changes in v3.0.0. LendAPI will have the biggest infrastructure upgrade in its history. We are working with one of the best infrastructure deployment companies in the world to beef up our deployment process to make sure we have seamless integration, deployment and a dynamically scalable infrastructure to meet our clients demands. This infrastructure upgrade will come in the next few weeks. We’ve been working on this for months to get us ready for the mega load that’s coming to LendAPI. We can’t wait for this hard work to pay off for the benefit of our clients.

A brand new UI Engine is coming to LendAPI! Tesla’s installing a brand new UNREAL UI engine and we are doing the same. Our UI Engine will give us the ability to dial in our User Interface down to the pixel. This will also give us an even faster and smoother experience where it matters the most. 

We want our clients, administrators, and clients to have the best experience interacting with LendAPI’a core platform and this UI Engine upgrade is in the center of this upgrade. We’ve also been working on this for months and this new UI Engine will be installed as part of our v3.0.0 release.

Lastly, end customer experience is key and communication between our clients and their clients is so important that we are unveiling LendAPI SMS Messaging Platform. This platform will completely change the way our clients communicate with their customers. Our clients will be able to send text directly to their customers' mobile devices. All of the conversations will be memorialized and end-client communication will never be the same!      

About LendAPI

LendAPI is a collaborative platform for banks, fintechs and retailers to launch any financial product instantly. Launch your next product with a free trial today at LendAPI.com  

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