Product enhancements for an existing nbfc product challenges

In the finance industry, the NBFC (Non-Banking Finance Industry) is seeing a northward trend as they successfully have serviced those who usually have no access to formal credit. Their ability to move fast and tap into specific customer segments such as SME’s and individual retail customers have contributed to the stellar performance of this sector. Additionally, the global NBFC sector has seen a significant transformation and is now being seen as a successful contributor to the state exchequer as well as for wealth creation opportunities. However, as technology begins to play an important role in the finance industry, the NBFC industry too has to dive in the technology bandwagon and invest in technology for positive business results. 

One of our clients, a company in the NBFC space, provides financial support to those people who want to buy a car but have a less than perfect credit score. The company takes a look at the credit score and borrowing history of the customer and goes beyond the traditional confines of credit analysis. They use, comprehensive sales controls, streamlined operations processes and a very high degree of customer service to both customers and their dealers. To ensure that they deliver on the promise of ‘Responsible Lending’ where both the dealer and the customer achieve high levels of satisfaction with their transaction, they had to make sure that their internal processes and systems work seamlessly and effortlessly.

This client approached us as they needed a comprehensive technology solution to process their applications and loans. This solution had to have several sections; first, which handled the users, dealers, and inventory; second, that managed the credit processing; third, the deal tracker that tracked the loan applications that came in from different dealers or other sources and fourth, based on payment frequency, maintain all the details for each loan application. We also had to make sure that the application manages all processes, from credit application, pulling of credit reports from third-parties, to the funding. The solution had to be robust enough to calculate whether a particular loan should be funded or not, based on several factors that were calculated and stored in it. While implementing this project we faced a few technology challenges but we navigated those successfully. This blog captures our leanings -

 Domain Knowledge:

The finance domain is quite complex and to build a solid technology solution, we needed to build domain knowledge. The team thus had to familiarize itself with the several calculations and criteria’s associated in this domain to gain the complete knowledge and expertise of this sector. To achieve this, our team researched and read everything that was needed to gain a thorough understanding of the lending industry such as lending and bankruptcy rules etc. and also exchanged notes extensively with the client to make sure that the knowledge acquisition was exhaustive and complete.

Integrated Complex Credo Functionality:

The Credo is a complicated functionality as it contains complex and sensitive data. The first challenge that the team had to work on was to understand the report that was coming in from Credo. In order to show the Credo report on the web page, we had to first convert it from XML to PDF. To be able to effectively show it on a web page, the team had to understand which data should be shown when and in which format. The data display depends on the various rules related to bankruptcy. The team had to learn all the rules to be able to implement the right design and logic.

Cloud Migration:

Our client wanted to adopt the cloud, but was unsure of which cloud provider to use. At that time, the application was in use on the Go Daddy server. Based on the application requirement, the team evaluated various cloud providers to assess which cloud service would service our client’s needs best. Our CTO personally got involved in the project at this stage, assessed the cloud service providers and proposed that our client evaluates Appharbor and Azure. We did a comprehensive POC for our client on both the options and presented the comparison checklist to our client post which, they selected Azure.

We then proceeded to aid the migration process. To ensure a smooth migration, we made sure that we have a streamlined and fool proof migration plan in place. We had to make sure that the live database was tested so that application performance did not suffer during and after the migration. On analysis, we realized that we needed to do the following things to make sure that the migration goes as planned:

• Upgrade the database size
• Change the listings to ensure that only required records were fetched
• Plan and itemize the cloud migration checklist and identify what would be migrated on each day
• Download all the files and documents hosted on Go Daddy and migrate those to the new cloud server

Zoho Integration:

Our client had a Zoho project that they had outsourced to a third-party for estimation. While the client waited for an estimation from the third party, on request from our client, we worked on how to implement it from our end. While the other vendor failed to provide an estimation to our client even after over two weeks, within that same time frame, we went ahead and worked out an implementation plan and prepared a POC for the same for our client. We also identified how we could integrate Zoho reports. Seeing our efforts, our client decided not to outsource Zoho to a third party and entrusted us with the responsibility of the same.

Performance Improvement:

In order to maintain the performance of the product, we had to make sure that the application could take advantage of technological advancements that came with time. However, since the application’s logic was complex, any change to the existing code impacted the application performance. We knew to improve application performance we had to upgrade to MVC5 and EF 6. However, this involved changes in data layer level as well as in main code. To ensure that this could be executed seamlessly, our team members took additional efforts to identify what exact changes we needed to implement. On identification of that, the team made the changes to the existing code. This was followed by a series of thorough regression tests to ensure that the code changes have not disturbed any existing functionality. The results were astonishing - We were not only able to make the application upgrades easily but also saw a dramatic improvement in the application performance.

Technology Stack:

We had used agile development methodologies to complete this project. By involving the client, we planned a detailed delivery cycle and together defined the priorities. We had used ASP.NET 4.5, MVC 5, Entity Framework, AJAX, jQuery, ADO.NET, SQL Azure, Microsoft Azure PaaS, Microsoft Azure IaaS, Web API as the technology stack for this project and also implemented several third-party integrations such as Credo, PDS, Dealertrack, NADA, Black book, Mandrill, Twilio and Zoho.

Amongst other things, at the end of the project the client experienced the following benefits:

• Improved application performance and productivity owing to application optimization because of continuous technology upgrades.
• Reduced human error as manual data entry to calculate dealer fees etc. was replaced and instead the underwriters could download the prefilled data in Excel file and send that data back to the portal.
• Improved and faster communication with dealers and lower turnaround time to close loan deals and streamlined better email communication.

Needless to say, the client was more than satisfied with the application performance and the performance of team Clarion.