Company transformations
May 1, 2023
Companies are defined by key milestones in their history where their business evolved and took the next step towards their future. We've had many in our past, the most recent of which was our shift towards taking a step back away from underwriting our own deals and pushing for every new borrower to be paired with an underwriter starting in January of this year. This could be considered more of an operational shift in how we do business versus a fundamental transformation of the company. What's in store for us in Q3 of this year is instead this type of fundamental transformation and to get there has been a herculean effort by the product and engineering teams to blaze the path to get there.
Starting in Q3, we will be able to offer the first ever true SaaS solution to our customers. Underwriters will be able to set up their own market with their own deals, their own borrowers, and their own investors. These deals will likely never make it into our market and our base of retail investors will never see these offerings. This is no small feat and the last several weeks have been busy with the team delivering not only on core features but also significant technical upgrades to prepare for this concept of multi-tenancy, self-service, and infrastructure & security improvements to be able to onboard this caliber of customer.
On the feature front, we are in the process of overhauling the data room to make it more robust, launching the Q&A functionality for investors to engage directly with underwriters, and preparing for the full release of the new investor portal. Over the last few weeks, the team has also enhanced the self-service capabilities, with the ability to view users, edit borrowers, and fully manage a deal from start to finish. The next few weeks will see underwriter editing, user invites, and adding new borrowers and underwriters get released.
On the architecture and infrastructure front, we have tested the ability to launch a new standalone market independent of our market. This is a big milestone but there is much left to do across Borrower, Investor, and Admin to truly make this work the way we envisioned. Just because the functionality works does not mean customers can adopt this though as they need certain levels of infrastructure and information security in order to clear their internal compliance. To that end, we have also invested heavily in revamping our infrastructure and information security. We have made improvements to how we manage and ship code, migrating to a new AWS product environment fully set up and configured as code, deployed and tested our disaster recovery site and implemented numerous security improvements, including an AI driven platform to protect our products from sophisticated bot attacks and fraud. These improvements are aimed at improving security, resiliency and auditability - in preparation for a future SOC audit and making our services truly institutional-grade.
It's been a mad dash to the finish on all these massive initiatives to get us multi-market ready by Q3 but all this effort will be worth the wait. Fundamental transformation is in the works and we are well on our way to being the SaaS company we always envisioned
