Rules Studio

Some of the best rules writing tools out there are still very restrictive. Authors of these rules are made to live in a very narrowly defined space. One can only write rules in a certain way or elements of the rule writing process is limited to a pre-defined set of criteria. Some of the rules engines out there with a rule writing feature can only change the value (right hand side of the rule) and not the rules themselves.

LendAPI’s Rule Studio lets our bank partners and lenders fully build any rules possible with the widest range of mathematical operations and variables supplied by the lenders and third party data providers. There’s no limitation on what types of rules you want to drive to drive the most complex business rules one can define.

Our Rules Studio is connected to our high performance decision engine where hundreds and thousands of simultaneous requests could be processed at the same time allowing our banks and lenders to do even more.

And now we want to unveil a few new features at LendAPI Labs to give you a preview of how we are combining the most powerful rule writing capabilities and operational tasks in one design studio.

Rules Studio + Workflow Studio

One of the ligaments in our system to combine decision outcomes from our rules studio to other features and functions of the system is the concept of “Outcome”. These outcomes follow the four major rule outcomes such as Approve, Decline, Review and Request Additional Documents.

These rule outcomes often drive actions such as emailing the clients a link to sign, or a reminder to complete the application. We are taking these actions and embedding them directly into our rules studio and making the entire experience from credit underwriting rules and operational actions in one for a more intuitive design.

Timer Function

For example, we are adding a new decision feature called Timer. This Timer functionality allows a delay in actions triggered by a specific decision outcome. You can have a delay effect of the decision outcome on any particular action or you can set a reminder for applications to log into their portal and perform certain actions asked by the decisioning outcome.

The Timer function will be introduced as part of the Rule Studio in the coming releases and we can’t wait for you to try this new functionality and be creative in ways you could use this feature and manage your decisioning as well as your operational effectiveness.

Signature Function

The signature is always a popular outcome at the end of the application. Whether the lender or the bank want their applicant or applicants to sign, signature outcome often brings up a contract, promissory note or some type of consent for the applicants to sign or co-sign.

We made this signature outcome a more direct outcome of an approval chain of decision paths. In this soon to be released feature, you can directly link and edit the email template of the signature request at the end of a decision node.

Of course the user can always sign on the the application itself, but if you decide to use the email to trigger a reminder to sign a final document, you can use this new signature outcome editor straight into the rules studio decision nodes.

Pricing Engine as an embedded editor

For our clients to link the pricing engine and our rules studio even close, we are bringing in the pricing engine straight into the rules studio.

When a decision path results in an approval decision, we often ask the users to select a decision outcome, and most of these outcomes are of a pricing outcome. A pricing outcome in the content of LendAPI’s platform is in essence a pricing table or pricing chart indicating the loan amount, loan terms (number of months or years of repayment) and interest or any other type of data elements you want to return back into the platform and display this information as part of the loan offer page or straight into a primossory note or TILA boxes.

This level of integration will make it easier for our clients to understand the important linkages between our rules studio and our pricing engine. We hope that editing the pricing structure of the loan directly inside of the rules studio will bring a new level of situation for our product managers and risk managers to collaborate and speed up the deployment of the rules and pricing algorithms simultaneously.

Compliance and regulations

One of the biggest issues in home grown solutions as well as some of our competitors' products is that they have zero ability to track version changes. This is a big problem when it comes to upgrading your rules, models and pricing algorithm.

Tracking changes is one of the fundamental ways to be in compliance with state and federal regulators. Every change in our rules studio, pricing algorithm and even our consents and contract editors are tracked.

Not only do we track all the changes, the original author of the changes as well as the approval parties, you can also revert back to the previous set of rules and pricing on a dime in case of an emergency.

As part of the rule editing flow, once a ruleset is modified and saved, in order to promote these rules into production, our clients can set an approval path for a higher level of approval to review and confirm the changes before these rules can go into effect.

Of course, if something were to go wrong and we hope that doesn't happen, you can always use the version control section of the rules studio to revert back to the previous set of rules.

Rules Studio becomes a cross-functional collaborative platform

We often get asked about the type of roles at our bank partners that will use this platform to build. Our generic answer is that anyone with any technical abilities can use LendAPI’s rules studio to build rules and implement pricing models.

However, this platform is one of the best platforms for risk managers, product managers, compliance officers and chief technology officers and the like to collaborate on the same platform.

Risk management staff can work on rules, pricing and third party integrations. Compliance staff can work on workflow, consents, email templates and contracts. Technologies can work with our various APIs to link data and other enterprise systems right in our system.

Our rules studio and the overall LendAPI fintech deployment system is a true collaborative platform for everyone to join in and build their products simultaneously.