Introduction

Boats.com is the world's largest boat listing company. Operating over 140 countries in 8+ different languages. Boats.com has over 350,000 boat listings at any given time. Boats.com is part of the Boat Group family of companies including Boat Trader and YachtWorld. We automated Boats.com’s entire underwriting process and brought them from manual underwriting interacting with their bank partners to a fully automated real time responsive system to all of their dealerships.

Boats.com commands millions of unique visitors a month with high intent buyers, an automated underwriting engine is a must for Boats.com to move at the speed of their potential clients. Boats.com owns more than 95% of all boat listings under 26 feet and this market domination needs a complete overhaul in their digital onboarding and decisioning process.

Big Overhaul

Before LendAPI, Boats.com was underwriting their deals manually and it took days to return a decision back to their dealerships. They were under pressure to deliver results to their bank partners as well. They needed a complete solution to solve for the speed of their underwriting so their dealership and their financing partners could move more inventory and financing to keep up with demand.

Their manual underwriting process was done with seasoned underwriters but there were inconsistencies and each deal was swayed with personal experience and they needed consistency and speed to process each deal with the same rigor and intent. In a high-intent market, a 48-hour delay isn't just a slow process, it’s a lost sale.

Boats.com quickly realized that their growth was constrained by the number of deals they can process by hand and hired a new digital team which identified LendAPI as their solution partner to build a high speed underwriting platform that can process hundreds of applications per second with scale that they need to grow.

Perhaps the most important problem was opportunity cost. The dealerships are unhappy with the speed of which Boats.com was returning a credit decision with their financing partner. This caused a lot of uncertainty with dealerships and forced their dealerships to shift to other financing options which caused the Boat Group millions of dollars of opportunities.

The age of real time underwriting is finally available with LendAPI and Boats.com quickly adapted their underwriting strategy to a fully automated underwriting system with all of the third party valuation vendors such as J.D. Powers plugged in as part of the critical valuation process. LendAPI saved Boats.com millions of dollars of development cost and brought in a fully automated underwriting platform within months.

Digital Transformation

With the newly established LendAPI underwriting platform, boats.com is now processing applications and receiving financing decisions instantly. This gave boats.com the scaling opportunity they needed to bring satisfaction to their financing partner as well as their dealership. The consumer is satisfied with the speed of financial decisions as well to understand their purchasing power.

Integrations to J.D. Powers Marine Sports valuation integration as well as credit bureau integration was already done when Boats.com started working with LendAPI which made onboarding an easy process. All that was left to do was to configure their underwriting decision as well as consents and promissory notes. If this platform was built in house, it would have taken years and millions of dollars to complete and an untold amount of money and time to maintain a platform to serve their banks and brokers.

LendAPI also provides a sleek user experience for Boats.com’s customers to quickly getting onboarded with an instant decision. Our entire Point of Sale system as well as our Loan Originations System is a complete program that enables any retailers, banks and credit unions to quickly and easily set up the entire consumer experience in weeks not years.

Rather than a multi-year, multi-million dollar internal build, Boats.com deployed a sophisticated, fully-integrated underwriting platform in a fraction of the time. By leveraging LendAPI’s pre-built integrations with J.D. Power Marine Sports and major credit bureaus, the onboarding was a matter of configuration, not coding. Boats.com was able to focus on their unique logic, consents, and promissory notes, while we provided the heavy-lifting of the infrastructure.

Key Results

Instead of days to make one single underwriting decision, boats.com can conduct thousands of transactions per second with consistency and accuracy. With a controlled decision process, we’ve reduced the chance for error, and achieved 100% adherence to the underwriting policy. The platform also increased the quality of decision by multiple folds which gives their lending partners a peace of mind.

Boats.com can now process all of their applications with the same team within a day which greatly reduces their overhead and sets them up for scale and success. Instead of waiting for a dev cycle to update a risk parameter, Boats.com's credit team can now adjust their own 'logic knobs' in real-time.

The instant funding and A.I. guided decision is the future and LendAPI’s platform is the only solution in the market that combines customer experience, decisioning, loan servicing in one platform. Our unique do-it-yourself approach gives the power and flexibility back to the retailers to manage and control their future by themselves.