A Note on Zopa Technology
I thought we’d give you a behind-the-scenes look at one of the technical issues we’ve solved in order to bring you Zopa (seeing as how I’m the CTO and all).
When we set out to build the partnerships with credit unions, one big technical question we had to answer was, how do we integrate all our partners?
We looked at existing loan origination and servicing systems and their interfaces with core banking systems. None of them fit the bill for what we were trying to achieve – they required too much up-front investment and integration work both on our part and on the part of our partners. We wanted to make the process of getting partners on board as simple as possible.
So, we built our own web-based workflow tool in-house. Every Zopa Loan application goes into a real-time work queue and along the way gets underwritten, decisioned, and disbursed. The tool is an ASP.NET web application communicating with the business logic layer via WCF. What makes the system unique and different from traditional loan origination & servicing systems is that the underlying business objects are shared across the end user web application and the dashboard. In traditional systems, a loan application or lead gets decisioned in the origination system and then it is moved into a separate servicing system that manages the lifecycle of the loan. At Zopa, we provide a single integrated view of origination and servicing using shared business objects. This might not sound all that fancy if you don’t follow technology but trust me it’s a pretty big deal!
But the best part is, that our partners do not need to go through a long process of systems integration – just a web browser and Internet connection from their workplace will do.
BTW, we can always use a few more good ASP.NET and C# people, as we have many more technical challenges to solve. If that sounds interesting, drop us a note.