Quality of Life for Credit Decisioning Tool Users & Admins
When embarking on automation journeys, many lenders opt to initially invest in home-grown credit decisioning solutions. Often written in languages like C# or Java, these bespoke solutions allow lenders to quickly achieve high-levels of automation. In these cases, the ideal credit strategy is already known, and it is simply a matter of handing those detailed requirements to developers to make it an automated reality.
While quick to start, leaning this heavily on a custom-code focused approach can be burdensome to the administrators and analysts that are responsible for maintaining and making tweaks to the system. When issues arise, this can mean combing through thousands of lines of code to find and debug areas that require fixes or changes.
Even the most savvy developer can find it challenging to revisit and quickly understand their past work. This can lead to inefficient use of developer time, or worse, an overall lack of confidence by business stakeholders on the accuracy of business rules buried in the code over time. Of course, these potential issues are exacerbated when onboarding new team members, or when experiencing the unexpected loss of a senior automation SME (often, one or two people within some smaller organizations).
With BrightSignal, these inefficiencies and potential risks are eliminated thanks to a troupe of “quality of life” (QoL) features. When considered as a whole, QoL features allow some of the most rare and valuable people in a lender’s organization to do their best work, while freeing up time for exploring and reacting to new opportunities.
QoL #1: Versioning & Rollback
Similar to how a developer might use Github for version control, modern decisioning engines like BrightSignal offer advanced version control and rollback features. At a glance, administrators and power users can see which diagram changes were recently deployed, by whom, and a brief description of the change.
As a self-documenting solution, BrightSignal is always updating version history, and there is no need for users to remember to save and organize different versions of code. This automatic safety net is a godsend for lenders that find themselves conducting audits and reviews after unexpected drops in lending performance.
QoL #2: Environment Deployment
Controlling versions of diagrams is also made effortless when promoting credit strategies between different environments. Moving from development to production does not require time consuming (and error prone) reentry of business rules.
QoL#3: 3rd Party Integration Versioning
The subprime lending space has seen a recent explosion of new FinTech data vendors emerge. BrightSignal makes it easy to integrate with these vendor’s APIs, while also maintaining a version history of any integration changes made. This is especially helpful when incorporating new data points into your diagrams, or a vendor launches a new type of service or category of data.
QoL#4: Branch & Sub-diagram Nodes
The best designed diagrams are easy to understand for newcomers and seasoned veteran users that are ready to jump back in after a hiatus. Diagram design best practices include making use of organizational nodes like “Branch” and “Sub-diagram”, which make changes faster and more intuitive.
The Branch diagram allows for different diagram flows, which may be separated by credit risk. Other common applications include splitting for A/B tests, or making costly calls to external service providers for only some applicants.
The Sub-diagram node allows diagrams to work together, and can help avoid the creation of unwieldly diagrams. As a best practice, Sub-diagrams are helpful for templating hardened and established rules that you need to ensure are executed consistently across all strategies and channels. (e.g. KYC and anti-fraud).
Let’s Relax
These are just four examples of QoL features embedded within BrightSignal. Upon closer inspection, you’ll find many other examples of credit-strategist-friendly capabilities, which are aligned with the themes you’ve already recognized above: reusability, collaborative & visual, low-code and self-documenting.
