Loan application tracking system

The goal of this project was to create a secure, fast and user-friendly web-based platform, which can be used by employees of the company to manage end-to-end business processes.

Web

Frontend and Backend Development

Finance

Overview

The client is one of the very successful and established company in the USA, which helps the prospective home buyers to get them the home loan that matches their requirements. We as a team worked with the client to create the application that is mapped to their business process.

Business Goals

The goal of the project was to create a secure, fast, and user-friendly web-based platform, which can be used by employees of the company, to manage end to end business processes. The client wanted to transfer their current business process which is monolithic and requires a per-user license for each of their employee.

The new system will be the company’s proprietary tool, which will be reflecting the business process, and can be used across several branches spread across the country.

Challenges

Key Challenges

Every project brings a set of challenges that are needed to be solved. However, with proper planning and regular reviews with the stakeholders, these challenges can be easily overcome. During the development of the application, we faced challenges, which we can categorize as follow:

Business Challenges

Since the client is already a very established and old player in this business, the first and most important step was to make sure that the team has an understanding of it. This is very important, as we all believed that until the team does not have an understanding of the business, they will not be able to create the application that meets the client’s expectations.

Tech Challenges

The application requires integration with various third-party services, to pull, validate data related to loan applications, communicate through SMS, emails in real-time. These services need to be running and latency has to be minimized for the application so that users should not feel delay and information related to application should get updated in real-time.

We integrated the various 3rd party services, with different fail-safe options, so that if one service fails, the application will use the other one, and end-users will have a consistent experience.

The client is an established and old player in their business domain. As per the requirement of the business, the old data of the applicant if any in the system, affects their future transactions. So, the new system that was being developed, has to take into account all the dataset available in the application. The system needs to communicate with various 3rd party services in real-time and update the data accordingly. As such, we had to design a very robust infrastructure, which is not only secure and fast but also reliable. The infrastructure needs to be supporting the daily business and has to be running independently for various business processes. As such we choose the microservice architecture.

The Approach

Any project that we take up at Ahex begins from estimation and planning phases so that we can let our client know the time that the development would take and the required budget. We defined the client’s business model, inspected the cycle of various operations, essential investments, and several other aspects so that we could help them successfully transition their business to the proposed platform. We followed the agile methodology with slight variations to meet client expectations and targets. The business process was mapped and detailed documentation was prepared. Each of the steps and or processes were discussed in detail with the client to make sure that it mapped their day to day operations accurately, and during these discussions, all the shortcomings were pointed out and updated accordingly.

Following these two phases, we designed wireframes to show the client how the platform would work. Once all the organizational details were settled and the client approved the design, we entered the development phase. We worked on developing a responsive web portal, which will be used by the employees of the client company for their daily business process. Testing was an integral part of the development process. We strongly believe that it’s not possible to develop a top-notch platform without testing it for bugs and other issues. We wrote many scripts to automate the testing process, which helped us achieve the best efficiency and fix bugs even before it was launched.

Technologies Used

Our strong technical expertise and experience across various industries helped us get through the involved complexities with ease. We used the right technologies to build a platform that accurately meets the client requirement, which their company is using to manage their day to day tasks.

Frontend

HTML

CSS

Bootstrap3

Gulp

Angular6

Sass

Backend

Symfony

Mysql

Redis

php

SugarCRM

CMS

WordPress

Vcs

Git

JIRA

Confluence

Hosting/deploymet

AWS ElasticBeanStalk

S3

Route53

Amazon RDS

Third party tools

sendgrid

Credit Service providers

The Solution

The solution we developed covered all the use cases and mapped the actual business flow of the client organization, right from adding a new lead in the application to the processing of their loan.

Key features

User onboarding process
Adding new leads
Managing lead application form
Creating loan accounts
Regular updates to leads (SMS/E-mail)
Role-Based Access Control
Dashboard for users based on their roles
Reports
Credit reports
Third-party services integration for Loan processing
Previous Loan Information

Results

The final platform we developed covered all the functionalities, along with scope for future developments and enhancements as required. The platform is secure, stable, and easy to use as per the client requirements and feedback of the end-users. The entire development was closely monitored with the client and the feedback from the end-users was continuously incorporated in the development, which resulted in a great application for the client.

The new application has helped the client to centralize all the operations that are done through their different branches. It has reduced their dependencies on other commercial platforms, due to which company has reduced the operating cost, as they don’t need to buy licenses on a per-user basis for their employees.

Project Scaling In Future

The application has been successfully launched and is being used by the client across all the branches. Ahex is continuously working with them and providing after deployment services on a defined timeline. Also, all the feedbacks are being continuously taken care of, and as per the plan, it will be incorporated in the upcoming versions.