Mortgage Platform in Seven Months: Product Engineering from Scratch

Business challenge

How can a highly successful lending marketplace scale its business in the short term and seize a new revenue opportunity? With the help of Intellias, our client entered the market and had a big impact on it. We created a brand-new product line to help the marketplace excel in the era of customer-centricity and offer transformative digital experiences.

Intellias has an extensive track record of building and improving solutions for this client, a leading European loan comparison portal. We first worked together in 2017, when an Intellias team took over refactoring the client’s system architecture from monolithic to microservices. The goal was to migrate to microservices without interrupting business continuity and existing platform functionality. We aced the task, and our cooperation with the client expanded into several streams, from modernizing a legacy application to developing new platform features. Ever since, Intellias has been there to help our client grow and diversify.

Our next big project together was developing a new mortgage platform. The objective was a fast release to market and the first return on investment in several months.

Solution delivered

One way lending companies can stay ahead is to tap into new possibilities and markets, such as mortgages. Since our client decided to broaden their product portfolio with a mortgage marketplace, we started with product engineering from scratch.

Thanks to our long-term relationship, we were familiar with the client’s product division and business needs. The company came to us with its product vision and design ideas, and we took on technology ownership. Adopting an iterative development approach and working at the pace of a Kanban startup, our team was responsible for backend, frontend, microservices architecture, and infrastructure development as well as live production on AWS.

Value for consumers

We worked shoulder to shoulder with the product owners. This helped us define and deliver features to create a single-point platform that allows consumers to request a mortgage online as easily as possible.

Instead of visiting countless bureaus and filling out loads of documents manually, our platform users can fill in their main personal and financial data to make an initial mortgage request. This initial request provides consumers with an overview of options and an understanding of their affordability.

Where it once was a burden, this process is now a boost to both consumers and banks in finding a perfect mortgage match.

Core features

Platform users can book a financial advisor who will connect them to the most relevant bank based on their needs and capabilities.

Apart from comparison of options and advisory packages, the marketplace offers pre-scoring. This is the process of validating if consumers meet the requirements to get a mortgage. It also helps mortgage advisors match consumers with banks that are most likely to provide a loan.

We also implemented a CRM that allows our client to divide leads into cold, warm, and hot to increase the success rate of open deals.

For now, our strategy is to enrich the platform with new features and implement migrations for more significant loads in the future.

Business outcome

We delivered an MVP in one month after starting product engineering from scratch. Then, it took us six months to release the feature-packed product to the market. The mortgage platform developed by Intellias was implemented in just seven months, and, shortly after its launch, it already was bringing ROI.

By delivering a superior experience for its clients, the lending marketplace is experiencing extraordinary business growth. In just the first two years of its operation, the mortgage platform has been responsible for almost 10% of the company’s annual revenue.

The partnership with Intellias allowed our client to enlarge their product portfolio, lift conversions with iterative platform upgrades, and skyrocket revenues with a brand-new solution.