Unlocking better digital lending development with Blend

If there’s anything certain about the lending industry today, it’s the rate of change and the need to accommodate it. The tech teams working to advance their digital lending experiences face many hurdles. To further complicate things, development priorities have to be split between innovation for the future and upkeep for existing services.

It’s difficult to proactively prepare for evolving consumer needs, and when plans do change, it’s a challenge to realign internal roadmaps without going through multi-month processes. Rapid change also presents an issue for complex bank architectures with multiple internal and external systems. Tech teams are tasked with stitching everything into one unified offering — a tricky job for financial institutions using many point solutions.

At Blend, we understand the development challenges at hand and are here to support better development. Our platform enables financial institutions to focus on rapid innovation and execution, so tech teams can build faster and smarter.

The value of partnering with an advanced development team like Blend’s

Blend’s approach to development prioritizes flexibility over fully fixed outcomes, which helps lenders better accommodate shifting markets and changes in consumer demand. We provide a variety of benefits for tech teams, but let’s take a closer look at a few key advantages:

1) Faster speed to market

Our platform implements top-tier verification services, algorithms, and data sets into our out-of-the-box products. Since we’ve done the due diligence, we understand all of the pieces that need to be in place for your organization to hit the ground running — no matter how you choose to use our configurable products. By tapping into this, lenders can feel confident and reduce up-front backlog work, so the overall process moves more quickly.

2) Continual financial services innovation and platform evolution

Rather than waiting six months for advanced versions of our products, our customers get access to continual updates. We understand that the requirements for a lending product may change over the course of development. Blend’s platform helps ensure that production can accommodate these changes on the fly and respond to feature requests not known at the start. When a tech team needs to add, remove, or adjust components, our configurable platform can enable them to move forward without the need to rewrite code.

3) Iterative development with rapid feedback for quicker results

In order to develop modernized, innovative lending experiences, tech teams occasionally have to take risks. Fortunately, we’ve moved beyond the old days of shipping software, where organizations made huge investments into new products or capabilities and had to simply hope that it would pay off.

Blend enables — and practices — continual learning, so tech teams can launch, test, evolve, and iterate along the way. If you have an idea for an improved product experience, you don’t need to waste a year developing it only to find out after launch that some elements don’t resonate with consumers. This approach helps us expand and improve our platform while also enabling our customers to deliver better consumer experiences and business outcomes.

How Blend facilitates better digital lending development

Agile development is at our core. This is the way we work internally and it shapes the very form of the products we develop for our customers. Not only are elements like income verification, e-signing, and identity verification built from a deep knowledge of lending-specific needs, they’re also integrated into everything we develop and updated automatically — fueling success from day one. In addition to pre-built and custom integrations, we also maintain API integrations that let banks support the features they need.

After a year of unpredictable change, it’s become even more clear that an agile approach is essential. Preliminary research is showing that agile companies have outperformed others in adapting to COVID-19. As demonstrated by our accelerated launch of Blend Close in May 2020, our rapid adaptation of a PPP loan mechanism, and our rapid feature releases intended to help manage refi boom volume surges, we are committed to helping financial institutions stay ahead of the curve with rapid innovation.

At times, building world-class financial products can feel like a sprint and a marathon, but Blend is here to help you tackle digital lending development, one mile at a time.