“Freedom to Create” Tour

This tour is about to go into a high swing. I am making a small pit stop on Catalina Island, a small island (It’s the size of the smallest island in Hawai’i) off of the coast of Southern California. I am writing this on this magical island of connection and healing. 

After much needed R&R, I am heading into the Big Apple this coming Saturday and getting ready for the next leg of the tour which includes Finovate Fall and spending time in Minneapolis with Great North Ventures.

I will be on stage demo’ing LendAPI at Finovate Fall and spend time with friends and family as well as limited partners at the Great North Venture’s investor day. I am excited about both of these events. I can’t wait.

LoanPro’s Salt Flat Festival is taking shape, thanks to the organizers and there’s a lot of planning happening. It’s going to be a great event, I can already feel it.  We might partner up with LoanPro for an event at Money2020 later this year in Las Vegas. Look out for that developmental news.

The Platform News

Our little baby is turning 3, well v3.0.0. As you might well know, we release code on a daily basis and around two months ago, we were doing platform upgrades weekly. We since went into an every other week rhythm for platform releases but hotfixes are still happening daily.

We have a major feature announced in v3.0.0, which is our SMS Platform. This platform allows you to natively start chatting with your applicants right through our platform and right into your client’s mobile phones.  

Our SMS platform provides an even more intimate way to connect with your clients. All conversations are tracked and all of your staff members can chat with the clients together. Should someone go on vacation, you can still keep the conversation going. 

We built a website to display some of the functionalities in our SMS Platform. Check it out, here.

If you want to give it a test drive, please connect with us and we can show you a live demo. This feature will be available next week! 

We want to announce a major change to our pricing structure to give more flexibility and power to our clients. We will move two of the most powerful A.I. features to our Core pricing. Doc AI and Underwrite AI can now be enjoyed by our Core subscribers, free of charge.

We are adding SMS Platform to our Scale Plan free of charge for the time being to gather feedback from our scale subscribers. We can’t wait for you guys to start using our SMS/Texting platform.

Lastly, we are moving away from our unlimited plan and moving into a transactional plan. Depending on the platform subscription, per application fee (annual plan) of $1 to $0.6 will be assessed on top of our platform subscription fee. We believe striking this balance will help us to reinvest into the platform and bring more powerful features to your plans.

New Support Staff & Engineers

We have three new team members officially signed up with LendAPI and they will join us next week to help us keep on building our platform. We have another offer outstanding and we hope he will accept our offer and help us build.

We are also interviewing folks in the US with lending, banking, mortgage and just general domain knowledge. We are moving into a new era at LendAPI and one of the most important aspects of steering this ship in the right direction is its people. We need folks that share our same vision and not come to the team building their fiefdoms.

Sam and I have a lot to do siphoning through who’s who in this zoo.

LendAPI Partner Podcast

We have two fantastic episodes from two fantastic founders that we couldn’t wait to get your ears on. Check these episodes out from Channel Payments and Lendisoft

LendAPI Partner Podcast with Mike Coy - Founder & CEO of Channel Payments

LendAPI Partner Podcast with Rick Haskell, Founder & CEO of Lendisoft

Channel Payments is a huge up and coming payments provider that’s both efficient and cost friendly with lenders and fintechs alike. Reach out to Mike and hear his story, he’s an amazing founder and one that I respect tremendously. Ask him about his fishing expeditions.

Rick Haskell is someone I met earlier this year and he’s passion for good software oozes out of every conversation that I have with him. You should go and check out his entire lending software stack, he’s a great local guy (Orange County and since relocated) and his partner is equally capable. I am glad we have him on our podcast!

If you want to join our podcast, please connect with Rutgers van Fassen. I am going to spend some time with Rutgers in New York City next week and I hope to share a more creative mind with him. 

LendAPI Academy

No, it’s not a competition with Kay and I to see who can produce the most LendAPI Academy videos. It’s coming straight from our love language, which is to share this most productive platform we’ve built to date and make it yours to solve problems. Here are some episodes of Doc AI and Product Studio.

LendAPI Academy - Doc AI: Speed Up Onboarding with Driver License Scan

LendAPI Academy - Product Studio: Connecting Widgets & Integrations

One thing about Doc AI is that it’s capable of scanning any piece of document as we wish. With minimum training, we can now scan all sorts of tax documents and identity verification cards. Thanks to the advent of AI, we can pass this feature down to our clients and offer this tool as a free product to our scale partners.

Our Product Studio continues to be the best in the industry. You can build just about anything with our product studio. Outside of financial products, you can create applications of any type, be it insurance or payment merchant onboarding, we can do all of them. Your imagination really drives the creatives on our platform and we hope you login and create more.

LendAPI FinTech Marketplace

We have seven marketplace members joining us and I simply didn’t have the time to get them onboarded. This is a scarlet letter that I will carry into next week. Please accept my apologies for those that are waiting and I will get all of you guys listed and invite you guys to our podcast!

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 - v3.0.0 & SMS / Texting Platform

First of all, I want to thank our entire staff for getting our platform to v3.0.0. We love our platform and building this platform up one line of code at a time is something we take great pride in. I personally can’t believe that in less than a year and a half, our platform has grown into a full featured lending digital onboarding platform with all the fixings.

In this release we have some major feature announcements. Please keep this in mind that we will release v3.0.0 mid next week. 

SMS Platform (Chat with your clients)

SMS Platform. This has been one of the major enhancements to our platform where our clients (you) can text directly to our clients. We will make this feature available as a free tool to our Scale Plan users. Please enjoy.

The ability to chat with your clients directly on their mobile device is a game changer in this industry. Our clients have been requesting this feature for a long time. There is a ton of complexity managing the technology behind mobile networks, differentiating different messages per client and enabling group chat that allows your agents to chat with a single client simultaneously. 

This ability will help you to capture your clients attention immediately without having them to check their email or voice mail. 97% of the US population are active SMS users according to research. 

Your clients are on the go and you should be where they are by communicating with them wherever they are. We will continue to develop this technology with live face to face video conferencing with your clients to reduce the amount of friction for our break and mortar clients.  

Instead of coming to the branch, they can now have face to face conversation and satisfy their compliance needs to reduce the amount of traveling or while there’s inclement weather. 

New UI Infrastructure

We’ve been working on this for almost a quarter. We began building this platform with an UI construct that is fast and flexible but this construct has come to an end with our needs. We want to be infinitely more flexible with our platform user interface.

So we decided to move to a new UI library that gives us pixel perfect precision and finally gives us the control that we need to be able to lay down all of our design concepts with the finest precision. I for one have been looking forward to this upgrade for a long time.

Our clients will benefit from faster load time and more precise user interface. We will finally implement some of the finer details that really make our platform pop in the near future with this new design.

What’s Next?

The Co-Applicant has been put on the back burner for a few weeks and we will bring this back. It’s a complicated build by leveraging our Product Studio but we will get this feature out there as soon as humanly possible.

We have begun working on our Lead Generator Control Panel, a critical component for folks that buy leads through us. This will give our clients more control and transparency on how they would like to manage their campaigns, spend as well as time restrictions of their lead campaigns. We look forward to getting this out there for folks in the next release or so.

We have also started to lay down the groundwork for our reporting infrastructure. We need to build a replicated infrastructure that controls security, permissioning and speed for our clients to truly develop whatever data strategy they want off of their data. We hear you guys loud and clear and we are working on this as we speak.

We will also beef up our lender control to give more power to how you want your bank to offer waterfall to react to your available offers. This is something that we’ve been designing and I think Sam and I will spend a little bit more time to button this up.

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.