Custom Digital Lending Platform Engineering for a $33B US Commercial Bank

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Average loan origination time of 21 to 28 days, well behind market expectations
Underwriters touching eleven systems per file, with extensive copy-paste between CRM, credit bureau pulls, and Excel models
Compliance evidence (Reg B notices, HMDA data points, SBA forms, adverse action reasons) reconstructed manually at audit time
No portfolio-wide pipeline visibility for the sales team, slowing every quarterly forecast
Three vendor RFPs returning six-figure annual licensing costs alongside eighteen-month implementation timelines

Six-week discovery covering nine loan products, target architecture with explicit regulatory control points, and a phased delivery plan
Hybrid delivery model pairing a US-based product owner and lead architect with an offshore engineering squad of fourteen
Nine-week release cadence committed up front so working software reached production every quarter
Onshore product leadership protected stakeholder velocity, while offshore engineering held blended rates down

Domain microservices on AWS for origination, underwriting, document intake, compliance evidence, disbursement, and portfolio analytics
Event bus with idempotent consumers across services
Borrower portal built in Next.js with a React component library mirroring the bank’s brand system
Workflow engine for underwriting that cut clicks-to-decision in half
Fine-tuned vision model achieving 94% accuracy on SBA Form 1919 and supporting tax documents
Dedicated compliance evidence service capturing every decision, model input, and adverse action reason at the moment it occurred
Decisioning gateway consolidating identity verification, fraud screening, and credit bureau orchestration behind a single policy
Generative summarization layer condensing multi-hundred-page financial disclosure packets into structured one-page briefs

Trunk-based development with feature flags, supporting dark launches to controlled cohorts
Blue-green deployment topology delivering zero downtime across nineteen production releases
SOC 2 Type II readiness, FFIEC alignment, and a third-party penetration test completed before the platform funded its first loan
Engagement closed with a 30-day knowledge transfer to the bank’s internal platform team
Engagement anchored by TAV’s banking engineering practice

Loan origination time fell from 24 days to 9 days on average, a 63% reduction
SBA 7(a) approvals issued in under five business days for 78% of qualifying applications, against a fourteen-day industry benchmark
Six of seven legacy tools retired, removing roughly $1.4 million in annual licensing
Approximately seventeen FTE-equivalents released from manual reconciliation work
Borrower application drop-off down from 41% to 14%
Funded loan volume up 22% in the first full quarter post-launch
Compliance audit preparation reduced from six weeks to four days
Most recent regulatory examination produced zero findings tied to the new platform

Custom-built lending platforms now compete favorably with vendor SaaS on total cost of ownership when the institution has a multi-product roadmap (break-even arrived in month nineteen)
Compliance evidence designed in from day one is materially cheaper than compliance evidence retrofitted (the dedicated evidence service added 6% to phase-one cost and removed roughly $900,000 per year in audit and remediation expense)
Hybrid delivery models pairing onshore product leadership with offshore engineering capacity delivered a 38% lower blended rate than fully onshore staffing, while sustaining velocity above typical vendor SaaS implementations

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