“Freedom to Create” Tour

The “Freedom to Create” Tour continues in the San Francisco bay area. I gave a talk to UC Berkeley students and students around the world about entrepreneurship in the tech space. I had a great conversation with the organizer Gigi Wang and this was my second time on UC Berkeley campus. The first time was attending a Rancid concert two decades ago. Good times. 

Next week, I am returning to the SF Bay area continuing our conversation with potential partners to grow our business. I tell people that I am either selling shares or our product and one of them is not the same as the other. 

The tour is gearing up for Lend360 and LoanPro’s Salt Flat festival and I can’t wait to see clients, partners and our competitors. It will be a great fall and end of the year since the Feds have signaled rate cuts next month. Even though the market may have baked in some of this excitement, lending activities will rise and LendAPI is at a perfect spot to capture this growth.

I want to thank all of the friends and family that cheered us on while I am on the road. These trips aren’t easy so I want to thank our troop for holding the fort down while I am out there sourcing for deals. I want to thank my wife as well. She had major surgery on Thursday while I was on the road and I had one of my business partners pick her up from the hospital. There’s a cost to it all.  

The Platform News

Three things happened to our platform this past week, we officially shipped v2.9.9 with over 80 tickets in tow from enhancements to bug fixes.

The second thing is that we successfully installed DuploCloud. This piece of software will allow us to have more automation in deployment and reduce issues on releases. It will also help us manage Kubernetes to deploy and scale our containers. Our team and the DuploCloud engineers worked on this for over a month and we finally cut it over last night. 

As we rocketed past 40 million applications, there will be more demand on our systems and we want to spend every penny to make sure our platform is built for the future and that our clients will never have to think about system performance, scalability of our platform and any downtimes during our releases.

I am also featured on The Great North Ventures’s website with a Q&A Interview titled “‘Embedded Everywhere’: Tim Li on the future of lending, AI, and VC scrutiny”. Thanks to Rob Weber and their team to continue to support us!

LendAPI also joined the American FinTech Council. It’s a great honor and privilege to be accepted into this group filled with major fintech players. I want to thank Phil Goldfeder and their team for making this happen. Thank you. See press release here and here.   

New Team Members

We finally have our QA Engineer Vishal Chauhan joining us. We made an offer to him a few months ago and after his notice period, he’s finally here and hitting the ground running. PLease be on the lookout for more announcements on Vishal. We are busy designing his avatar and his own press release. Yes, everyone is important to our firm.

We have two more engineers entertaining our offer to join LendAPI. One backend and one fullstack with an affinity to backend. One will join our platform team and the other will join our implementation team. A few weeks ago, we split our engineering team into two groups, one group focuses on platform and the other focuses on implementation.   

Both of these engineers will start sometimes at the beginning and at the end of September. We are looking for more people joining our team, please check out our careers section and reach out to Arvind and Sarthak and them your resumes.

LendAPI Partner Podcast

Have we got new episodes for you guys? There are three episodes locked and loaded in our LendAPI Partner Podcast section and here they are:

LendAPI Partner Podcast with Steven Thompson, CEO & Co-Founder at ScoreMyCash

LendAPI Partner Podcast with Jake Pimental, CEO & Co-Founder of Tennis Finance

LendAPI Partner Podcast with Alex Gonikman, CEO & Co - Founder of True North

Honestly, I haven’t had the chance to listen to these new episodes but I will soon. I will give an honest take on these episodes in the future blog posts but I am very excited to have these founders and CEOs to talk about their story, why they exist and some memorable moments of their company history. 

If you want to join our podcast, please give us a call or contact Rutgers van Fassen. Our esteemed podcast host!

LendAPI Academy

We have some new episodes that YouTube picked up as expert noise. For the first time, our episodes have gotten over 100 views or watched at its premier! Thanks YouTube. It just shows you that persistence wins everytime. We will have new episodes soon. Thanks Kay for doing this.

LendAPI Academy - Product Studio - Connecting Widgets & Integrations

We will have more episodes coming out on a weekly basis and be on the lookout for these. We are using these episodes for education purposes as well as client education. Surprisingly, a lot of people watch these episodes and we get a ton of feedback from them. Thanks for watching these episodes and we love to hear from you.

LendAPI FinTech Marketplace

I am the bottleneck when it comes to the FinTech Marketplace and I have to admit to this. I will get new members installed soon and please keep those requests coming, we will get them looked at and get you in. Come to think of it, I might to pass this torch to someone else to manage.

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 Production Release

Okay, we have another giant of a release we called v2.9.9. This release was pushed into production mid last week. This is also the last release we are doing the old way before moving into our DuploCloud environment to manage all of our releases going forward. 

In this release, it’s packed with enhancements, features and bug fixes and we will highlligh some good ones below.

Platform Enhancements:

• The ability to redirect urls with https protocol. 

• We also added the ability to redirect clients at the end of application to their client portal.

• We added and are maintaining a new backend variables library.

Agent Dashboard:

• Adding OTP verification as part of the logging process.

• We made several enhancements to the Email tab to track email statuses accordingly.

Product Studio Updates:

• We resolved a back button issue with the application online form.

• We also added SSN validation code.

• We implemented a manual fill approach when Prove fails to auto populate PIIs.

• We fixed a small issue to resolve Product Studio from picking up the wrong product version.

• We resolved an issue when the document was uploaded during the application process.

• We added an Appointment Scheduler feature for our storefront users.

• We added the ability to redirect Approve/Decline/Request for More Information and Decline pages as part of the Product Studio functionality.

• Rules Studio Updates:

• We added Rule ID to the rules studio list view.

• We also made some enhancements to the look and feel of Rules Studio.

• We added code to prevent unpublished rules in the rules engine from affecting active rules.

• We fixed a minor issue with the logical function within the Rules Engine.

• We fixed an issue when there’s a data picker variable in the rules studio and at UAT running mode.

• We made enhancements to how nodes getting deleted and added again.

Contract Builder Updates:

• We updated the contracts with new compliance changes with respect to the AI Agent

Client Launch Updates:

• We added more leadgen fields to a particular client to allow them to do more analytics.

• We enabled more features for one of our patient financing clients to add more sub-tenants to manage their health insurance partners.

• We added more pagination features for our real estate financing clients.

• We added more attributes for one of our clients with their Agora integration.

• We enhanced the Financed Rehabilitation feature for one of our real estate clients.

• We added additional variables from TransUnion for one of our credit card clients.

• We added some derived variables to add up monthly payment obligations for particular clients in the Equifax credit report.

• We resolved an # of ADU (Additional Dwelling Unit) through an API call for our real estate financing client.

• We added a Loan Calculator API for our Marine Equipment financing client.

• Cleaned up multiple list views for our Electric Vehicle financing client to get them launched.

• We added an iframe experience for our store front lenders.

• Third Party Integration:

• We added the Equifax Digital Identity Verification tool.

• We also added more variables to the Model Studio.

• We further enhanced our LoanPro integration around their amortization calculation API.

• We are fixing some USIO payment API to get them ready for another client.

• We made some enhancements to our Lead Sherpa integration.

What’s Next?

We are working on an SMS platform that will change the way our clients communicate with their applicants. You will get a glance at this on a dedicated page we’ve built for our SMS Platform. We are hoping to release this platform enhancement during our 3.0.0 release in two weeks.

We are also working on a dynamic co-applicant feature where under certain circumstances a co-applicant request will fire off to help the main applicant to get approved.

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.