By
This year, one of our biggest web application development projects involved building a custom loan processing application for financial lender FTL Finance.
Our partnership with FTL over the past year and a half has given us the opportunity to put most of our web skills to use, from branding and website design to search engine optimization and PPC advertising strategy. But the loan processing application represented the most UX strategy and app development-heavy portion of our work for FTL.
As a growing financial lending company with properties spanning multiple industries, FTL realized their loan processing method was in need of a serious upgrade and came to Integrity looking for a solution.
The new application would have to do what their old processes hadn't. A major goal of the project was to increase the application's security and stability in order to keep applicants' information protected. We also sought to simplify FTL's process and to build a single application that could house all of their properties—the old method required a completely separate application for each of the company's lending properties.
The Integrity team recognized that it would be impossible to build the new application without completely reimagining FTL's business processes.
"Since it was built over time, the old process wasn't fully mapped out, which made it unclear exactly what happened to an application once it was submitted," says Integrity Project Lead Jamal McLaughlin. "So our biggest challenge was in discerning exactly how FTL had been processing applications and where we could improve that process and create a better user experience."
Despite the haziness of the old process, we worked closely with FTL to build out a simple, effective way to process loan applications moving forward, and started building the application.
Part of simplifying the process involved moving previously manual pieces of the system onto the web.
It also involved a number of third-party integrations at various parts of the application process: TransUnion's credit checking system, DocuSign's electronic signature technology, SalesForce's CRM and LeaseComplete's loan processing software. Any integration adds layers of complexity to a project, and that didn't change for this application.
A major shift from FTL's old process to the new application was the consolidation of the company's loan processing systems. This means the company's various lending properties are now all using one loan processing application, rather than three separate ones. The new app also has the ability to scale, so that as FTL grows and expands into more industries, they won't need to create new applications.
The application has been up and running for six months now and FTL is enjoying the intuitive application and streamlined loan processing system. That doesn't mean we've stopped working with FTL to improve the process even more! We're excited to head into the new year continuing our work with FTL by helping them expand into new markets in 2016.
In need of a custom web application for your company? We'd love to help you build it! Get in touch.
