Consolidating platforms and improving release standards for a non-bank lender

The client is a U.S. non-bank lender that finances small and mid-sized businesses with working capital, term loans and lines of credit. Applications arrive through a direct sales organization and through a partner network of independent sales organizations. Volume is high and approval is selective, so the quality and speed of the decision between those two points is the business.

The company grew quickly and built systems to match as it went, reaching 19 delivery teams. Coherent Solutions has been an engineering partner for over two years, with more than 30 engineers across loan origination, Salesforce, the legacy PHP estate, data engineering and QA.

At a glance

Client: A U.S. non-bank lender providing working capital, term loans and lines of credit to small and mid-sized businesses.

Industry: Financial services, SMB lending.

Challenge: Rapid growth had produced 19 delivery teams, two parallel CRMs, point-to-point integrations to credit and identity providers, and no documented processes or standards. Underwriting was manual, approvals were slow, and production releases were rolled back often enough to be costly.

Outcome: Coherent owns development and releasing for loan origination, after a transition that took close to a year and ended with the platform vendor's contract. One QA and release standard covers every delivery team, third-party data sits behind a single gateway, and the architecture direction is Salesforce-first with a costed migration plan. The lender is now scoping a checkout process it would own outright.

Coherent's role: Embedded engineering partner across loan origination, Salesforce, legacy PHP, data engineering and QA. Supplied the delivery lead who took loan origination over from its vendor, and the QA lead for the lender's entire delivery organization.

The challenge

The lender had outgrown the way it built software. Growth had added systems, teams and integrations faster than it added the documentation and standards to coordinate them, and leadership recognized the company could no longer run the way it had at a quarter of the size.

Five problems shaped the engineering agenda.

• Two CRMs, one business. A Salesforce implementation and a PHP platform built more than a decade earlier both ran in production. For older products, sales sat in Salesforce while underwriting, collections and payments stayed in the legacy platform.

• Manual underwriting and slow decisioning. Prequalification and approval depended on manual steps and on data pulled individually from each credit, identity and document provider.

• Releases that rolled back. Testing happened in UAT, defects surfaced in production, and rollbacks followed. On live funding and payment flows, each one carried operational cost.

• No shared record of how anything worked. Onboarding, handover and incident response all depended on the people who happened to remember.

• A bought platform that did not fit. Loan origination ran on an off-the-shelf digital lending product, customized for the lender by the vendor that built it. The architecture did not match how the lender works, the application carried a large set of features the business never used, and support and hosting fees continued regardless.

Our approach

Coherent started inside the lender's existing teams and moved into ownership as the engagement proved out. The lender's engineering managers ran delivery at the outset and brought Coherent in for capacity. That changed, stream by stream, into accountability for outcomes.

Taking loan origination out of the vendor's hands

The vendor that built the loan origination platform had customized it for the lender and continued to develop and support it. The lender asked Coherent to move that development onto our team.

The vendor had no reason to move quickly. Its own processes governed how requirements were confirmed and how work shipped, and its contract paid it for the work being transferred away. For close to a year the two teams ran in parallel, at first on the same stories, with scope released to Coherent's side only as far as the vendor's position allowed. Our delivery lead worked inside that arrangement, learning how the implementation had been built and why, while the team put its engineers through the certifications the platform requires. When the vendor's contract ended, the whole of it sat with Coherent.

We own development and releasing today, with three developers and a QA engineer on the stream. DevOps sits on the lender's side with a Coherent engineer inside that team, and the lender keeps approval rights over what ships. The lender has been rebuilding how it plans and releases, so the team now works to a different process than the one the vendor ran.

Scoping a checkout the lender would own

The lender is now scoping a checkout process of its own, to replace the part of the vendor platform it actually uses. The monthly licensing and hosting bill covers the whole product, not the portion the business runs on.

The lender has started making this concrete. It brought in a product owner dedicated to the rebuild, and it is planning to grow the team so one group supports the existing process while another builds the new checkout.

Consolidating on Salesforce while keeping legacy supportable

Salesforce is the lender's strategic system of record, and five teams work on it. The newest product was built Salesforce-only from the start, which set the direction for what follows. A new partner portal, close to release, connects directly to Salesforce and bypasses the older partner API.

The legacy PHP systems still carry core processes, so the work there is about keeping them safe to run. Coherent upgraded the partner API to a supported PHP version, and the older platform continues to serve the products that depend on it while the lender decides how to retire it.

Simplifying integration and data

Coherent's integration work reduced the number of connections the lender has to own.

• An event bus carries traffic between internal systems and out to third parties on a publish and subscribe standard. A payment event reaches every subscribed system without bespoke wiring.

• Credit, identity, document intelligence and background data now arrive through a single gateway rather than a direct integration per provider, from sources including Experian, Plaid, Ocrolus and LexisNexis.

• Mambu orchestrates accounts and payments between Salesforce and the payment systems, including bank responses.

• Snowflake consolidates the databases behind every system, and a dedicated team builds curated views. A team needing data from several sources reads one view instead of many databases.
  
  

Establishing QA and release standards

Coherent's QA lead owned quality across the lender's entire delivery organization, internal and external teams alike, for roughly 18 months, until the lender hired a permanent QA director. The work concentrated on the rollback problem, covering how releases are tested, what has to be true before one ships, and which standards apply to every team rather than to one. Scrum practice was strengthened alongside it.

Putting AI into the delivery workflow

Developers work in Cursor, and QA adopted it for test case authoring. The lender approved the tooling and provided the licenses, which matters for a lender with compliance exposure on how code and test artifacts are produced.

The solution

The lender now has a delivery organization with standards and one strategic direction for its platform. The application path runs end to end. An application arrives from direct sales or a partner, data on the business and its owner returns through the single gateway, the backend calculates a risk score, and a go or no-go decision follows. Approved merchants receive offers, negotiate terms and sign contracts, funding runs through the lender's bank agreements, and collections tracks payments against schedule.

Three surfaces sit around that path.

• A merchant portal where borrowers see account history and payments, request a promise to pay, and generate their own monthly statements.

• A new partner portal wired directly to Salesforce, replacing an older portal and the API hop behind it.

• A case manager application that receives merchant-run checkout submissions and approves or declines them.

The organization around the software changed as much as the software did. QA and release standards are documented and shared, and loan origination has an accountable delivery owner inside Coherent rather than at a vendor.

The impact

This work left the lender with capabilities it did not have before, and a transaction that depended on them.

• Business readiness. The lender's technology leadership spent this period preparing the company for a transaction with a private-equity buyer. That transaction completed, and Coherent's engineering and process work supported the readiness behind it.

• Delivery no longer runs on a vendor's timetable. Loan origination changes ship on the lender's schedule, released by a certified team accountable for the outcome rather than for a support contract.

• Releases stopped being a risk event. Rollback-free releases are the explicit target across every delivery team, measured against one documented standard where there previously was none.

• Adding a data provider is a one-place change. A new credit, identity or document source no longer means another point-to-point integration to own and maintain.

• Answering a data question no longer requires knowing the estate. Curated views replaced the need to track which of many systems held which field.

What's next

The checkout rebuild is the next substantial piece of work, and it is not ready to start. The lender wants development underway early next year, which means requirements and a first set of stories have to exist before this year ends. The team has seen a two-page outline so far, which means the schedule depends on analysis that has barely started.

The migration off the legacy platform is planned rather than underway. The lender is weighing the cost of moving the remaining products into Salesforce against the cost of upgrading the legacy platform's PHP version, and core processes still depend on the old platform. Meanwhile the new partner portal is close to release and AI-assisted delivery is expanding from development into QA.

This engagement shows where modernization tends to lead at a company that grew faster than its documentation. Two years in, the question in front of the business is no longer how to modernize a platform it bought. It is which parts of that platform it should own outright.