A loan management system for a retailer's own bank
Built new Loan Management System for a newly created greenfield bank issuing retail loans for an e-commerce player in-house, with the goal to offer loan origination services to other commercial retailers in the market.
What the business got
Challenge
A recent PE investment pushed a retail player to find a new scaling approach on a saturated market.
In a rare combination, they already issued their own retail loans in their commercial branches for high value electronics, growing some in-house banking experience.
Strategy
The decided to branch out to provide retail loans for other retail players, which now embarked them on the journey to get a banking license and build the platform on which they can define and sell retail loan products.
Our delivery
We built two main pillars of their banking core:
- the loan management system in GoLang optimized for high reliability and speed,
- and the engineering culture and initial team to grow out from, part from existing mature engineering organization, part from new hires.
The Loan Management System was to be built despite the ability to buy one because it was deemed to be a core capability in the expansion strategy and allowed us to make trade-offs for specific product needs relevant for them. This way the lengthy process of integration was bypassed for a moderate effort on custom build.
Outcome
Initial launch of the solution in 4 branches quickly scaled to country-wide availability and shortly for the first loans sold outside of their own branches.
The origination and servicing of the loans back-office efforts dropped, allowing them to focus on new product launches instead of maintaining older offerings.
Client testimonial
"Sandor bridges business needs into technology: he listens to what the business is trying to achieve and turns it into practical technical choices"
— CTO
The container architecture
A smaller scale seed of a micro-service architecture emerged as the mobile app delivered the origination process for the user while the product rules, logic, verifications and servicing remained in the Loan Management System (LMS) service.
Domain separation led to a simple but effective approach: LMS consisting of a service (API & command line interfaces), a database (product configuration and each issued loans servicing matrice) and an only internal admin UI (product parameters, versioning, retiring, and customer loan management) as an established pattern replicated among more domains.
Domains connected through event streams where each domain listens to the events they are interested in, e.g. a loan service update to be shown on the mobile app leads to a materialized view in that domain.