Compliance Guard helps you stay compliant with federal and state regulations through automated monitoring of borrower statuses and outbound communications.

compliance-guard

Trusted by top lending innovators

Our proprietary regulatory compliance tool, Compliance Guard™, helps you stay compliant with federal and state servicing and collections requirements—and take proactive steps to support borrowers during significant life events.


Compliance Guard™

Compliance Guard monitor automatically checks the status of active borrowers as it relates to applicable federal and state regulations.

Compliance Guard monitor

Modern loan servicing technology enhances the borrower experience by providing convenient self-service options, efficient customer support, omnichannel communications, flexible payment options, and seamless accommodations for various life events, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty while reducing servicing costs.

In today's competitive lending landscape, customer experience has become a key differentiator. While the origination side of the customer experience is focused mainly on reducing friction during borrower onboarding—as well as optimizing underwriting to approve more borrowers—the post-origination side is all about increasing customer satisfaction as the loan is being repaid. While origination is vitally important, it’s the post-origination experience that comprises most of the lender-borrower relationship, and that the borrower is most likely to remember.

This article will address the post-origination side of lending, and the servicing technology that underpins it. We’ll look at five ways modern servicing technology is enabling lenders to offer their borrowers convenience, transparency, and personalized service.


# 1. Better self-service

These days, most borrowers prefer to self-service if at all possible. But technology is often a limiting factor. Modern servicing technology is the key to unlocking the kinds of self-service functionality borrowers have come to expect:

* Access loan balances, payment histories, upcoming due dates, and statements across a wide range of devices
* Make and schedule payments, and set up autopay
* Customize repayment schedules, including setting up personalized due dates and payment frequencies

Offering robust self-service functionality—including the flexibility to modify payment schedules—gives borrowers control over their repayment experience while enabling lenders to reduce contact rates and lower operational costs. 

# 2. Enhanced customer support

Self-service options can significantly reduce the need for direct support from agents. But when borrowers do need help, modern servicing technology can make it more effective and efficient by providing:

* A robust, lending-specific CRM
* AI-powered features, like case summaries and call transcription, to increase agent efficiency
* Preconfigured cases and workflows to increase agent productivity and accuracy
* Detailed customer profiles and case histories, giving agents a full view of each borrower's history

Customer support experiences [typically lag behind other aspects of the post-origination experience](https://theacsi.org/industries/finance-and-insurance/banks/) in terms of customer satisfaction. But these tools can enable faster, more effective problem resolution, leading to higher customer satisfaction. Providing out-of-the-box cases and workflows for common scenarios enables lenders to launch their lending programs much more quickly, and helps them reduce risk by ensuring all workflows are vetted by compliance. Lenders should also expect their servicing technology to offer the flexibility to customize additional cases, workflows, and templates as needed.

# 3. Omnichannel communications and alerts

Modern servicing systems enable lenders to reach their borrower wherever they are. Specifically, these servicing systems should provide:

* Communications templates for all common cases and workflows that are optimized for the user experience and compliant with federal and state regulations
* Customized payment reminders
* Omnichannel support, including email, SMS, two-way texting, and chat
* Unrestricted ability to personalize and customize outbound communications

Omnichannel communications are a critical way to reach customers at the times and on the channels that are most convenient for them. By delivering communications on their terms, and in a seamless and transparent way, lenders can maximize customer satisfaction and increase on-time payments.

# 4. Flexible and convenient payment options

Modern loan servicing technology makes it easier for borrowers to pay the way they want to. This can have an impact not just on borrower satisfaction, but also on repayment rates. Best-in-class capabilities include:

* Support for multiple payment methods: ACH, debit, and credit
* Ability to modify due dates to align with borrowers’ paychecks
* Customizable payment frequencies and amounts
* Self-service autopay functionality

These flexible options not only improve the customer experience but can also lead to higher repayment rates.

# 5. Seamless borrower accommodations

No matter how well you’re prepared for the happy path, there will always be borrowers who need accommodations of various types. Modern servicing technology can make it easier and less resource-intensive to handle scenarios like:

* Bankruptcy and natural disasters
* Military deployment (requiring SCRA protections)
* Financial hardship

Modern servicing technology can give you the flexibility to accommodate scenarios that require pausing payments, modifying payment plans, making retroactive changes to the ledger, and more. When lenders have the flexibility to turn unhappy paths into happy paths, they can deliver a better customer experience and ensure compliance at the same time.

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Modern loan servicing technology has transformed what used to be a limiting and frustrating post-origination experience. By investing in modern servicing technology, lenders can significantly increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and reduce servicing costs.

As technology continues to evolve, and especially as AI becomes more proficient at augmenting the efforts of customer service agents, we can expect increasing benefits to lenders and borrowers alike. Lenders who stay at the forefront of these technological advancements will be best positioned to meet and exceed customer expectations in an increasingly competitive market.

5 ways modern loan servicing improves the customer experience

Enervee, a climate tech company focused on making energy efficiency accessible, partnered with Peach to service its Eco Financing loans, streamlining operations, reducing costs, and ensuring regulatory compliance while scaling its national consumer marketplace for energy-efficient appliances.

Enervee is a climate tech company on a mission to make energy efficiency accessible to all. By combining data science, behavioral insights, and digital marketing, Enervee helps consumers buy energy-efficient appliances like washer/dryers, refrigerators, water heaters, and air conditioners to reduce emissions and save on utility bills. With the Inflation Reduction Act incentivizing energy-efficient measures, Enervee’s online marketplace matches consumers with energy-efficient appliances and applies eligible tax rebates and discounts at the point of sale. To overcome the barrier of high upfront costs, Enervee offers [Eco Financing](https://www.enervee.com/eco-financing)*—an installment loan option to help make energy efficiency affordable for all consumers, including those with less-than-perfect credit.

"Eco Financing* is all about democratizing access to energy-efficient products," says Matthias Kurwig, Enervee Co-founder and CEO. "We believe everyone should have the opportunity to make energy-smart choices, and with Eco Financing*, we're making that possible."

In 2023, Enervee sought a new servicing partner for its existing loan portfolio, leading them to Peach—a reliable, flexible, and compliance-driven solution that met the needs of Enervee’s capital partners.

## Key servicing requirements

Enervee's requirements for Peach included:
* Precise interest accrual and payment application
* Automated data reporting to capital markets partners and credit bureaus
* Borrower portal with robust self-service capabilities
* Advanced analytics and reporting dashboards
* Integrated payment processing with real-time bank account balance checks to avoid NSF issues
* [Migration capability](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate) to transfer existing loans to Peach’s system and recreate full loan histories

## Additional opportunities identified

As the partnership deepened, Enervee and Peach identified additional opportunities to reduce costs and streamline operations:

* **Integrated payment processing**: Peach allowed Enervee to reduce maintenance costs and simplify investor settlements by replacing a previous payment processing vendor.
* **Credit bureau reporting**: Enervee bypassed a third-party credit reporting platform by using Peach's built-in Metro 2® capabilities.
* **Automated compliance**: Peach's Compliance Guard™ module allowed Enervee to demonstrate adherence to state and federal regulations, a critical value-add given today’s regulatory environment.

## Implementation and migration

The implementation kicked off in late October 2023. New originations on Peach began in mid-December, and the migration of existing loans was completed in January 2024—12 weeks after signature.

"Metaphorically speaking, Enervee changed engines on a moving train without losing any cargo. This truly speaks to Peach’s ability to deliver," says Matthias Kurwig.

## A growing partnership

As Enervee scales its consumer marketplace nationally, backed by Eco Financing* that makes energy-efficient appliances more affordable, the company needed a loan servicing platform capable of handling growing complexity, volume, and compliance requirements. Peach has delivered on all these fronts.

"Peach has proven to be a highly configurable, accurate, and reliable loan servicing platform that has quickly adjusted to our growing needs," says Kurwig. "This allows us to focus less on the mechanics of loan processing and more on meeting the needs of our customers and marketplace partners."

_*Eco Financing by Enervee loan programs are owned and funded by Lewis & Clark Bank, Member FDIC._

Scaling energy efficiency equitably: The Enervee-Peach partnership

As part of your integration with Peach, we can generate a monthly Metro 2® compliant file representing the status of your consumer accounts using your provided PII. We run Metro 2 reports on the first of each month to show the current status of your borrower accounts based on activity during the previous calendar month. Once generated, we send the file(s) to your specified SFTP location. If you have more than one product on Peach, you can choose which one(s) you want to report on. We support the Metro 2 format for both installment and line of credit products, and offer expanded reporting capabilities for non-retail credit cards, savings and loan companies, banks, credit unions, private student loans, sales finance and loan finance companies, and retail store exclusive accounts.

Metro 2 is the required file format for Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. To populate the Metro 2 header, we will need your program identifier numbers from the agencies you choose to report to. To obtain your identifier numbers, you will need to establish a relationship with your agencies of choice and pay any fees associated with data furnishing within their network. Please note that some agencies require a minimum of 100 accounts to qualify as a data furnisher, so you may not be able to furnish data during the early stages of your lending or credit program. Peach does not directly support Metro 2 files for business borrowers, or other file formats for alternative reporting agencies. However, [your data within Peach](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/accessing-your-data-with-peach) is always accessible to you through our snapshot and replica data tables should you need to generate other file formats.

## Reporting on migrated accounts
If you are migrating accounts with existing bureau reporting histories, we will need the most recent 24 months of values in the Payment History Profile field of your Metro 2 files. This field contains a 24-character string representing payment activity for each month. Going forward, we’ll maintain reporting for previous months while layering in new payment activity.

Brand new loans originated and boarded to Peach for servicing will have their entire Metro 2 reporting managed by Peach. Our system is designed to handle reporting for migrated portfolios where legacy accounts are serviced alongside new accounts. And since Metro 2 reporting is a loan-by-loan view, we are also compliant in reporting on borrowers who have both migrated and net-new loans or lines of credit. This is just one of the ways we make the complex work of migration less painful for you and your teams.

## Handling disputes
Consumers can dispute information on their credit report through the pertinent credit bureau. When this happens, the credit bureau will send the dispute to you through the e-OSCAR intermediary system. You’ll then respond to the dispute through [e-OSCAR](https://www.e-oscar.org/) and either validate the information you originally reported or provide an update to the consumer’s credit report.

Because we automatically generate Metro 2 files for you, you’ll also make any necessary updates to consumer data through the Peach Agent Portal so that the next month’s file accurately reflects the outcome of the dispute. We’re here to support you if you run into any issues or have credit reporting requirements outside of what’s covered in this article.



Credit bureau reporting with Peach

Prospective clients naturally ask a wide range of questions about our platform’s capabilities and features during the course of their evaluation. One theme we hear often is the need for ready access to data—whether for real-time actions, analytics, or investor and credit reporting.

In today’s world—where loan management systems are more nimble than ever—ready access to data can be a competitive advantage, helping lenders quickly assess portfolio performance and hone product-market fit. Additionally, the importance of clean and precise data from a compliance perspective has never been greater.

No matter your unique data access, analytics, and reporting needs, our underlying philosophy at *Peach is that the data belongs to you*. In other words, it’s our responsibility to ensure you have seamless access to your data when and where you need it. We’ve architected our platform from the very beginning to give you maximum flexibility in how you access data for various use cases.

There are three main ways our clients access their data.

# Method 1: Direct API access
Peach is an API-first platform, so all your data is available via real-time API endpoints. The APIs available to our clients are the same ones we build on internally, so you can expect highly performant API access to our system. There are no hidden APIs.

API calls are suitable for things like getting loan balances for real-time decisioning and taking actions on loans and borrowers. *Webhooks* provide near-real-time push updates, while *Events* are suitable for information pulls.

API access, however, is not designed for operational reporting and analytics. That’s where the replica database comes in.

# Method 2: Replica database
Peach provides a read-only replica of all important database tables. Part of the replica is a powerful *snapshots* table that provides a daily summary of all loans on a granular level (e.g., balances by accounting bucket). The replica is designed for operations, analytics, auditing, and financial accounting reporting and reconciliation.

Peach also provides an SQL analytics tool called Redash for custom reporting on the replica database. Alternatively, clients can ETL data into their data lake/warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, Fivetran, BigQuery, Redshift).

Not all data is created equal. We’ve thoughtfully handled PII, external IDs, rounding, dates and cutoff times, and data mapping. Ask your Peach team for more information about why our clients love Peach for their data and reporting needs.

# Method 3: Third-party files
Peach provides a variety of configurable third-party reporting file types. These include the following:

**Loan tapes & payment tapes** – Clients can create a variety of loan tapes and payment tapes for recurring reporting to both sponsor banks and third-party capital providers. Tape types are configurable with field mapping to partner/investor schemas. Files can be sent via SFTP to you and/or to each investor in CSV format daily or monthly. Tapes can also include custom metadata you provide.

**Metro 2® files** – Metro 2 files are generated by Peach and are sent to you via SFTP. These files are compliant with credit furnishing standards as supported by the three major bureaus—Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

**Statements** – Peach can generate periodic statements for both lines of credit and installment programs. Statement frequency and data is fully configurable at the product-type level. Statements can be generated and delivered both electronically and via physical mail. Clients can also access raw statement data via API to generate statements directly.

A powerful feature of Peach’s platform is our proprietary Loan Replay™ capability. Retroactive changes to loans affect each of the third-party files above in different ways. Ask your Peach team for more information about how Peach’s system handles retroactive changes.


Accessing your data with Peach

Peach has created a dedicated Customer Experience (CX) organization to enhance client satisfaction by combining Solutions Engineering, Customer Support, Technical Writing, and Customer Success teams for seamless support throughout the product lifecycle.

At Peach, delivering the best possible experience for our clients is at the core of our mission. For us, this means more than just bringing our extensive lending experience to the table. It’s also about operating with integrity, bringing a consultative mindset, building for the long-term, and delivering exceptionally dependable infrastructure. This approach enables our clients to lower costs, shorten time-to-market, spur innovation, and de-risk their product launches.

In order to enhance the level of service we provide to our clients, we’ve formally established a Customer Experience (CX) organization within Peach. This change brings together our Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Customer Support, and Technical Writing teams to drive the seamless experiences from implementation to post-production support that customers value when choosing Peach.

* **Solutions Engineering** partners with clients during implementation to provide a smooth experience while onboarding to Peach’s platform. Solutions Engineering also partners with clients post-implementation to ensure they’re able to leverage Peach’s full suite of capabilities. 

* **Customer Support** ensures that when clients run into issues, those issues are resolved quickly through dedicated support channels. This provides a reliable level of service and documentation around resolution to issues raised to Peach’s Support team. 

* **Technical Writing** is responsible for Peach’s Documentation Hub, which assists current and prospective clients throughout their learning journey as they endeavor to grasp the broad set of features and functionality provided by Peach’s platform. The Documentation Hub comprises technical documentation for developers as well as guides that describe system capabilities for end-user audiences. 

* **Customer Success** has responsibility for maintaining and cultivating client relationships, including understanding clients’ needs and providing a high level of ongoing support as their lending programs scale.

Bringing these teams together in a dedicated CX organization provides our clients with continuity throughout the product lifecycle and enables us to partner more deeply. Whether your offering is consumer or business, BNPL or credit card, de novo or already at scale—we’re here to make sure you get maximum value from our best-in-class loan management and servicing platform. We look forward to partnering with you as you continue to innovate and grow.



&nbsp;

**About Russell Braden**

A three-year veteran of Peach, Russell leads Peach’s newly formed Customer Experience organization. Most recently, he served as Peach’s VP of Product Management. Prior to Peach, Russell has held key roles at leading innovators like Grainger, Avant and Enova International. At Grainger, he oversaw Product Development for Customer Information, a cornerstone of Grainger’s broader digital transformation efforts. He helped scale insights and best practices from an internal startup across the entire company, replatforming their tech stack and reducing their dependence on legacy software.

Prior to Grainger, Russell was responsible for launching one of Avant’s installment lending programs—overseeing underwriting, risk, servicing, collections and remarketing, as well as development of their servicing platform. And before Avant, Russell worked in Strategy &amp; Operations at Enova International, learning the ins and outs of their online lending business through the lens of the call center.



Delivering a superior client experience

The CFPB's new rule requires BNPL providers to offer similar protections as credit cards, including statements, dispute resolution, and return handling. This creates challenges for BNPL providers, but Peach's platform can handle all these requirements out-of-the-box,  including generating compliant statements, managing disputes, and processing refunds.

On May 22, 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued an [interpretive rule](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/notice-opportunities-comment/open-notices/use-of-digital-user-accounts-to-access-buy-now-pay-later-loans/) targeting buy now, pay later (BNPL) products. The rule positions BNPL products similarly to credit cards under the Truth in Lending Act (TILA), thus subjecting BNPL providers to new requirements around periodic statements, billing disputes and returns.

The rule is currently open for public feedback, providing a brief transition period for BNPL providers to align their operations with the new standards. The rule is set to take effect after 60 days.

In this article, we’ll review the required changes and discuss the ones most likely to pose challenges for BNPL providers. We’ll also cover the ways in which Peach was designed to natively solve for the rule’s requirements.


## Key provisions of the new rule

With BNPL now classified similarly to traditional credit cards, providers must offer [similar consumer protections](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/notice-opportunities-comment/open-notices/use-of-digital-user-accounts-to-access-buy-now-pay-later-loans/), such as the ability to dispute charges and the provision of clear and concise periodic billing statements.

1. **Periodic statements**: Lenders must provide regular and detailed billing statements to consumers showing transactions, fees and other relevant information.

2. **Dispute resolution**: Procedures must be established for resolving billing errors and other disputes reported by consumers. Payment obligations must be paused during such investigations.

3. **Refunds for returned products**: Providers must credit refunds to consumers’ accounts when products are returned or services are canceled.

Though these provisions may sound simple on the surface, they are nontrivial for many BNPL providers. Servicing technology is perhaps the most complex part of the lending tech stack, and even small changes can require an extensive retrofitting of existing infrastructure.

To take returns and disputes as an example, more than [13%](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-takes-action-to-ensure-consumers-can-dispute-charges-and-obtain-refunds-on-buy-now-pay-later-loans/) of BNPL transactions have historically involved returns or disputes, translating to $1.8 billion in disputed or returned transactions at five surveyed firms in 2021 alone. So any requirements related to returns or disputes that are not already accounted for can quickly lead to an unsustainable amount of manual work—dramatically lowering operational efficiency.

The creation of periodic billing statements can also create additional work for BNPL providers who have not historically generated statements. Lenders must create a standardized process for generating statements at specific times as required by regulation, including fetching accurate and timely accounting data when needed.

Given that this interpretive rule is the latest in a [series of BNPL-related moves](https://lex.substack.com/p/fintech-cfpb-rules-bnpl-credit-cards) made by the CFPB, it’s not unlikely that additional BNPL requirements will be introduced in the future. In light of this, some BNPL providers may choose to take a long-term view when it comes to their infrastructure—investing in flexible technology that enables them to continue to adapt not only to changing regulations, but to evolving markets and consumer preferences as well.

## How Peach solves for the CFPB’s BNPL requirements

Given Peach powers credit card programs for many of our clients, and thus we already support statements, refunds and disputes, we’re able to support all of these requirements out of the box for BNPL as well. We’ll briefly cover some of the more salient capabilities that are native to our platform.

* **Statements**: Peach builds CARD Act-compliant statements out of the box—not only for credit cards and BNPL, but also for all line of credit and installment loan products. For lenders who would like to render their own statements, we also serve up all the information required to build compliant statements via API.

* **Refunds**: Our system natively allows lenders to issue refunds, both through agent tooling and systematically via API. Our system can leverage our proprietary Loan Replay™ capability to automatically ensure that retroactive changes are accounted for and that an accurate history of the loan (including principal/interest splits) is reflected. Additionally, we give BNPL providers flexibility in how they handle recurring payment amounts in the event of returns. Lenders can keep the same recurring payment amount while shortening the repayment term, or they can reamortize the outstanding balance to reduce the recurring payment amount.

* **Disputes**: Peach provides out-of-the-box agent tooling around customer disputes, empowering agents to create disputes, monitor cases and follow workflows as they progress toward resolution. Our system can freeze accounts, temporarily stop loans from accruing interest, and pause payment requirements for borrowers as required during disputes.

* **Multi-capture transactions**: With Peach, BNPL providers can track every item in a transaction individually. This way, if a customer finances multiple items and only a subset of them are subject to a refund or a dispute, lenders have granular control over accounting for each item.

* **Credit reporting**: Peach builds Metro 2® files out of the box for all credit products. We can furnish files directly to the credit bureaus if desired using the lender’s subscriber ID number. Though credit reporting is not part of the CFPB’s latest rule, it’s a potential focus area of future CFPB guidance.

## Peach’s Supported Portfolio Migration

The additional requirements laid out by the CFPB are substantial for BNPL providers whose servicing systems weren’t built to support generating precise statements, freezing payments for disputes and issuing returns. Peach’s [Supported Portfolio Migration](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate) technology provides lenders with a path to modernizing their servicing technology that drastically reduces the time, cost and risks associated with a typical migration.

With Peach, the migration is conducted through the same APIs lenders use to manage the Peach integration. Leveraging our proprietary Loan Replay technology, we significantly reduce the amount of data that needs to be migrated—while preserving full loan and servicing case histories.

We’d love to discuss how we can help your BNPL program meet the requirements of the CFPB’s new rule. To speak with our team, please [contact us](https://www.peachfinance.com/contact).

[CONTACT US](https://www.peachfinance.com/contact)

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*The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, all information content, and materials available in this article are for general informational purposes only. Information in this article may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. Readers of this article should contact their attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter.*


How Peach addresses the CFPB’s latest BNPL rule

Tomorrow, May 21, we’ll be arriving at FinovateSpring in San Francisco to meet with some of today’s most innovative lenders. If you’ll be there, reach out and let’s connect.

Tomorrow, May 21, we’ll be arriving at FinovateSpring in San Francisco to meet with some of today’s most innovative lenders. If you’ll be there, reach out and let’s connect.

Some topics we’d love to discuss:
* How AI is starting to change the servicing landscape and how you can be prepared
* The advantages of running your lending portfolio on one servicing platform
* Why having APIs is not the same thing as API-first infrastructure
* How our 250+ product configuration variables help you stay truly nimble
* The importance of compliance-first servicing technology
* How first-party collections capabilities can minimize your delinquencies
* How end-to-end servicing technology increases operational efficiency
* How to easily and compliantly make retroactive changes to your ledger
* How to leverage Peach’s industry-leading approach to portfolio migrations
* And much more

We look forward to seeing you at the show!

FinovateSpring | May 21-23, 2024\
Marriott Marquis, San Francisco, CA


[**BOOK A MEETING**](https://www.peachfinance.com/contact)


Also check out:\
[Financial IT: An AI-focused Q&A with Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/financial-it-winter-2023)\
[Under the Hood: AI-powered Case Notes Summarization](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/ai-powered-case-notes-summarization)\
[Peach wins Gold in the 2023 Future Digital Awards](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-wins-2023-future-digital-awards)


Let's meet at FinovateSpring 2024

Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher sat down with Financial IT for their Winter Edition 2023 to talk about Peach’s leadership role in bringing generative AI to loan servicing.

Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher sat down with Financial IT for their Winter Edition 2023 to talk about Peach’s leadership role in bringing generative AI to loan servicing. In their Q\&A, Eddie covered the opportunities generative AI is creating in the loan servicing space, how it’s being incorporated into Peach's cutting-edge platform, and how predictive and generative AI can work together to make smarter and faster underwriting decisions.

[READ THE FULL ARTICLE](https://issuu.com/financialit/docs/x36_winter_2023_digital)

\---

**Q: Please introduce your company and provide an overview of its core operations and services.**

A: [Peach Finance](https://www.peachfinance.com/) is the industry’s most configurable loan management and servicing platform. Our API-first lending technology enables fintechs and traditional financial institutions to quickly launch and confidently scale lending programs. With Peach, lenders can support virtually any type of lending product, including BNPL, credit cards, cash advances, personal loans (installments and lines of credit), retail installment contracts, business loans and novel constructs.

Peach gives lenders a system of record with more than 250 configuration variables, plus a Servicing Suite with a lending-specific CRM, borrower portal, agent portal, omnichannel communications, payment processing and reporting. Meanwhile, our Compliance Guard™ module combines compliance-vetted rules with borrower status monitoring to help lenders stay compliant in their servicing operations.

We’re proud to partner with many of today’s foremost lending innovators, including Square, Mission Lane, Lendable and Remitly.

**Q: Could you shed light on how Peach is leveraging AI technology to move the lending industry forward? What innovative applications of AI are you implementing?**

A: It’s been exciting to see numerous applications of generative AI unfold across a wide range of industries over a relatively short period of time. However, the lending industry to date has been impacted much more by predictive AI than generative AI. This means there’s a greenfield opportunity to be among the first to deliver significant generative AI-driven enhancements within the loan servicing space. 

To understand the opportunity within servicing, we should first recognize that servicing has long been a source of frustration for borrowers. Irritating chatbots, lengthy hold times and inflexible borrower portals are just a few of the reasons for borrower dissatisfaction. It’s become a truism within lending that far more resources are invested in acquiring customers than in retaining them.

We should also acknowledge that loan servicing is a significant cost center for lenders...

[READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON FINANCIAL IT](https://issuu.com/financialit/docs/x36_winter_2023_digital)


Financial IT: An AI-focused Q&A with Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher

Case Notes Summarization helps agents agents save time as they review case histories in the Peach CRM.

At Peach, we continue to invest in cutting-edge technologies that push the boundaries of loan servicing. One example of this is [our focus on generative AI-powered servicing enhancements](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-ai-google-cloud) to improve agent productivity and the borrower experience. Because we’ve built our servicing tech in-house and in an API-first manner—and because our platform fully integrates loan management, servicing, collections and compliance—Peach is uniquely positioned to help lenders quickly realize the benefits of generative AI.

Our newest AI-powered innovation is Case Notes Summarization, a capability designed to reduce the time agents spend reviewing case histories in the Peach CRM. By employing generative AI to systematically and succinctly summarize a case’s full history of notes, we’re now able to meaningfully streamline agents’ case management workflows. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at how Case Notes Summarization works as well as the technology behind it.

### The business objective: Increasing agent productivity

The core business objective of Case Notes Summarization is simple: To increase the productivity of agents by reducing their time spent reviewing case histories.

This is an especially important pain point in the context of collections, where it’s typical for multiple agents to work a single case and where cases may contain dozens or even hundreds of notes. Historically, agents have always reviewed each note to piece together a clear and accurate chronological picture of the case history and associated loans. This is a time-consuming and tedious process that’s susceptible to human error. 

However, this challenge fits squarely within the wheelhouse of generative AI. Which is why we’ve invested in a tool that will, with the click of a button, generate a concise summary of all notes attached to a given case.

[WATCH CASE NOTES SUMMARIZATION IN ACTION](https://youtu.be/jEAHEH0vTeg)

With this tool, agents gain quick access to a concise yet comprehensive overview of the case history. This empowers them to quickly comprehend the current loan status and see the chronological sequence of any relevant events associated with the case. As a result, agents can take the necessary actions more quickly and with greater context. Agents can in turn handle more cases in a given time period.

While the primary benefit of Case Notes Summarization is increased agent productivity, there’s an additional positive impact on the borrower experience. Any reduction in the time borrowers spend waiting on an agent is a net positive, as are improvements in agents’ understanding of case histories. By quickly gleaning the essential points of the case, agents can engage with borrowers more thoughtfully, reinforcing trust and providing more personalized solutions. 

![](/blog/case-notes-summarization_screenshot2.png)

An example summary for a case with extensive historical notes.

### Translating business objectives into machine learning goals

To assess the effectiveness of Case Notes Summarization, we needed a consistent testing framework. We determined that the utility of Case Notes Summarization could be understood through a proxy metric: the normalized number of queries made to our case note endpoint. As Case Notes Summarization gains traction within servicing teams, agents consult the case notes themselves less often, leading to a reduction in queries to the case note endpoint. This change is a positive indicator of increased efficiency in the handling of cases, of a smoother workflow that reduces the bottleneck in information retrieval, and of more time being redirected toward proactive customer engagement.

Concurrently, for offline evaluation, we employ the standard ROUGE-L metric for measuring the preciseness of our summary-generation algorithm.

### Machine learning tools and methods

A crucial part of the engineering process in developing this feature was selecting the appropriate tools. Our collaboration with Google's Vertex AI proved fruitful, giving us a diverse set of offerings to explore. We decided to leverage a blend of self-hosted open-source models and other advanced models available on Vertex AI, ensuring the best fit for our requirements.

To refine our models, we conducted a series of detailed experiments, exploring methodologies such as fine-tuning, distillation and prompt engineering. We also leveraged techniques like chain-of-thought and self-consistency sampling for prompts, coupled with frequent tests using various large language model (LLM) parameters and temperatures.

Our experiments were carefully monitored and recorded, enabling us to meticulously manage and version all experimental models. This systematic tracking allowed us to effectively compare experimental iterations and determine optimal models.

### A/B testing, monitoring and improvisations

At Peach, we value consistent performance monitoring and enhancements. And so we’ve ensured steady tracking of system performance, swiftly detecting and handling anomalies. A/B testing is also pivotal to our approach, especially when it comes to testing various models and prompt variations. The data insights obtained in this process enable us to make necessary adjustments and improvements.

Integrating LLMs into our production environment presented unique challenges, particularly in managing the variability in output format inherent to natural language processing. To tackle this challenge, we invested heavily in precise prompt engineering, meticulously crafting our queries to guide the LLMs toward generating more predictable and structured responses. Concurrently, we fortified our downstream processing code, enhancing its ability to handle a range of input variations.

### Where we go from here

Our journey in developing our Case Notes Summarization tool reinforced our conviction around the vast potential of LLMs in solving real-world challenges for lenders.

We’re still near the start of our generative IT journey, and we already have an extensive roadmap in place. We will continue to navigate the rapidly advancing AI landscape to identify the platform enhancements that offer the highest return for our clients. As ever, we are committed to delivering unmatched efficiency and value in disruptive ways, continually orienting the lending technology industry toward the areas of greatest opportunity. Stay tuned for more updates as our roadmap comes to fruition.

If you'd like to learn more about how our AI-powered servicing tools can increase your operational efficiency, please [reach out](https://www.peachfinance.com/contact).


Under the Hood: AI-powered Case Notes Summarization

Peach Finance announced it is working with Google Cloud to deliver AI-driven loan servicing innovations.

# Peach to Deliver AI-Driven Lending Innovations with Google Cloud

Peach Finance, the leading modern loan management and servicing technology platform, today announced it is working with Google Cloud to build and deliver AI-driven servicing technology innovations. Peach will apply Google Cloud’s advanced generative AI technology to Peach’s loan management, loan servicing and compliance monitoring capabilities, helping lenders more effectively and efficiently manage and service their lending portfolios.

Peach’s lending technology platform provides lenders with a loan management system, payment processing, borrower portal, CRM, agent portal, reporting, omnichannel communications and compliance monitoring, as well as a Supported Portfolio Migration capability. 

Built on Google Cloud, Peach will develop a range of proprietary AI-powered solutions across servicing technology and customer experience—helping lenders drive operational efficiency and stay ahead of the curve. Examples of AI-powered solutions include call transcription, call coaching, smart reply, suggested responses, AI-driven chatbots, case summarization, agent self-service training and help, and additional solutions that will be announced at a later time. 

Peach CTO Eran Sandler spoke about the partnership and the potential of AI in lending. “Peach has leveraged Google Cloud from day one, benefiting from Google Cloud’s experience running safe, performant and secure cloud infrastructure. With AI, Google Cloud has applied the same security and safety principles, allowing Peach to securely and safely use AI to enhance our lenders’ capabilities. Lender data will never be used to train Google Cloud AI models, and cannot be accessed by Google Cloud.”

Sandler continued: “At Peach, our promise to lenders is to continually deliver technology that enables them to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why our platform is API-first, fully configurable, and designed to support virtually any asset class—and it’s why delivering the next generation of AI-powered lending technology enhancements is simply the logical next step to enable our clients to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven world. 

“AI is accelerating transformation across a broad range of industries, from healthcare to finance,” said Zac Maufe, Head of Regulated Industries, Google Cloud. “Peach has already seen the benefits of using Google Cloud’s secure and scalable cloud technology to build its platform, and by using our advanced AI technology, Peach can drive operational efficiency for its customers with more effective and efficient customer service experiences that are critical to the loan servicing process.” 

**About Peach Finance**

Peach Finance is an API-first lending technology platform powering innovative lending programs for many of today’s leading lenders, including Square, Mission Lane and Remitly. Peach is the only lending platform built on an Adaptive Core™, a new paradigm in loan management helping fintechs and traditional financial institutions quickly launch and confidently scale configurable lending programs. Peach is also the innovator behind the industry’s Supported Portfolio Migration capability. 

The company’s fully integrated suite of cloud-native products includes a loan management system that supports virtually any non-mortgage asset class and features 250+ configuration variables; a suite of proprietary servicing tools, including a lending-specific CRM, borrower portal, agent portal, payment processing, communications, reporting and first-party collections tools; and Compliance Guard™, a proprietary compliance monitoring system. Peach’s mission is to improve lives by giving every lender the power to innovate. Learn more at [peachfinance.com](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink\&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.peachfinance.com%2F\&esheet=52740188\&newsitemid=20220606005550\&lan=en-US\&anchor=peachfinance.com\&index=1\&md5=31f321d027ee89a322323dcfb6c40aa8).

**Peach media contact**

Crayton Montei

[press@peachfinance.com](mailto:pr@peachfinance.com)

[READ THE PRESS RELEASE ON BUSINESS WIRE](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231020783378/en/Peach-Finance-to-Deliver-AI-Driven-Lending-Innovations-with-Google-Cloud)


Peach to Deliver AI-Driven Lending Innovations with Google Cloud

In just 10 days, the Peach team will be heading to Las Vegas for [Money20/20](https://us.money2020.com/). The conference is one of the largest in fintech, bringing together many of the foremost thinkers in the industry. We’re proud not only to attend but also to sponsor the event.

If you’re attending, stop by Booth 6552—or [schedule a time to meet with us](https://www.peachfinance.com/money2020). We’d love to share some of the most recent advancements we’ve made in powering innovative lending programs.

As a leading modern loan management and servicing software platform, Peach provides API-first and cloud-native solutions for lenders looking for flexible lending tech. We enable lenders to quickly launch lending programs in virtually any asset class, and we provide more than 250 product configuration variables to give lenders maximum flexibility and scalability.

Our fully configurable lending platform is designed to help you stay nimble in a rapidly evolving market. It’s also designed to help you stay compliant in your servicing efforts. Our [Compliance Guard™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/compliance-guard) module monitors borrower statuses and outbound servicing communications to ensure compliance with regulations like the FDCPA, SCRA, TCPA, UDAP/UDAAP, U.S. Bankruptcy Code and Regulation F.

At Peach, we’ve developed a few other novel capabilities, including [Loan Replay™](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-loan-replay-works)—an innovative way for you to easily make retroactive changes to the ledger. And for lenders looking to modernize existing lending portfolios, we’ve developed the industry-first [Supported Portfolio Migration](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate). We’ve streamlined the migration process to make it as painless as possible, ensuring data consistency and a seamless transition.

If you'll be at the show, we’re excited to meet with you, understand your challenges, and explore how our solutions can help. We’ll see you in Vegas.

[BOOK A MEETING](https://www.peachfinance.com/money2020-2023)


Join us at Money20/20

Peach has once again won Gold in the Future Digital Awards for Banking-as-a-Service Innovation.

We’re pleased to share that Peach has once again won Gold in the Future Digital Awards for Banking-as-a-Service Innovation. The accolade is presented by Juniper Research, a renowned research firm. Peach won the same award in 2022.

The [Future Digital Awards](https://www.juniperresearch.com/future-digital-awards/fintech-payments) recognize the most innovative, cutting-edge tech companies disrupting the financial industry and beyond. From fintech to payments, banking, blockchain, fraud, security and retail, these awards celebrate the pioneers charting the future of digital. 

Peach's cloud-native loan management and servicing platform provides lenders with unprecedented flexibility and configurability, enabling them to quickly launch and confidently scale innovative lending products. Peach’s approach has been transformative for lenders of all sizes, and it has also been instrumental in lowering the technological barrier to innovation.

Prior to this award, Peach has previously won a 2023 [Banking Tech Award](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-wins-2023-banking-tech-award), a 2023 [Fintech Breakthrough Award](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-receives-2023-fintech-breakthrough-award) and a [2022 Future Digital Award](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/future-digital-awards-2022). We’re grateful for these recognitions of our innovative technologies—including our [Adaptive Core™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core), [Supported Portfolio Migration](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate) and [Loan Replay™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core#loan-replay)—as well as our unwavering commitment to accelerating innovation in the fintech and banking industries.

[Read the full press release](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231002666131/en/Juniper-Research-Future-Digital-Award-Winners-Announced-for-Fintech-Payments-2023) from Juniper Research.


Peach wins Gold in the 2023 Future Digital Awards

With all the recent buzz about AI, we take a look at some of the ways in which AI will transform lending.

Despite all the buzz about artificial intelligence (AI) this year, AI is far from new to financial services. [A report published by NVIDIA](https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/industries/finance/ai-financial-services-report-2022/fsi-survey-report-2022-web-1.pdf) back in 2022 described AI use as “pervasive,” reporting that across all sectors of financial services—capital markets, investment banking, retail banking and fintech—over 75% of companies were already using one of AI’s core accelerated computing use cases. 

While AI may not be new, what *is* new is the advent of **generative AI** sophisticated enough for practical application. Generative AI promises to bring game-changing innovations to a wide range of industries.

Before we go further, let’s define the two main types of AI we see in the market today:

*   **Traditional (predictive) AI** is used to execute rules-based tasks and to identify patterns and trends that can predict future outcomes. Traditional AI has been in use for years—and in some cases for decades—across applications like fraud detection, financial forecasting, healthcare and customer service.

*   **Generative AI** is a more flexible form of AI that can learn from vast quantities of data, and can then produce original content—whether that’s visual, audio, text or some combination. A conversational chatbot is one example of generative AI.

These two types of AI each have their own strengths. For example, traditional AI is better at complex calculations, so it excels at mathematics-intensive work. On the flipside, generative AI is easy to interact with using everyday language, and its outputs are creative and original. As traditional and generative AI tools each solve different needs, expect them to [coexist and complement each other](https://baincapitalventures.com/insight/sharing-our-field-notes-the-state-of-generative-ai-in-financial-services/). 

Within lending, most applications of AI so far belong to the category of traditional AI. In fact, we can thank predictive AI for some of the most important lending innovations of the past decade, such as advances in underwriting and fraud detection. 

Let’s take a look at the example of underwriting. Many fintechs pride themselves on proprietary underwriting models that deliver smarter approvals. While each company may have a unique approach, what most have in common is that they’ve used machine learning algorithms to train their decisioning models on huge proprietary datasets. As more data is gathered, these models improve. The result is that each company possesses a model that, hopefully, performs better than any other for their target market. 

To take another example, fraud detection platforms like SentiLink, Unit21, and Sardine are likewise leveraging big data and machine learning to continually train their models to identify patterns of fraud and to refine their approach over time.

While we’ve already benefited from numerous applications of traditional AI, we’ve barely gotten a glimpse of the potential of generative AI. Since there’s no way to perfectly predict all the ways in which AI is going to impact lending, AI will continue to surprise us with its ability to solve important problems—as well as to create new ones. But based on what we know so far, we do have some idea of how AI is on track to reshape the lending landscape. Here are some of the ways in which we expect AI to transform lending.

### Fraud detection

Fraud costs lenders billions of dollars each year. And while fraud detection has improved dramatically over the past 10 years, so has fraudsters’ ability to fool lenders. And AI is putting this back-and-forth battle on steroids.

AI-powered fraud detection systems use advanced algorithms to analyze customer behavior, identify suspicious patterns and detect potential fraud in real time. By leveraging machine learning models, lenders can continuously learn from new data and evolve their fraud detection strategies to detect emerging threats.

These AI-powered systems can analyze vast amounts of data, including transaction history, geolocation and behavioral patterns, to identify anomalies and flag potentially fraudulent activity. By proactively detecting and preventing fraud, lenders are doing their best to safeguard their assets, protect their borrowers and build trust. As fraudsters become more sophisticated, lenders will need to make continual investments in the latest technologies to detect, deter and prevent fraud. 

### Underwriting

Underwriting is another area that’s seen huge advancements in recent years. Historically, lenders relied on manual processes and limited financial data to evaluate creditworthiness. Thanks to the advent of AI, lenders can now analyze vast amounts of data in real time to make better credit decisions. [According to Experian](https://www.experian.com/blogs/insights/2022/10/ai-driven-credit-risk-decisioning/), AI has already been able to deliver a 35% decrease in nonperforming loans.

In business lending specifically, AI-powered systems can automate the collection of business financial data and can evaluate complex financial statements, cash flow projections and business performance metrics with greater accuracy and speed. This enables lenders to make faster and better loan decisions, helping businesses access the capital they need and reducing the time and effort required for underwriting.

Unlike fraud detection, underwriting’s adversary is not bad actors but rather the challenge of thoroughly understanding a borrower’s financial situation and accurately predicting how it will evolve. Lenders will never be able to perfectly predict a borrower’s future ability to repay, but expect advances in AI to make lenders better and better at this until there’s little room left for improvement. 

While generative AI may help lenders uncover new signals that can help improve underwriting models, it will also need to help lenders with explainability of their models for compliance purposes. With more and more data sources being leveraged for underwriting, regulations will need to evolve in order to help ensure equitable access to credit. 

AI will also help lenders to better balance credit risk with borrower needs, enabling lenders to get smarter about offering the right amount of money in the right way. AI may also help increase access for borrowers with limited credit histories, and enable lenders to be more agile in dynamically updating their offers over time. For example, if a borrower’s financial situation improves, a lender could increase the borrower’s credit limit—or upsell or cross-sell—increasing customer lifetime value. 

### Customer service

Many borrowers prefer to resolve their concerns without interacting with an agent. For all but the most common inquiries, however, the promise of AI-driven customer service has yet to be realized. As often as not, chatbot interactions leave customers feeling frustrated and wishing they had simply been connected to an agent in the first place.

Expect this to change in a big way. Once AI can understand a lender’s system and policies as well as an agent does—and can interact with customers with the same degree of intelligence, empathy and tact possessed by agents—chatbots, queryable help centers and even AI-powered virtual “agents” will finally begin to transform loan servicing. Borrowers will receive quick, personalized solutions and guidance—with no hold music. 

Lenders won’t stop there, however. Customer service innovation will continue to advance until customers are receiving much better and more personalized service than they ever have before. Expect lenders to leverage nuanced customer insights and real-time analytics to provide tailored product offerings and personalized guidance. By gaining deeper insight into each customer and leveraging the massive amount of data at their disposal, lenders will be able to make customers feel like they’re using a product designed just for them—increasing customer satisfaction and reducing credit losses. Concurrently, AI must help lenders ensure equal access and fair treatment despite this more personalized approach.

### Personal financial management

A wide variety of financial services companies and fintechs have attempted to provide a personal financial management (PFM) software tool to help customers manage their finances. However, none have achieved widespread success due to the difficulty of aggregating separate accounts and providing truly useful, context-aware insights and guidance. AI may be able to solve this challenge. For instance, an AI companion could identify that a borrower has extra cash in their bank account, and could let the borrower know how much they’d be able to save by using that money to pay down their debt faster. Simple wins like this are just the beginning.

### Collections and CECL

Expect both traditional and generative AI to supercharge lenders’ ability to collect on delinquent accounts—and to prevent delinquency in the first place. Traditional AI will help lenders both predict delinquencies and optimize their collections cadences to increase recovery rates. Generative AI, on the other hand, will give lenders the ability to generate compelling and personalized communications that will reach borrowers in the right way and at the right time. Expect this AI cocktail to significantly reduce credit losses.

The current expected credit loss (CECL) accounting standard requires many lenders to estimate expected credit losses over the life of loans. AI technologies will play a crucial role in helping lenders minimize credit losses as well as predict them with greater accuracy. Machine learning models can analyze vast amounts of past loan data to identify patterns and predict potential default risks. This will enable lenders to make more accurate financial forecasts, assess credit risk with greater precision, and ensure compliance with CECL requirements. AI-powered tools can also provide real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, enhancing transparency and regulatory compliance.

### Regulatory compliance

The impetus of all lending regulations is hopefully to ensure the greatest good for all. However, after operating in a world of familiar lending constructs like credit cards and personal loans, the arising of constructs like BNPL has raised new questions about how regulations apply. This uncertainty is bad for lenders, borrowers and regulators alike. As technology spurs even greater and more rapid lending innovation, we will almost certainly confront a need to rethink the regulations that govern our financial products, and the speed with which we update these regulations. There will likely be a role for AI to play, both in increasing regulators’ speed in adapting to new innovations and in optimizing regulations themselves given an increasingly complex patchwork of technologies and offerings. AI may also increase the speed with which regulatory bodies like the CFPB can issue guidance to help lenders interpret new regulations.

On the lender side, AI will play a prominent role in helping lenders stay compliant. AI-powered systems can automate compliance monitoring, ensuring that lending practices adhere to regulatory guidelines. And by analyzing loan data, customer interactions and regulatory requirements, AI algorithms can identify potential compliance issues and provide real-time alerts to lenders. This proactive approach will enable lenders to address compliance concerns promptly and mitigate any risks.

A word of caution: Generative AI is prone to the same biases and racism present in the data on which it is trained. So lenders must be mindful of the downstream effects of leveraging AI technologies. Regulators are likely to be wary of the overuse of AI until lenders can demonstrate that their use of AI does not lead to discriminatory downstream effects.

### Lending construct innovation

For a long time, we’ve had a number of generally fixed and recognizable product constructs within lending—credit cards, personal loans, merchant cash advances, mortgages, and so on. But these do not necessarily represent the limits of what’s possible. BNPL is a recent case study in how a new lending construct can join innovative technology with novel terms and unique network effects to better meet customer needs. At Peach, we don’t expect BNPL to be the last such novel product construct to arise. On the contrary, we expect AI to accelerate the pace of innovation.

Today, there are a few things that limit lending constructs innovation: regulations, capital and resources, and our own imaginations. We’ve already covered how regulations can evolve to better support innovation. When it comes to capital and resources, AI is already beginning to increase the productivity of many job functions, including software engineering. We can expect that going forward, AI will have a marked impact on the productivity of engineering organizations, enabling lenders and lending platforms to do far more with the resources they have. This will dramatically accelerate the deployment of innovative lending software.

And then when it comes to our own imaginations, it’s not inconceivable that within the next few years AI will be sufficiently intelligent to help us develop even better ideas than we can on our own. This will help lenders better solve the needs of their customers.

### In conclusion

While the integration of AI into the lending industry is just one facet of digital transformation, the magnitude of its potential impact—on consumer lending, business lending and commercial lending alike—is hard to overstate. And while no one can predict exactly how AI will reshape lending, we do know that it will give lenders access to capabilities they’ve never had before. Embracing AI will be essential to staying ahead of the curve, driving innovation, and unlocking new opportunities for growth.

Here at Peach, we’re committed to being at the center of this innovation, providing an API-driven ecosystem for our lenders to leverage all the key advances in technology that enable them to gain an edge. 

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you deliver innovative lending programs, [contact our sales team](https://www.peachfinance.com/contact).


How AI is going to change lending

Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher shares his thought process on lending modernization in this piece for Fintech Nexus.

[READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON FINTECH NEXUS](https://www.fintechnexus.com/why-lenders-should-modernize-during-economic-uncertainty/)

According to Cornerstone’s 2023 [What’s Going On in Banking report](https://www.crnrstone.com/whats-going-on-in-banking-2023), 94% of banks have already embarked on a digital transformation strategy—or plan to do so by the end of 2023. This is a pretty convincing data point, and it leaves little doubt that financial institutions (FIs) are doing everything they can to modernize. And yet very few FIs are near the end of their modernization journey, which means significant opportunities remain.

For FIs, modernization can take many forms. One of the most obvious is the adoption of emerging technologies like cloud computing, APIs, machine learning and blockchain. At a more granular level, FIs are focused on modernizing around various themes like digital onboarding, digital lending initiatives and fraud management.

From our conversations with FIs at [Peach Finance](https://www.peachfinance.com/), we’re most familiar with initiatives related to modernizing core lending infrastructure—that is, loan management and servicing software. Because of the inherent complexity of lending software, modernization can feel risky due to the possibility of service interruptions, loss of data integrity and compliance violations. With potential downsides like these, it can feel like there’s never really a good time to take the plunge into lending modernization. But the longer FIs wait, the further behind they find themselves in terms of their flexibility, customer experience and support for novel product constructs.

So the question becomes, *When is the least bad time to modernize?* Generally speaking, FIs have more to lose when the economy is booming and credit is flowing. During these times, the risks of modernization loom larger and it can be harder to justify taking your foot off the gas to make platform improvements. So it’s times of economic uncertainty—such as we find ourselves in now—that may be the best opportunity for FIs to invest in modern lending infrastructure that positions them for future growth.

There are a few key areas of lending infrastructure where FIs should consider accelerating their modernization efforts.

**1. Loan management system configurability**

The loan management system (LMS) is the heartbeat of lending programs in the sense that it determines lenders’ flexibility to launch new products, accommodate evolving regulations and make product configuration changes on the fly. LMS modernization can go in a couple of different directions...(article continued on Fintech Nexus)

[READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON FINTECH NEXUS](https://www.fintechnexus.com/why-lenders-should-modernize-during-economic-uncertainty/)


Why lenders should modernize during economic uncertainty

Fintech Finance News sat down with Noah Trugman, Peach's VP of Sales & Partnerships, at Fintech Meetup 2023 to discuss current market dynamics, the evolution of the lending sector, and the opportunities for innovation in loan servicing.

Peach's VP of Sales & Partnerships, Noah, Trugman, joined Fintech Finance News to discuss current market dynamics, the evolution of the lending sector, and the opportunities for innovation in loan servicing.

[WATCH THE INTERVIEW](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfT8Jhws0WU)

## Transcript

**Question:** Can you please kick it off by introducing yourself and your company? 

**Answer:** First of all, it's great to be here. My name is Noah Trugman—I'm VP of Sales & Partnerships at Peach Finance. We're a venture-backed technology company based in Oakland, California, and we've been around about four years.

**Question:** Can you expand a little bit on where Peach fits within the fintech space?

**Answer:** Sure. Peach is a software company and we operate within lending. We're an all-in-one, post-origination loan management and servicing platform. So what we do is we help our lender customers who want to launch new, innovative lending products. We handle all the post-origination management and servicing for those products. 

**Question:** What does the lending sector look like today, and how has it evolved? What are the trends and what role is technology playing?

**Answer:** It's a great question. Fundamentally, we see tons of innovation coming from the fintech sector, and we see banks, with a little bit more of a legacy footprint and legacy technology racing to catch up with the innovative upstarts who are bringing new products to market and providing digital-native products and services. We are helping both sides of the market with very flexible, scalable servicing technology. 

Lending is very complex. I wouldn't say I'm an expert on every facet of lending innovation—there's a lot happening on the origination and underwriting side, for example. But given that we're a core system and we help our customers think through their fundamental product constructs, we see a lot of innovation happening.

Number one, over the past several years we have seen the rise of installment point-of-sale products that you may know as buy now, pay later (BNPL). We also see innovation happening with revolving credit in the credit card space. And post-pandemic, there has been tons of innovation in business lending, kind of out of necessity because so many business lenders were impacted during the COVID recession. Now, there's a real rebirth in business lending happening.

**Question:** Do you feel that businesses in general are really embracing innovation within this field?

**Answer:** Peach was built from the ground up as a very flexible, asset class-agnostic servicing platform. So we play in all of these different spaces outside of traditional mortgage. Our customers use us for everything from personal unsecured installment lending to business credit cards, auto lending, invoice financing...you name it. The way you go about running your business or your personal finances—you have so many more choices today than you did even five years ago. Mobile-first, digital-first financial services that are embedded in the products and services you use every day. So that access is a result of the innovation that's been happening in the lending space. 

This is an interesting, dynamic time, on the heels of a lot of changes in the market. But behind the scenes, people are still heads down, focused on innovation and evolving technology to remain competitive in the market. Financial institutions, as part of their long-term strategy to evolve their technology and continue to innovate and adapt their products, haven't been distracted at all by our dynamic market. 

**Question:** What's next for your company? 

**Answer:** We've really spent the past four years building a core lending platform and an end-to-end servicing technology platform from the ground up that is truly asset class-agnostic. Our customers are bringing some of the most innovative installment and revolving credit programs to market—both unsecured and asset-based lending products. Our customers are finding niches in the market and ways to innovate and find their foothold. We continue to lead with our best-in-class, API-first technology platform and are really excited to partner with some of the most innovative, forward-thinking players in the market. We have big plans for our platform, but more than anything we're excited to partner with our customers as they scale the innovative products that are making their borrowers' lives better.

**Question:** In the financial services industry, innovation isn't always easy. How are you overcoming this challenge?

**Answer:** The first aspect I would touch on is that in lending, "loan servicing" is often misunderstood. What we're talking about is both the lending system of record, which is often part of the core banking platform but is in many cases supported by a third-party loan management system, as well as all of the surrounding technology that operationalizes servicing. That can mean money movement, customer communications, data and reporting, compliance, borrower portal, CRM and agent tooling, and more. 

One of the challenges is understanding how all this technology needs to work together. Another is to optimize all these pieces not only for borrowers and agents, but also for regulators, investors and others. So fundamentally you are dealing with very complex software that is used in various complex scenarios by a variety of end users. We have worked hard to consolidate all this functionality so that it's easy for our customers to innovate and scale their lending programs in terms of both size and geography.

*This transcript has been edited for clarity.*


Peach's Noah Trugman joins Fintech Finance News

This blog posts takes a look at the inner workings of Loan Replay™—a novel capability that makes retroactive changes easy.

The Loan Management System (LMS) is a lender’s system of record as well as their financial ledger, storing all of the financial events that occur in relation to each loan. The happy path for any loan is for each payment to be made on its due date. In this scenario, the ledger simply progresses with its expected entries as time moves on, and lenders do not typically encounter any major issues. 

However, the real world is often quite different from this happy path, and there are a number of edge cases that can cause significant disruptions for lenders. Particularly challenging are scenarios that affect loans retroactively.

Consider the case where an ACH payment fails 45 days after it was made. (ACH payments can be disputed for up to 60 days.) For an interest-bearing loan, it's not sufficient to “remove” the amount paid from the loan’s ledger (for example, by debiting the loan by the same amount that was previously credited). Instead, the loan needs to account for the additional interest that would have accrued if the original payment had not been made.

Another salient example is a retroactive change to a loan’s interest rate, which also requires a recalculation of interest accrual—and a reapplication of interest/principal splits for payments. We explored this example in our post about how Peach handles interest-rate adjustments in the context of the [Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA)](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-peach-powers-scra-compliance).

There are a few possible ways to support retroactive changes in an LMS. The simplest approach is to fiddle with the ledger on an ad-hoc basis to arrive at the correct outcome. This method is manual and error-prone, and any bugs or issues—especially for more complex lending constructs such as lines of credit—render the ledger useless. A slightly better approach would be to create a new branch of the ledger each time a retroactive change is made. This branch would record an up-to-date view of all events from that point on. This method retains the previous ledger history, but makes it significantly harder to accurately calculate the loan balance, as it requires traversing the various branches a ledger might have.

At Peach, we’ve approached the problem differently than the two methods described above. We call our approach Loan Replay™, and it’s a capability native to our Adaptive Core™ loan management system. In effect, we’ve woven into our LMS the ability to automatically perform recalculations when retroactive changes are made, and to preserve the full loan history before and after those changes. Loan Replay makes it easy for agents to backdate payments, fail past transactions, retroactively change interest rates and more through the same intuitive Agent Portal they ordinarily use (the same functionality is also available via API).

The way we approached Loan Replay also enables us to support lines of credit with multiple sub-lines (amortized or revolving credit), which carry significantly more complexity for retroactive changes. The first two methods described above would likely make it almost impossible to correctly adjust past events.

At the core of Loan Replay is an [event sourcing system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_architecture) that emits events as they happen. Such events include “loan.interestaccrued” and “payment.applied” as well as more complicated actions such as “loan.rate.created.”

\=================================

For a loan with a weekly payment frequency with auto payment:

Day 0: loan.created

loan.rate.created

loan.activated

payment.instrument.created (bank account)

Day 1: loan.interestaccrued

Day 2: loan.interestaccrued

Day 3: loan.interestaccrued

Day 4: loan.interestaccrued

Day 5: loan.interestaccrued

Day 6: loan.interestaccrued

Day 7: loan.movebalances.nonduetodue

transaction

payment.applied (payment via bank account)

payment.pending

Day 8: loan.interestaccrued

Day 9: loan.interestaccrued

Day 10: loan.interestaccrued

Day 11: payment.suceeded (ach payment cleared)

.

.

.

\=================================

Some events are simply there to mark an occurrence, while other events will add entries to the ledger. Each event of the latter kind knows how to read the state of the ledger and of the loan, and knows what ledger entries it needs to add in order to record its changes. In the case of a past failed payment, Peach will simply mark the [transaction object](https://docs.peach.finance/tag/Transactions#operation/peach.transactions.handlers.transactions_get_by_id) as failed and it will “go back in time,” invalidating all ledger entries from the time the original transaction was applied to the ledger until the date the transaction failed. Our system will then replay all events in that same time frame.

![](/blog/scra/scra-loan-replay-timeline.jpg)

When Loan Replay processes the “payment.failed” event for the failed transaction, it will simply skip it and will not write it to the ledger, because the event is now marked as “Failed,” and from an accounting perspective it's as if the payment never existed in the first place.

In a similar way, when a loan’s interest rate must be retroactively changed, a new rate with a past date is added to the system and a replay is initiated from the effective date of that new interest rate. The replay will invalidate all ledger entries from its starting point until today, and will begin replaying all events during that time frame. When it reaches an “Accrue Interest” event, it will use the new rate and will accrue the interest based on the ledger balance for that day and the interest rate defined. When it comes time to reapply previously successful payments, the interest/principal splits will reflect the newly accrued interest with the new rate.

Peach’s immutable ledger and events preserve a clear audit trail and ensure that lenders never lose any of their data or loan histories. Our ledger is queryable before and after replays—showing exactly what was changed and how.

#### A few thoughts on the design of our platform

Because of the many dependencies that affect ledger immutability, the functionality of Loan Replay can’t just be bolted onto an existing loan management system. That’s why we built it as a core part of our platform, weaving it into the fabric of our LMS. This approach is emblematic of the way Peach builds, and of our company value, *Think long-term*.

Many other loan management systems in the market started with installment loans, and when the time came they added support for lines of credit. This required rewriting their code and making certain compromises for expediency and to minimize impact to the installment loans already in flight. The result is platforms with certain inflexibilities that make Loan Replay-like functionality very challenging.

For this reason, we designed Peach from day one to be agnostic to asset class, so that our underlying technology, data model and core software construct can utilize the same code to support both installment loans and lines of credit. This enables all our clients to use the functionality of Loan Replay as part of their day-to-day operations—failing past payments, changing interest rates retroactively, waiving past fees, canceling purchases on draws and more. Loan Replay is also integral for lenders who leverage our [Supported Portfolio Migration™](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate) capability.

At [Peach](https://www.peachfinance.com/), we’re always taking the path of configurability, ensuring that all our clients are leveraging the same code base and benefiting from the full breadth of our functionality as they find new and better ways to improve lives through innovative lending products.


How Loan Replay™ works

Peach won the 2023 Banking Tech Award for LendTech of the Future, presented by Fintech Futures.

Peach has received the 2023 Banking Tech Award for LendTech of the Future. We’re grateful to be recognized alongside many of today's foremost innovators in banking and fintech.

View all the winners [here](https://informaconnect.com/banking-tech-awards-usa/2023-winners-highly-commended/). 

Other recent awards received by Peach include the [2023 FinTech Breakthrough Award](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-receives-2023-fintech-breakthrough-award) for Banking-as-a-Service Innovation, as well as the [2022 Future Digital Award ](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/future-digital-awards-2022)for Banking-as-a-Service Innovation.

Historically, innovation in lending has occurred slowly because of outdated technology. Banks often require years to launch new products like BNPL, and fintechs who want modern lending software must build it in-house, leading to inflexible, purpose-built systems that limit scalability and adaptability.

Peach was founded to solve these problems—to revolutionize lenders’ ability to innovate and to quickly launch new lending products. Our API-first lending technology platform gives lenders an extremely high degree of flexibility and configurability, enabling them to offer [virtually any type of loan](https://www.peachfinance.com/solutions/asset-classes)—from BNPL to credit cards to merchant cash advances—and to configure their lending programs in unique and innovative ways. Our [Adaptive Core™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core) gives lenders more than 250 configuration variables to define loan product behavior, and features industry-first capabilities like [Loan Replay™](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-loan-replay-works) and [Supported Portfolio Migration](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate).

For financial institutions, Peach lowers the technological barrier to modernization, so banks and credit unions can finally innovate with greater speed and agility. For fintechs, Peach lowers the technological barrier to launching novel lending products, enabling more innovative ideas to come to market. 

Our [mission](https://www.peachfinance.com/about) is to improve lives by giving every lender the power to innovate.

\--

To learn more about Peach, [visit our homepage](https://www.peachfinance.com/) or check out the [Fintech One-on-One podcast](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/fintech-one-on-one-2023) featuring our CEO, Eddie Oistacher.


Peach wins 2023 Banking Tech Award

Peach announced a major additional investment in its first-party collections capabilities, enabling it to outperform standalone external collections systems.

[Read the full press release on Business Wire.](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230510005351/en)

OAKLAND, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--[Peach Finance](https://www.peachfinance.com/), the leading modern loan management and servicing technology platform, today announced a major additional investment in its [first-party collections capabilities](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/first-party-collections). While Peach’s existing capabilities were designed to match those of external collections systems, Peach is uniquely positioned to be able to exceed those capabilities as the only API-first loan management provider with first-party collections built in.

Lenders’ loan management and collections systems are very often decoupled—typically because end-to-end functionality is not available on a single platform. But this undermines lenders’ ability to collect effectively, since collections systems need access to as much borrower data as possible to deploy sophisticated and adaptive collections models and strategies. In addition, decoupled systems can make accurate credit bureau reporting more challenging due to delays in communication between systems, while differing lines of sight into borrower communications between lender and servicer can introduce compliance risk.

Peach’s tight integration between its loan management and collections systems enables it to realize functionality, efficiencies and compliance benefits far beyond those of disparate systems. Lenders will be able to take advantage of automated collections campaigns, robust loan modification tools, temporary payment plans, promise-to-pay analytics, automatically created collections cases, pre-integrated communications tools and templates, cases and workflows, [Compliance Guard™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/compliance-guard) monitoring, and more.

“Peach is committed to continual innovation as a market leader in modern loan servicing technology,” said Russell Braden, VP of Product at Peach. “That’s why we aren’t satisfied with matching the functionality of external servicing platforms—we are determined to exceed it. In addition to all the collections tools we provide, we will also enable lenders to leverage nuanced data points like historical on-time and late payments, communications delivery and open statistics, app activity, promise-to-pay success rates, and more to fine-tune collections campaigns and optimize performance.”

“Our clients already benefit greatly from the first-party collections tools native to our platform,” continued Braden, ”and we’re looking forward to unlocking even more value for them in the months to come.”

Earlier this year, Peach announced the launch of its [Supported Portfolio Migration™](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate) capability. A first of its kind in the lending industry, the capability streamlines the migration process and gives lenders the ability to manage migrations themselves, reducing the time, effort, risk and cost associated with migrating their existing lending portfolio. The tool is suitable for both installment loans and lines of credit, and is offered at no cost to lenders migrating their portfolio onto Peach’s platform.

Peach also recently announced [the beginning of its international expansion](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-begins-international-expansion) with a launch in Canada.

**About Peach**

Peach is a cloud-native lending technology platform that helps fintechs and traditional financial institutions quickly launch and confidently scale lending programs. Peach is the only lending platform built on an [Adaptive Core™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core), a new paradigm in loan management offering complete configurability and support for virtually any asset class. For lenders with existing portfolios, Peach provides the industry’s first supported Portfolio Migration capability. The company’s fully integrated suite of API-first products includes a loan management system with 250+ configuration variables; a suite of proprietary [servicing tools](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/crowdfund-insider-qanda-2023), including a lending-specific CRM, borrower portal, agent portal, payment processing, communications, reporting and first-party collections tools; and Compliance Guard™, a proprietary compliance monitoring system. Peach was built by leaders from top fintechs like Affirm, Avant and Prosper, who set out to create the most configurable, robust, compliance-forward and future-proof lending platform in the market. Peach’s mission is to improve lives by giving every lender the power to innovate. Learn more at [peachfinance.com](https://www.peachfinance.com/).

**Peach media contact**

Crayton Montei

<press@peachfinance.com>


Peach announces investment in first-party collections

Peach's international expansion has begun with a launch in Canada. Peach also announced a partnership with Snaplii.

[Read the press release on Business Wire.](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230508005809/en/Peach-Begins-International-Expansion-with-Canada-Launch)

OAKLAND, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Peach Finance, the leading modern loan management and servicing technology platform, today announced that its international expansion has begun with a launch in Canada.

The company, which enables fintechs and traditional financial institutions to quickly launch and confidently scale lending programs, shared the news alongside an announcement that it had partnered with [Snaplii](https://snaplii.com/), a leading Canadian digital wallet and mobile payment fintech.

“We have already built the industry’s most flexible servicing platform—one that can support virtually any asset class and can easily adapt as lending programs, regulations and borrower preferences change,” Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher said. “Our platform was designed from day one to support country-specific constructs, making it possible for us to scale to other markets with relative ease. We have also assembled a team that brings significant experience running lending programs in Canada, Australia and the UK. We are very happy to be partnering with Snaplii as we begin our journey of international expansion.”

“At Snaplii, we’re focused on driving the North American fintech industry forward,” said Snaplii’s CEO, Spencer Xu. “We’re aggressively pursuing initiatives that unlock mutual value for consumers and merchants. We offer consumers a convenient payment system along with one-stop membership benefits, while giving merchants ways to increase loyalty and engagement.”

According to Xu, innovative products like those created by Snaplii require a servicing platform that’s flexible and modern.

“We needed a servicing platform with robust virtual credit card functionality, as well as the flexibility to work with both open loop and closed loop constructs. We also needed a solution that could integrate with our credit card issuer of choice. With Peach, we found a partner that’s invested in our success, and that won’t be a limiting factor for us as we continue to evolve our product offerings.”

Earlier this year, Peach announced the launch of its [Supported Portfolio Migration](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate) capability. A first of its kind in the lending industry, the capability streamlines the migration process and gives lenders the ability to manage migrations themselves, reducing the time, effort, risk and cost associated with migrating their existing lending portfolio. The tool is suitable for both installment loans and lines of credit, and is offered at no cost to lenders migrating their portfolio onto Peach’s platform.

**About Peach**

Peach is a cloud-native lending technology platform that helps fintechs and traditional financial institutions quickly launch and confidently scale lending programs. Peach is the only lending platform built on an Adaptive Core™, a new paradigm in loan management offering complete configurability and support for virtually any asset class. For lenders with existing portfolios, Peach provides the industry’s first Self-Service Portfolio Migration capability. The company’s fully integrated suite of API-first products includes a loan management system with 250+ configuration variables; a suite of proprietary servicing tools, including a lending-specific CRM, borrower portal, agent portal, payment processing, communications, reporting and first-party collections tools; and Compliance Guard™, a proprietary compliance monitoring system. Peach was built by leaders from top fintechs like Affirm, Avant and Prosper, who set out to create the most configurable, robust, compliance-forward and future-proof lending platform in the market. Peach’s mission is to improve lives by giving every lender the power to innovate. Learn more at[ peachfinance.com](https://www.peachfinance.com/).

**Peach media contact**

Crayton Montei

[press@peachfinance.com](mailto:pr@peachfinance.com)


Peach begins international expansion with Canada launch

Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher will be speaking about credit card innovation as part of a panel discussion at Fintech Nexus 2023.

Peach CEO and Co-Founder Eddie Oistacher will be speaking about credit card innovation next week at [Fintech Nexus](https://www.fintechnexus.com/usa/2023/).

**Session topic:** Are Credit Cards Lagging Behind the Rest of Fintech?

**Session time:** Thursday, May 11, 11:15–11:55am; Room 1E-15

**Panelists:** Eddie Oistacher, Peach; Howard Goldstein, Mission Lane; Anthony Peculic, Cross River; Sachin Ramchandani, Zeta

**Moderator:** Juan Azel, Winston & Strawn

If you’ll be at the conference, stop by Booth 321 to learn more about our API-first loan management and servicing platform. Peach enables you to launch new products of virtually any asset class, or migrate your existing portfolio with our industry-first supported Portfolio Migration capability.

\--

Update: [Listen to a recording of the panel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqKzFoc_bFg&list=PLdQ2kQyad3IiwRTsOhkvaMS4k1YaGdASx).

See also: [Eddie Oistacher speaks at Fintech Nexus 2022](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-ceo-eddie-oistacher-to-speak-at-lendit).


Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher to speak at Fintech Nexus 2023

In this Q&A with Crowdfund Insider, Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher takes a look into the future of loan servicing.

In this Q&A with Crowdfund Insider, Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher takes a look into the future of loan servicing. Here's an excerpt from the article.

\--

**Q:** We often hear of “financial institutions vs. fintechs,” as if this is a battle with a binary outcome. Is this an accurate assessment within the lending space?

**A:** Not at all — in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Once upon a time, fintechs may have been perceived as a threat to the existence of traditional financial institutions (FIs), but that perception has radically changed. This is for two reasons.

First, the fintech that had hoped to replace FIs wholesale have been largely unsuccessful. That’s not to say they haven’t built great businesses. But instead of replacing FIs, these fintechs have found a niche — doing certain things like point-of-sale financing, underwriting, and onboarding better than their FI counterparts. These more focused solutions don’t pose an existential threat to FIs.

Secondly, a very large portion of today’s fintechs in the lending space aim not to replace FIs, but to serve them. For every fintech building machine learning-based underwriting for their own benefit, there’s another fintech offering a similar technology to bolster the existing offerings of FIs. And in large part, FIs have embraced this symbiosis, acknowledging that they need help in certain areas in order to stay competitive.

So, in this way, we’re settling into a very healthy balance between fintechs — with their specialized product offerings and nimble approach to financial services innovation — and FIs — with their comprehensive product offerings, offline presence and established customer bases. It’s certainly true to say that the emergence of fintechs has made FIs better, that FIs’ resilience has compelled fintechs to be better, and that customers have benefited a great deal from...

[Read the full article here.](https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2023/04/205895-eddie-oistacher-ceo-of-lending-technology-provider-peach-finance-discusses-the-future-of-loan-servicing/)

[Learn about Peach's servicing suite.](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/servicing-suite)



The future of loan servicing technology

Peach was selected as a finalist in the 2023 Banking Tech Awards from FinTech Futures—in the LendTech of the Future category.

We're pleased to share that [Peach](https://www.peachfinance.com/) has been named to the shortlist for the 2023 Banking Tech Awards from Fintech Futures. Peach's category is LendTech of the Future.

Built to support any asset class, featuring over 250 configuration variables and designed around modern user experience principles, our [adaptive lending platform](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core) is built to power tomorrow’s lending products. As change accelerates within financial services, Peach gives lenders the ability to stay nimble and adapt as markets, regulations and product constructs evolve.

Winners will be announced June 1. [See the full list of finalists here.](https://informaconnect.com/banking-tech-awards-usa/the-shortlist/)

\--

Update: [Peach wins 2023 Banking Tech Award](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-wins-2023-banking-tech-award)


Peach named finalist for 2023 Banking Tech Award

Peach received a 2023 FinTech Breakthrough Award for banking-as-a-service innovation—in recognition of the company's revolutionary lending solutions.

Peach is honored to accept this year’s FinTech Breakthrough Award for Banking-as-a-Service Innovation.

In its 7th year, the annual FinTech Breakthrough Awards aims to recognize the breakthrough companies and products in the global financial services and technology industry. Peach receives its award alongside other leading-edge companies including American Express, Ramp and Credit Karma. Over 4,000 nominations were received. 

From our [Adaptive Core™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core) to our [Self-Service Portfolio Migration](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate), we’re proud of the innovations that are helping every lender to innovate—and we’re grateful for this recognition from FinTech Breakthrough.

Other recent awards received by Peach include the [2023 Banking Tech Award](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-wins-2023-banking-tech-award) for LendTech of the Future, as well as the [2022 Future Digital Award ](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/future-digital-awards-2022)for Banking-as-a-Service Innovation.

For more information, read [the full press release](https://www.prweb.com/releases/global_fintech_innovators_recognized_in_seventh_annual_fintech_breakthrough_awards_program/prweb19242066.htm).


Peach receives 2023 FinTech Breakthrough Award

Lending compliance has never been more important than it is today. Here's how Peach helps lenders keep up with regulations like the SCRA and FDCPA.

One look at the [running tally of CFPB enforcement actions](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/actions/) is enough to inspire a healthy respect for the importance of lending compliance—especially as the steepest penalties [swell into the billions of dollars](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-orders-wells-fargo-to-pay-37-billion-for-widespread-mismanagement-of-auto-loans-mortgages-and-deposit-accounts/).

But for lenders, compliance isn’t just a checklist of straightforward decisions. The inflexibility of legacy lending technology can make it difficult or impossible for lenders to fully comply with certain regulations. For example, one regulation that frequently poses challenges for lenders is the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), which entitles active-duty servicemembers to an interest rate cap of 6% during the period of their deployment. This interest rate cap can be requested retroactively, which presents a challenge: Most loan management systems are not capable of making retroactive changes at scale. As a result, many lenders are forced to approximate the interest benefit through service credits, exposing themselves to risk due to improper implementation. Lenders likewise face difficulty complying with the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), among other regulations.

Peach was founded in large part because of the opportunity to improve upon the shortcomings of legacy lending infrastructure—including on the compliance front. Peach was designed from the beginning to accommodate all the regulatory requirements of lending as a routine part of daily operations. That’s why you’ll find a number of features, like [Loan Replay™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core#loan-replay), that are uniquely designed to address widely acknowledged pain points such as retroactive changes and portfolio migrations. 

[Compliance Guard™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/compliance-guard) is the name of our compliance-focused platform module. Its functionality can be divided into two parts. First, our Compliance Guard Monitoring module scans for borrower status changes with compliance ramifications, like military status, reassigned numbers and bankruptcy. Second, our Compliance Guard Rules module scans outbound communications based on predefined (yet fully customizable) rules to ensure compliance with regulations like the U.S. Bankruptcy Code and [Regulation F](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-peach-helps-lenders-comply-with-regulation-f). We’ll take a detailed look at borrower status monitoring first.

## Compliance Guard Monitoring

Peach is continually running processes to check relevant borrower statuses. For example, if a borrower is found to be bankrupt, sanctioned, deceased or on active duty, our system will automatically create a case for that person, which a lender’s agents can then review and take action on. Similarly, we monitor the Reassigned Numbers Database to determine whether borrowers’ phone numbers have changed, which helps ensure compliant communications. We also check for borrowers who live in areas declared by FEMA to be natural disaster zones, although there is no law requiring lenders to take proactive action in this scenario.

All our borrower status monitoring systems are automated. Once turned on for a lender, we will continually monitor for all relevant borrower statuses. All that’s required of the lender is to handle the incoming cases created by Peach’s system.

Our system is built to standardize the information lenders see, even though the sources of this information are far from uniform. This helps lenders to be able to focus on their core business. Lenders can always choose which types of monitoring they want—so if they don't want to conduct proactive SCRA monitoring, for example, they can choose to forgo it. 

#### Monitoring for bankruptcy and deceased

We’re continually monitoring for borrowers who file for bankruptcy or pass away. Each time we receive a hit, we create a servicing case in the lender’s CRM for their agents to review. The case contains the match level for the hit—for example, the SSN, name and address could each match completely, partially or not at all. The case also contains additional metadata about the hit. For example, a bankruptcy case will show the court case filed date, the court case number, the bankruptcy chapter and the last status of the court case, among other data. A complete list of the fields we include for each case type can be found in our [API documentation](https://docs.peach.finance/tag/Cases#operation/peach.cases.handlers.case.cases_get_by_company!c=200&path=data/0/courtCaseFiledDate&t=response).

After a servicing case is generated, a lender’s agents can then leverage the flexibility of the Peach platform to perform a variety of actions, including triggering communications, setting do-not-interact rules, offering hardship solutions, waiving past fees, backdating payments and more. In the case of bankruptcy, because court cases can go on for months, our system will also continue to monitor progress, updating our internal data as the court case progresses. 

#### OFAC monitoring

The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is responsible for enforcing economic and trade sanctions. Lenders must periodically check to ensure they are not doing business with any borrowers who appear on a sanctions list.

Peach automatically searches the sanctions lists for every borrower on our platform. If we receive a hit, we’ll create a case in the lender’s CRM for their agents to review and take action on. We do this periodically so that lenders do not have to play an active role in the monitoring—they only need to handle the cases as they come in.

#### SCRA monitoring

The SCRA gives certain rights to borrowers who are on active military duty. So multiple times per week, we monitor for borrowers whose military status has changed, creating a case for each borrower. Agents can easily take appropriate action on SCRA cases, like lowering interest rates as of the current date or any past date—and waiving past fees, as necessary. For more detail, check out our [SCRA compliance article](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-peach-powers-scra-compliance).

#### Reassigned Numbers Database

Occasionally, the phone number on file for a borrower is reassigned to a new person, who by definition has not given permission to be contacted. If lenders are not aware of these reassigned numbers, they take on compliance risk. For that reason, we monitor the Reassigned Numbers Database for any numbers that have been reassigned or disconnected. We then update the contact object in our system with details, and we prevent further communication until consent is received again.

#### FEMA disasters

Even though it is not required by law, Peach tracks the occurrence of natural disasters so that lenders can provide leniency based on geographic location. We periodically pull FEMA’s list of declared disasters and identify any borrowers located within the bounds of those disasters, using the geographic coordinates of their addresses. We create a supercase for each disaster, which, unlike a normal case, applies to a group of borrowers. Once a supercase is created, the lender can decide whether they want to take action. If they do, they can automatically create individual cases for each borrower in the population.

## Compliance Guard Rules

Lawmakers at various levels of government have enacted regulations affecting how lenders can communicate with borrowers. Many of these laws overlap at the city, state and federal levels, and may vary by asset class—creating a complex patchwork of requirements. Tracking which laws affect which borrowers is complicated, but Peach has created a straightforward process to help lenders stay compliant in their communications.

Whenever an outbound communication is sent, whether automatically or manually, our system loads all rules that apply to the borrower based on where they live—and runs each rule to make sure that the communication is compliant. 
![{{ w: 620 }}](/blog/Compliance-Guard-blog-post-flow%20chart.jpg)
Alternatively, we expose an endpoint that allows a lender to check if they can interact with a given borrower without having to actually send a communication. 

For example, a lender might send the following to the [can_interact](https://docs.peach.finance/tag/Can-Interact#operation/peach.people.handlers.can_interact) endpoint to see if they can make a debt collections call to the borrower:

```
{
  "loanId": "LN-ABCD-EFGH",
  "channel": "voice",
  "theme": "opsCollDebt",
  "isAutodialed": false,
  "contactId": "CT-ABCD-EFGH",
}
```

If the call is allowed, the response from Peach would be:

```
{
  "status": 200,
  "data": {
	"result": true
  }
}
```

We continually scan for new legislation, and code any new or modified laws into our rules engine. By default, we code rules derived directly from law text into our Rules Engine. We also have the flexibility to customize the set of rules for any given lender. If they have special circumstances that require a different subset of rules to follow, or if they want to enforce more stringent rules than are required by law, we can easily alter the set of rules that is applied to their communications, or even add custom ones. This can all be edited on the platform in real time without having to release a new update of our system.

The rules are separated into business rules, federal rules and state rules, which can be further split up by city. This means we can have custom rules that apply to everyone, just to a particular state or just to a particular city. The rules are also specific to asset class, type of origination license and servicing entity, giving lenders with multiple lending programs a high degree of flexibility.

–

Though the complexity of lending compliance is likely to increase over time, many of the compliance challenges lenders face today can be reduced or eliminated with more flexible servicing technology. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you handle compliance in the context of your specific lending program, [please contact us](https://www.peachfinance.com/contact).


How Peach helps lenders stay compliant

Fintech Nexus News recently covered Peach's game-changing, industry-first Self-Service Portfolio Migration™ capability.  Read the full interview here. 

Tony Zerucha of Fintech Nexus News recently sat down with Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher to discuss Peach’s industry-first [Self-Service Portfolio Migration™](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate) capability, which we [previewed last September](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/self-service-portfolio-migration).

Why is it such a game-changer? One reason is that Peach recreates full loan histories from a small subset of data, which means far less data to gather and migrate. Another reason is that  lenders use the same API endpoints for migration that they’ll use to board new loans to Peach, enabling them to self-migrate with very little additional training. Plus, there’s no migration fee.

Check out the article to read more about how we simplify migrations, how we help lenders balance self-service with agent assistance, and what we’re excited about in the coming year.

[Read the full article here.](https://news.fintechnexus.com/peach-finance-goes-back-to-basics-to-simplify-migrations/)

#### An excerpt from the article

...Ultimately, lenders want borrowers to be self-curing, Oistacher said. Increased automation reduces pain points, leaving issues that actually need the human touch. Those automations can be programmed by the lender to include overdue reminders at prescribed points. Message tone can be changed throughout.

Oistacher said this is one area where Peach Finance took a different approach than many other servicing providers. Instead of assuming that agents will need to get involved, they provide more self-service options for customers (all with lender approval). Customers can lower monthly payment amounts, split payments, and customize their autopay schedule depending on lender preference.

When first-party collections are needed, the system allows borrowers with specific issues to be assigned to the best-equipped agents to handle them. Those agents learn more quickly because all the tools they need are in one system instead of being split into multiple systems and providers.

Additional utility is provided by pre-integrated communications tools that can be deployed manually or via automation. Options are available for phone, email, SMS, two-way texting, chat, and physical letters. Letter templates can be provided, and the system accepts lender templates.

Peach addresses [compliance](https://news.fintechnexus.com/bnpl-providers-should-consider-ftcs-compliance-checks/) monitoring through [Compliance Guard™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/compliance-guard), which includes coded federal and state rules governing collections communications, including FDCPA, TCPA, UDAAP, SCRA, the US Bankruptcy Code, and applicable state analogs. Outbound collections communications are run through and approved by a rules engine. The system automatically blocks non-compliant communication attempts...([continue to Fintech Nexus News](https://news.fintechnexus.com/peach-finance-goes-back-to-basics-to-simplify-migrations/))

\--

See also: Peach announces [release of Self-Service Portfolio Migration](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-launches-self-service-portfolio-migration) capability.


Peach simplifies portfolio migrations

Listen in as Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher joins the Fintech One-on-One podcast with Peter Renton. Eddie describes how Peach can help lenders successfully navigate a downturn. 

Peach CEO and Co-Founder Eddie Oistacher joined Peter Renton on the Fintech One-on-One podcast to chat about Peach's founding story, the biggest challenges lenders face today, and how Peach helps lenders meet borrowers halfway during a downturn.

They also discussed how Peach's supported Portfolio Migration capability is changing the game for lenders who want to modernize their servicing technology.

[Listen to the podcast](https://news.fintechnexus.com/podcast-409-eddie-oistacher-of-peach-finance/)

#### An excerpt from the podcast

**Peter:** I’d like to talk about loan servicing. There’s a lot of talk about a potential recession this year, and the economic environment may end up being quite challenging. How should lenders be thinking about servicing given what may be in store for us this year?

**Eddie:** Downturns in lending always make for an interesting discussion. At previous companies, we learned a lot about these recessionary periods, gaining insight into how people behave during a recession and what the lenders that survived did differently from those that eventually had to write off entire portfolios. 

I think the key for any lender is to keep the borrower financially healthy and happy. Because in the end, these are your loyal customers, and losing them during a downturn probably means losing them forever. 

We put so much effort and money into acquiring these customers, so during this kind of economic environment you just need to be flexible enough to weather the period where the customer may experience financial hardship. The required flexibility can take a lot of different forms as you work with your customers to find a solution. One way, for example, can be allowing your customer to make no payments for a certain period of time. Or you can do things like lowering the monthly payment for a given period, refinancing the loan, extending the term, waiving fees, or lowering interest for a while. 

So there are multiple different ways for you to help the customer and keep them on your platform without charging them off or writing them off in your books. And that’s where robust and modern technology is key. If the lender doesn’t have all these tools, then they’re likely going to lose the customer forever. Because if the customer can’t pay what the lender is asking, they’ll have no choice but to walk away and either file for bankruptcy or default on the loan.

**Peter:** Right, got it. On your website, it talks about the Adaptive Core™, which it looks like you’ve trademarked. What is an Adaptive Core™ and why is that important?

**Eddie:** Our Adaptive Core is our proprietary loan management system, which is the heartbeat of what we do. You can think about it in this way: If you need to make a change to a lending program, the Adaptive Core enables you to change a configuration, instead of changing code or introducing a new feature. It is basically an ability for lenders to quickly and easily launch and modify lending products. And because we support virtually any asset class, it’s very adaptive to your needs and offers a great deal of flexibility. 

We have 200+ variables that control the loan behavior without needing a single line of code—not from us and not from the lender...

[Listen to the podcast](https://news.fintechnexus.com/podcast-409-eddie-oistacher-of-peach-finance/)


Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher Joins Fintech One-on-One Podcast

The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) presents a number of technological hurdles for lenders. Peach's built-in compliance tools are designed to help. 

Regulatory compliance has a place near the top of every lender’s priority list. But that doesn’t mean compliance is straightforward, even for lenders with the most earnest intentions. Often, legacy infrastructure is the culprit, making it difficult for lenders to take the actions clearly outlined in the law. Even regulations that haven’t changed for some time—like the **Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA)**—still present significant challenges for many lenders. 

The SCRA grants active-duty service members the ability to request certain [protections](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/consumer-tools/educator-tools/servicemembers/the-servicemembers-civil-relief-act-scra/#:~:text=The%20SCRA%20is%20a%20law,defense%20needs%20of%20the%20Nation) during the period of their deployment, enabling them to devote their energy to serving the country. These protections include a reduction in interest rate to a maximum of six percent on any pre-service loans. While the SCRA in its current version has been law since 2003, the number of recent enforcement actions indicates just how difficult it is for many lenders to comply with the SCRA’s interest rate protections.

For example, in October of 2022 the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that the financial leasing arm of GM agreed to pay over $3.5 million to resolve allegations in relation to [SCRA violations](https://www.fox34.com/2022/10/05/gm-financial-pay-over-35-million-resolve-servicemembers-civil-relief-act-claims/) on thousands of service-member requests. Also in October, the DOJ announced a [settlement](https://www.consumerfinancemonitor.com/2022/10/04/doj-settles-scra-interest-rate-action-against-auto-finance-company/) with Westlake Financial, which failed to appropriately apply the interest rate reduction for service members. Meanwhile, the CFPB issued [recent guidance](https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_servicemembers-usage-of-scra-credit-protections_2022.pdf) signaling that underapplication of SCRA benefits is on their radar.

**Blunt tools in the absence of a scalpel**

The recent DOJ actions illustrate the high cost of non-compliance with the SCRA. In light of this cost, why do so many lenders still struggle with compliance? The answer primarily involves the limitations of legacy loan management systems—specifically, their inability to make retroactive changes to loans. To understand the significance of this limitation, let’s take a closer look at the details of the SCRA’s interest rate protection.

The SCRA [states](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/consumer-tools/educator-tools/servicemembers/the-servicemembers-civil-relief-act-scra/) that “...if you took out an automobile, home, or student loan or incurred credit card debt prior to becoming a service member, then you are entitled to have your interest rate reduced to a maximum of 6 percent per year…for the entire time you are serving on active duty.” This protection stipulates that the rate reduction can be requested at any time during active duty and up to 180 days after active duty ends. So lenders must be prepared to *retroactively* instate a lower interest rate, effective as of some date in the past. 

This modification of loan state is one of the biggest challenges for loan management software. Some loan management systems date back decades, and were designed for a much simpler set of possible actions. Even newer loan management systems may not account for the need to modify past events—because of significantly increased complexity. Loan management systems often start their life as single-use-case systems, with the aim of getting their core functionalities off the ground. But by the time these systems interact with real-life borrowers and regulations, enabling retroactive changes becomes nearly impossible.

As a result, many lenders must resort to costly, time-consuming and imprecise manual workarounds to comply with the SCRA. They may manually calculate the overpayments of past interest, then issue service credits—and zero out the interest rate going forward. Or they may resort to waiving the interest on an SCRA loan entirely—past and future. Further, many lenders have no way of reinstating interest once active duty ends. Needless to say, many lenders are stuck with clunky, costly solutions that in some cases may not even fully comply with the SCRA.

**Peach’s approach to SCRA**

At Peach, we brought real-life lending experience to the design of our platform. So from day one, we recognized the importance of being able to make retroactive changes to loans. (There are numerous applications beyond SCRA, including our [Supported Portfolio Migration](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate).) In the case of SCRA, Peach has long enabled lenders to retroactively change interest rates and waive past fees—as separate, manual actions. 

This was functional, but the ideal way to implement SCRA is to make these changes simultaneously. We now support this capability by leveraging the power of Peach's [Loan Replay™ engine](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-loan-replay-works), which can make changes to the ledger at any time, and then recalculate a loan’s history in light of those changes. The new combined functionality is as user-friendly for your agents as processing a payment. 

Specifically, the new SCRA feature allows your agents to perform the following adjustments simultaneously on a loan of an active-duty service member: 

1.  Lower interest rates to 6% (*and* lower the recurring payment during the active-duty period to account for the interest rate reduction)

2.  Waive fees, if necessary

3.  Enact these changes retroactively, if necessary, and replay the loan history with the rate and fee adjustments 

4.  Preview the intended changes 

While each of these SCRA adjustments are highly complex in themselves, involving detailed changes to loan state and financial state, ease of use is paramount. Our SCRA API endpoint allows the agent and borrower to see the combined result of simultaneously performing two replay actions (interest reduction and fee waiving) on the same loan and payment plan. In addition, we’ll automatically lower the recurring payment during the active duty period to account for the interest rate reduction. Our tool can then be used to reinstate the borrower’s previous interest rate once active duty ends.

Our SCRA functionality is available via API as well as through our white-label agent tool. The white-label agent interface can be seen here:
![](/blog/scra/scra-change-terms-460px.png)

For those working directly with the API, this can be as simple as sending the following request body to the SCRA endpoint:
![](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/scra/SCRA-snippet-1_2.jpg)
You’ll receive a response with either the actual post-SCRA adjusted payment plan or a preview of it. Below is a comparison of a payment plan prior to the SCRA adjustment, and the expected payments after the SCRA adjustment. The SCRA period is in effect for the first two months, and thus you will see the interest rates lowered to 6% in the response body (*and* the recurring amount due lowered by the amount of the interest rate reduction for the two relevant months). The origination fee has also been canceled.

**Original payment plan (first 3 payment periods)**
![](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/scra/SCRA-snippet-2.jpg)
**Adjusted payment plan (first 3 payment periods)**
![](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/scra/SCRA-snippet-3.jpg)
(*Certain fields omitted for brevity)

In addition to streamlining manual compliance with SCRA, Peach enables you to proactively offer the SCRA benefit to eligible borrowers. This is possible thanks to [Compliance Guard™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/compliance-guard), which automatically monitors for borrower status changes. We can alert you when borrowers receive orders to active-duty service, and again when active duty ends. You can then proactively reduce the borrower’s interest rate to 6% for the exact duration of their deployment, without the borrower ever needing to contact you. As the CFPB eyes [underutilization of SCRA benefits](https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_servicemembers-usage-of-scra-credit-protections_2022.pdf), this capability may evolve from a nice-to-have to a requirement.

Combining these subtle yet highly complex changes into a single, user-friendly tool is in line with our standard approach to feature work: building loan servicing solutions that are configurable, scalable, compliant and user-friendly.

**Loan Replay: Programmatically managing retroactive changes**

Peach’s Loan Replay capability is the engine that powers complex features requiring retroactive changes to loans. Here, we spend a little time—using SCRA as a use case—to examine the technical underpinnings of Loan Replay, and the intricate lending mechanics that make it necessary.

At their core, loan management systems act as highly complex state machines holding data for each individual loan. Lenders rely on these state machines first and foremost to accurately record and track a constantly evolving set of information constituting a loan’s state, and to ensure each change cascades correctly to update the rest of the loan’s state.

In a simplified world, the past is the past, and any event causing a change in loan state—payments, interest accrual, charge-offs, etc.—results in a permanent state transition. But in reality, there are myriad changes that can impact a loan’s history—whether it’s reversing a payment previously marked as successful, reversing a previous charge-off, or, in the case of SCRA, lowering an interest rate effective as of a past date. 

Let’s say we have a simple installment loan that was originated on January 1, 2023 with the following terms:
![](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/scra/SCRA-snippet-4.jpg)
Because there are many stakeholders consuming information about a loan throughout its life—business, operations, finance, accounting, payment processors, credit bureaus and investors, to name a few—a single loan requires that a host of data points be recorded with precision. This includes, but is not limited to, borrower data, financial data, accounting data and payment data.

What’s more, these data points need to be represented in highly specific ways. Where operations may need only a high-level view of the numbers, finance will ultimately need the nitty gritty story of a loan told in accounting debits and credits. Data analysts and credit bureaus require tracking of delinquency in specified ways, while borrowers only want to know whether they are current or overdue. It becomes clear that any event impacting a loan requires deterministic updates across a large surface area. 

Moreover, a key characteristic of loan management is tight coupling. Firstly, we see this between various facets of a loan. Taking the example above, let’s say the borrower makes a payment several days into the loan. That single action will lead to a cascade of changes, including generating new transaction data, generating accounting entries to deplete various receivables buckets, recalculating the interest and principal splits on the borrower’s payment plan, and updating whether the loan is current or overdue.
![](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/scra/SCRA-independent-objects.jpg)
Secondly, we see tight coupling between each successive event in the life of a loan. A payment event in the first period will impact the amount of interest that will be subsequently accrued on a daily basis (as the principal balance has been lowered), which impacts the amount of interest, fees, and principal receivables to be moved on the due date. Put simply, the state of a loan at any given time depends on the entire history of inputs—not just the most recent one. This means that the history of a loan—when payments were made or not made, when interest rates changed, when fees were booked, etc.—is an interconnected chain of events. One change not only immediately impacts the loan, but adding, removing or changing one piece means changing everything about a loan’s state from that adjustment onward.

In the example above, let’s say that 80 days into the loan, after two payments were made, the customer requests an SCRA relaxation effective as of 10 days into the loan. How do we update this loan appropriately?
![](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/scra/SCRA-snippet-5_2.jpg)
If the interest rate has to be lowered as of day 10 of the loan, then everything that happened subsequently will be subject to change. The daily interest accruals from the tenth day onward will change, and the first payment will now waterfall different amounts of interest, fees and principal. Depending on the amounts of the payments, a loan that was overdue may now be current, given the lowered interest rate. 

Loan Replay™ was built for use cases such as this. Broadly speaking, our architecture is built to keep detailed track of all mutable and interdependent events in the life of a loan, so that when any change is made to that event timeline or loan state, we can rewind to the time of the event in question, rewind the loan state, and create a new timeline in light of that change. In the case of SCRA, after handling interest rate changes and fee cancellations we reverse the state of the loan to the appropriate point in time, then replay the loan, recalculating the payment plan, re-accruing interest, re-applying payments and re-moving balances in light of the new reality, so that the present receives a new loan state.
![](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/scra/SCRA-Loan-Replay-timeline.jpg)
The breadth of loan data needing to be adjusted means that rewriting loan histories requires the right design and abstractions, and having a built-in layer of abstraction to handle retroactive changes is the only feasible approach. Because of our team’s combined experience in the real world of lending, we know that the need to edit past loan events is inevitable. So we’ve designed a system that makes these changes as painless and automated as possible. 

–

Though lending infrastructure is complex, lenders must find ways to balance [regulatory compliance](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-peach-helps-lenders-stay-compliant) with innovation toward growth. Peach is designed to give you the best of both worlds. [Contact us](https://www.peachfinance.com/contact) to learn more.


How Peach powers SCRA compliance

Peach is introducing an industry-first Self-Service Portfolio Migration™ capability, simplifying and reducing the cost of migrating a lending portfolio. 

OAKLAND, CA / ACCESSWIRE / December 13, 2022 / Peach Finance, the leading API-first loan management and servicing technology platform, today announced the release of its [Self-Service Portfolio Migration™](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate) tool.

A first of its kind in the lending industry, the tool streamlines the migration process and gives lenders the ability to manage migrations themselves, reducing the time, effort, risk, and cost associated with migrating their existing lending portfolio. The tool is suitable for both installment loans and lines of credit, and is offered at no cost to lenders migrating their portfolio onto Peach's platform.

[READ THE FULL PRESS RELEASE.](https://www.accesswire.com/731522/Lending-Technology-Platform-Peach-Finance-Announces-Launch-of-Self-Service-Portfolio-MigrationTM-Tool)

#### An excerpt from the press release

OAKLAND, CA / ACCESSWIRE / December 13, 2022 / Peach Finance, the leading API-first loan management and servicing technology platform, today announced the release of its Self-Service Portfolio Migration™ tool.

A first of its kind in the lending industry, the tool streamlines the migration process and gives lenders the ability to manage migrations themselves, reducing the time, effort, risk, and cost associated with migrating their existing lending portfolio. The tool is suitable for both installment loans and lines of credit, and is offered at no cost to lenders migrating their portfolio onto Peach's platform.

"When we founded Peach in 2018, the number one issue lenders identified was the challenge of migrating from legacy technology," said Eddie Oistacher, Peach co-founder and CEO. "Our Self-Service Portfolio Migration tool is a game-changing feature, and one we've been planning for the past year. Lenders will see drastic cost savings and an unprecedented ability to control the integrity of their data, along with all the benefits of moving to a modern and fully configurable servicing platform."

Portfolio migrations, also known as portfolio conversions, typically require lenders to migrate a vast amount of data using manual or file-based methods. It's an expensive and lengthy process that often leads to unreliable or incomplete data in the lender's new system.

Peach's approach is fundamentally different, and is made possible by their Adaptive Core™ and [Loan Replay™ technology](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-loan-replay-works). Peach replays each loan based on a subset of data to accrue daily interest, calculate interest/principal splits and determine loan status. This drastically reduces the amount of data lenders need to migrate and gives them access to full loan histories in Peach's system.

And because lenders use the same API endpoints for the migration that they'll eventually be using to board new loans to Peach, they can conduct the migration themselves with almost no additional training. This eliminates dependencies on third parties, and enables lenders to take their timeline and the integrity of their data into their own hands.

When it comes to the migration itself, Peach's API-first architecture saves time and eliminates the need for manual data entry, minimizing mistakes. The migration can be automated in any sequence, while the migration system's sandbox testing capabilities give lenders full confidence in the accuracy of their data before moving to production.

"Many lenders are still handcuffed to legacy servicing tech for the simple reason that migrating their portfolio comes with too many risks and too many unknowns," said Stewart Watterson, Strategic Advisor, Aite-Novarica Group…(continue to [ACCESSWIRE](https://www.accesswire.com/731522/Lending-Technology-Platform-Peach-Finance-Announces-Launch-of-Self-Service-Portfolio-MigrationTM-Tool))

\--

See also: [Fintech Nexus News feature](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-simplifies-portfolio-migrations) on Self-Service Portfolio Migrations.


Peach announces launch of Self-Service Portfolio Migration™ tool

Peach joined the Mastercard Engage Partner Network to help support lenders as they develop BNPL solutions within the Mastercard Installments program. 

OAKLAND, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Peach Finance, the leading modern loan management and servicing technology platform, today announced that it has joined the[ Mastercard Engage Partner Network](https://www.mastercard.us/engage/#/en/home) as a fintech enabler to help bring consumers more payments choices. The partnership is currently focused on supporting lenders in developing buy now, pay later (BNPL) solutions leveraging the Mastercard Installments program. 

BNPL is growing rapidly, with a projected e-commerce transaction value of $7.2T by 2025. But one of the barriers to growth in the space has been the challenge of merchant acceptance—BNPL providers must build merchant acceptance relationships one by one. Mastercard has helped solve this problem by developing a BNPL solution that’s available everywhere Mastercard is accepted.

[READ THE FULL PRESS RELEASE.](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221207005290/en/Peach-Finance-Joins-Mastercard-Engage-Partner-Network-to-Help-Lenders-Develop-Installments-Solutions)

#### An excerpt from the press release

OAKLAND, Calif.--([BUSINESS WIRE](https://www.businesswire.com/))--Peach Finance, the leading modern loan management and servicing technology platform, today announced that it has joined the [Mastercard Engage Partner Network](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mastercard.us%2Fengage%2F%23%2Fen%2Fhome&esheet=53015562&newsitemid=20221207005290&lan=en-US&anchor=Mastercard+Engage+Partner+Network&index=1&md5=7df794f45fc08266a73a4b879a2cccca) as a fintech enabler to help bring consumers more payments choices. The partnership is currently focused on supporting lenders in developing buy now, pay later (BNPL) solutions leveraging the Mastercard Installments program.

BNPL is growing rapidly, with a projected e-commerce transaction value of $7.2T by 2025. But one of the barriers to growth in the space has been the challenge of merchant acceptance—BNPL providers must build merchant acceptance relationships one by one. Mastercard has helped solve this problem by developing a BNPL solution that’s available everywhere Mastercard is accepted.

The new Mastercard Installments program brings scale, flexibility and simplicity to the BNPL space by helping banks, lenders, wallets and fintechs get to market faster—all with the security and peace of mind that come with Mastercard. As a qualified Engage partner, Peach will provide issuers in the Mastercard network the servicing technology they need to quickly launch highly flexible programs using Mastercard Installments.

An additional barrier to BNPL growth has been the challenge of launching newer lending constructs like BNPL on legacy servicing technology. That’s where modern servicing solutions like Peach can help. Peach’s platform is agnostic to asset class, enabling lenders to offer virtually any type of lending program, including novel constructs.

“Servicing technology is arguably the most critical component of the lending tech stack,” said Russell Braden, Peach’s VP of Product. “When novel lending constructs arise, a lender’s servicing tech can either be a competitive advantage or a hindrance. That’s why we designed Peach’s platform around an Adaptive Core, which gives lenders the flexibility to launch virtually any loan type in any asset class and continually refine their lending programs at scale.”

Braden continued: “We’re proud to be part of the Mastercard Engage network, where we can offer our modern platform and deep BNPL expertise to many of today’s top lending innovators. We believe that unlocking lending innovation is fundamentally good for borrowers and for the financial industry, and our partnership with Mastercard has the potential to significantly accelerate this innovation.”

Peach’s platform is designed to help lenders launch and scale modern lending products. Peach provides a loan management system, an integrated suite of servicing tools and Compliance Guard™, a proprietary compliance monitoring system. Unlike other lending technology platforms…([continue to Business Wire](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221207005290/en/Peach-Finance-Joins-Mastercard-Engage-Partner-Network-to-Help-Lenders-Develop-Installments-Solutions))

\--

Related: [Peach joins Visa Ready for BNPL](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-selected-as-visa-ready-for-bnpl-launch-partner) program


Peach joins Mastercard Engage Partner Network

Peach's cloud-native loan management and servicing platform won gold in the 2022 Future Digital Awards for banking-as-a-service innovation. Read the full press release. 

Since 2008, the Future Digital Awards from Juniper Research have recognized outstanding organizations that are positioned to make a significant impact in the future. The Awards honor companies whose imaginative products or services have the potential to disrupt their ecosystems and provide significant benefits to their target audience. 

Peach is honored to accept this year’s Gold award in Banking-as-a-Service Innovation for our cloud-native lending technology platform. From our Adaptive Core™ to Compliance Guard™ to end-to-end servicing tech, we’re proud to continue building toward our mission of improving lives by giving every lender the power to innovate.

More recent awards received by Peach include the [2023 Banking Tech Award](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-wins-2023-banking-tech-award) for LendTech of the Future, as well as the [2023 FinTech Breakthrough Award](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-receives-2023-fintech-breakthrough-award) for Banking-as-a-Service Innovation.

[Read the full press release.](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221010005608/en/Juniper-Research-Future-Digital-Award-Winners-Announced-for-Fintech-Payments-2022)


Peach selected as Future Digital Awards Gold Winner

Peach's loan management system and collections technology are tightly integrated—enabling innovative functionality that helps lenders get the most out of their collections efforts.

First-party collections capabilities are a crucial component of any lender’s toolkit—especially in a market downturn. They enable lenders to retain 100% of what they collect, and they empower lenders to control the tone of customer correspondence, giving them a chance to preserve borrower relationships.

To be effective in the context of ever-improving customer experiences, collections strategies must be tailored to the needs of the borrower. That’s why we’ve created a borrower portal that maximizes borrowers’ ability to self-service. It’s also why we created the first lending platform with [native first-party collections tech](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/first-party-collections-investment) built on top of an enterprise-grade loan management system. This means that when borrower self-service isn't enough, agents are empowered to truly help customers through automation, intelligence and powerful loan modification tools.

Here are three ways our collections capabilities can help you master first-party collections and achieve better outcomes from your delinquent accounts. 

### 1. Repayment engine

Our proprietary, lending-specific CRM is configurable on a roles and permissions basis, so it can accommodate both in-house agents and third-party BPO access. Here’s an overview of its capabilities.

**Loan modifications**

With Peach, your agents get access to a full set of loan modification tools, enabling them to meet customers halfway with flexible payment options. Agents can manage payments and hardship and modify receivables—for example, waiving fees, issuing credits, deferring due dates, changing or extending terms, creating payment plans, reversing payments, backdating payments, and more. We support unique products and policies by geography.

**Cases and workflows**

We provide out-of-the-box cases and workflows for collections-related servicing scenarios like bankruptcies and disputes. We’ve also made it easy to create custom cases and workflows so you can design them around your own needs.

**Communications**

We provide pre-integrated communications tools for phone, email, SMS, two-way texting, chat and physical letters—ready to use in automated or manual fashion. We give you out-of-the-box templates for white-label emails, SMS and letters, and you can add your own templates, too. 

You can also set automated, no-touch rules to help prevent accounts from going to collections in the first place. Automatically send custom communications or leverage our templated reminders to create an account, enable autopay, make an upcoming payment and more. You can also configure rules for recovering debts, leveraging templates on the cadence and via the medium of your choosing. 

**Compliance monitoring**

With Compliance Guard™, we’ve coded the federal and state rules governing collections communications, including FDCPA, TCPA, UDAAP, SCRA, the US Bankruptcy Code and applicable state analogs. Every outbound collections communication is run through and approved by the rules engine, and our system automatically blocks non-compliant communication attempts.

**Reporting and analytics**

We provide access to both a replica of your production database as well as a pre-integrated SQL-based analytics tool. You can query all of the data and develop custom reporting as needed. Real-time access to your data is always available through our API.

**Borrower self-service**

Though not technically part of our repayment engine, our white-label, digital-native borrower portal helps maximize the impact of borrower self-service—and minimize the need for agent involvement. From any device, borrowers can easily check their balance, make payments, set up and customize autopay, modify their payment plan, access statements, update account information and more.

### 2. Automatically created collections cases

No matter how optimal your borrower self-service is, some accounts will go to collections. That’s where automatically created collections cases come in. With Peach, you can leverage your own operational insights to create sophisticated collections strategies that give you the best chance of collecting from each customer. Start by deciding when you want manual intervention to begin, which teams you want tasks assigned to, and how and when you want them alerted. Based on these rules, Peach will automatically create and distribute tasks among your available agents. Agents can then leverage the robust loan modification tools outlined above, and can set follow-ups such as scheduled outbound calls, manual email and SMS sends, and reminders to follow up.

Each of your teams can log in to Peach’s lending-specific CRM, where our system will match each team or agent to the unique actions they need to perform. For instance, your fraud team can be matched exclusively to dispute cases, while your legal team receives legal action cases. Meanwhile, the rest of your servicing team can continue performing their field work.

### 3. Automated collections campaigns

Recognizing that a mixture of contact methods is the most effective approach to collections, and that collections agents typically spend much of their time on repetitive tasks, we’re developing a new tool that will enable you to run automated and highly configurable collections campaigns. Available later this year, the tool will allow you to define which populations of borrowers you’d like to target, and then create rules as to when and how frequently you reach out—whether that’s through a phone autodialer or via email, text or direct mail—or a combination.

For outbound phone calling, Peach can help you match limited call center resources with positive answers to phone calls. After defining the borrowers you’d like to target—which you can update on an ongoing basis—Peach will export the requisite customer information to the dialer system of your choosing. As calls are made, the results will sync back into your existing collections cases in the Peach system, giving you a full picture of the attempts made on each borrower. You’ll get a full data analytics view, and results will also be visible within your agent tooling.

–

Our first-party collections tools are designed to help you approach the efficiency of a third-party collections agency while retaining 100% of what you collect. These collections tools are included standard as part of Peach’s servicing suite, alongside our [Adaptive Core™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core) and [Compliance Guard™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/compliance-guard).

To learn more about our first-party collections capabilities, [contact us](https://www.peachfinance.com/contact) or send us an email at <info@peachfinance.com>.


How Peach helps you master first-party collections

Peach's Self-Service Portfolio Migration™ is a revolutionary take on migrations. It will be available to lenders at no cost—helping them modernize and improve their customer experience.

By now, most lenders with legacy servicing tech have come to the determination that it’s time to modernize. Some of them are driven by a desire to support new asset classes. Others want to drastically improve their customer experience, or consolidate functionality currently handled by disparate service providers.

Yet in spite of their conviction, a sizable percentage of these lenders have yet to move on from their legacy servicing platform. When it comes down to it, migrating their portfolio to a new system comes with risks and costs that can often be prohibitive. As a result, many lenders find themselves handcuffed to a legacy servicing platform they don’t want.

This is one of the reasons we pioneered the Adaptive Core™, a loan management system built for radical flexibility. This has given us a unique ability to rethink portfolio migrations—and to address the problems of risk, cost and timelines.

This fall, we’ll be releasing our free portfolio migration capability—the first ever of its kind. For lenders stuck between the costs and benefits of migration, self-service migrations will be a game-changer. 

More on our solution in a moment—first, we’ll address the three main challenges with legacy lending portfolio migrations.


## Three challenges with legacy portfolio conversion methods

**Challenge 1: The risk**

Legacy portfolio migrations are typically conducted by a third party—either an outside vendor or your new servicing provider—working in collaboration with your internal team. The two teams migrate loans in batches, troubleshooting issues on a per-loan basis as they arise.

Because every system behaves differently in its terminology, interest accrual, rounding and status mapping, there’s a lot that can go wrong. And when migrations involve manual data entry—which they almost always do—errors are unavoidable at scale.

What’s more, migration processes are notoriously brittle, and unexpected discrepancies can arise in your data even after rigorous testing. Reconciliation down to the penny is painstaking work, and seemingly simple issues like rounding can cause your new and old systems to disagree. Minor inaccuracies can compound into unintended consequences for the borrower—for example, an inaccurate payment amount can result in an overdue status in your new system. These challenges can be compounded by migration methods that transfer only a snapshot of each loan, rather than the loan’s full history, making it much more difficult to rectify discrepancies as they arise.

A worst-case scenario is for your borrowers to log in and see missing or incorrect data in their account. This can jeopardize your customer relationships and expose you to compliance risk.

**Challenge 2: The timeline**

Because you’re dependent on your new servicer and potentially a third party to conduct your migration, you have limited control over your timeline. If your new servicing platform hasn’t invested in maximizing efficiency and preventing errors, the migration process can require a great deal of time and effort. It’s not uncommon for migrations to take 6-12 months or even longer.

When discrepancies do arise, it can be a challenge to gather the right people on both sides to troubleshoot and remediate the root cause. This can be made all the more difficult when a migration occurs over a single, momentous weekend but then reconciliations fail and cause a rollback. Rollbacks then force new sprints and a rescheduling of the migration for a future weekend. But with us, you can migrate as few or as many as you want and let them run concurrent to your existing system to test and reconcile before committing to a production shift, no rollbacks required. This is also why clients consider us a vendor for backup servicing as well as primary production servicing. 

**Challenge 3: The cost**

Servicers often charge hundreds of thousands of dollars or more for portfolio migrations, depending on the size and nature of your portfolio. The first reason for the high cost is the manual nature of the typical migration process—and the fact that lending platforms are rarely designed to optimize migration efficiency. The second reason is that you’re paying for a third party to learn your current system—an investment that is not accretive to your business in the long run. 

By automating manual tasks, the total time spent migrating is drastically reduced, and your team can move to production in less time. The obstacle is that no lending platform has been designed for such modern migration until now.


## Peach’s portfolio migration capability

Our portfolio migration tool is a complete reimagining of portfolio migrations, giving lenders the ability to break free from their legacy tech stack without incurring unreasonable risks, costs and delays.

We’ve been planning modern migrations for some time. They’re made possible by our Adaptive Core and by our [Loan Replay™](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-loan-replay-works) technology, which makes it straightforward to insert events, such as payments, anywhere in the timeline, with recalculations happening automatically.

Our modern process empowers your own engineering team to conduct the migration to Peach. Using the same Peach APIs they’ll eventually use to interface with our system, they’ll call Peach’s typical endpoints. Once they verify that the migration is working for test users, your engineers can write simple scripts to automate the conversion process, eliminating the need for manual data entry. When the migration is complete, you’ll have access to all the benefits of the Peach platform, like our [Adaptive Core](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core), [Loan Replay](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/adaptive-core#loan-replay), [Compliance Guard™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/compliance-guard), [first-party collections capabilities](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/servicing-suite) and more. The typical migration to Peach will take just 8-12 weeks.

The idea of our modern migration isn’t to put more work on your team—it’s actually far less work than a traditional migration thanks to automation, efficiencies and error-preventing features of our capability. And we’re here providing migration assistance when and where you need us. Meanwhile, you get to remain in control of the migration timeline, and you’ll have close oversight of your data, reducing the likelihood of errors.

For lenders interested in the benefits of a modern, best-in-class lending platform, our portfolio migration capability  opens up the possibilities of modernization without the risks and drawbacks of legacy migration methods.

To learn more, visit our [portfolio migration](https://www.peachfinance.com/migrate) page. You can also contact us or send an email to [info@peachfinance.com](mailto:info@peachfinance.com).


Peach to offer modernized portfolio migration capability—at no cost

Our in-depth whitepaper explores why lenders need adaptive infrastructure. Learn the risks of rigidity in lending and how you can stay ahead of the curve.

[READ THE FULL WHITEPAPER](https://www.peachfinance.com/documents/5-reasons-lenders-need-adaptive-infrastructure.pdf)

#### An excerpt from the whitepaper

Fintechs, who have been this decade’s primary instigators of lending innovation, might seem poised to be the primary and perennial beneficiaries of continued technological progress. But things aren’t so straightforward. Many of today’s fintechs are falling into the same trap established lenders did long ago: They’re launching modern lending programs on rigid infrastructure designed for the present, not the future. We’ve seen the repercussions of this choice over the past decade, as established lenders hobbled by rigid infrastructure  ceded market share to fintechs, who have gobbled up  about [half of all personal loan originations](https://www.experianplc.com/media/latest-news/2019/fintechs-more-than-doubled-personal-loan-market-share-in-four-years/).

It’s become expected for lending cores to bake in assumptions about loan configurations, ancillary software systems and regulatory requirements—these assumptions make cores cheaper and faster to build. But when markets shift and novel lending constructs emerge, established lenders find themselves handcuffed to outdated infrastructure, sometimes requiring years of retrofitting just to launch new lending programs.

To compound the problem, the rate of change in lending—as in all of technology—is accelerating. And so it will take even less time for today’s modern-yet-rigid lenders to be eclipsed by the next crop of nimble upstarts with newer and better ideas. Rigid lenders will once again lose market share in the struggle to keep pace with a rapidly changing landscape.

But lenders have control over their fate, and can prioritize investments in adaptive infrastructure that enables them to 1) continually test and iterate, even at scale; and 2) continually launch new lending programs with speed and flexibility. For those lenders who fail to make these investments, there will be five major headwinds as lending innovation and market evolution continue their forward march.

#### Risk #1: Competitive innovation

Technology has lowered the barrier to entry in financial services, spurring a profusion of venture-backed startups with nothing to lose and everything to gain. Some of them have succeeded in disrupting existing paradigms and seizing market share from established lenders—one recent example being BNPL. While such innovations are net positives for borrowers, they can exact a heavy toll on existing lenders who can muster only a sluggish response to novel competitive threats.

However, existing lenders with established brands and loyal customer bases hold some important advantages against first-movers. They must complement these advantages with the agility to reconfigure loan behavior and to rapidly launch new products in a wide range of asset classes, including innovative constructs. While no one can perfectly predict the next disruptive trend, with North American fintechs alone having raised [$80.8B in 2021](https://ftpartners.docsend.com/view/ihnz564x98bvxj74) it’s certain that BNPL will not be the last novel construct to sap market share from slower incumbents.

#### Risk #2: Your evolving tech stack

If there’s one thing that’s certain about the array of software systems and vendors your lending programs depend upon, it’s that what’s ideal now won’t be ideal in a few years. And this is part of the rub with rigid lending cores—when they ossify, so does your tech stack. This means you can be stuck with the same array of vendors long after they’ve outgrown their usefulness to you. The abundance of newer vendors adding value for lenders—from card issuance to fraud prevention to financial data—illustrate one of the opportunity costs of a rigid tech stack.

Instead, seek a core with modular architecture that supports your ability to switch vendors and add new ones over time, and to make other crucial updates to your software infrastructure. In this way, you won’t be handcuffed by vendors you don’t want.

#### Risk #3: Market disruptions

Recessions, natural disasters, conflicts and pandemics are just a few of the market disruptions we may face in coming years. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that everything can change overnight. During the COVID-19 pandemic, lenders were forced to enable remote servicing—quickly transitioning call center workforces away from an office environment. Lenders also had to find a way to offer repayment flexibility to borrowers facing hardship on a scale and in ways that were...

[READ THE FULL WHITEPAPER](https://www.peachfinance.com/documents/5-reasons-lenders-need-adaptive-infrastructure.pdf)


5 reasons lenders need adaptive infrastructure

Aite-Novarica Group’s Q2 2022 Retail Banking & Payments Fintech Spotlight features Peach among vendors whose innovative services are creating change within the industry.

Peach has been featured in Aite-Novarica Group’s Q2 2022 Retail Banking & Payments Fintech Spotlight. The report highlights nine vendors whose innovative offerings are putting pressure on legacy players.

The report underlines the ways Peach enables lenders to quickly launch highly configurable lending programs and to easily iterate on existing ones, even at scale. Three core differentiators are called out:

1.  Our [Adaptive Core™](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/5-reasons-lenders-need-adaptive-infrastructure), which gives lenders unprecedented flexibility in the configuration of lending programs and support for virtually any asset class.

2.  Our servicing solution, which is end to end and full integrated.

3.  Our compliance-first approach, with robust and innovative compliance technology in Compliance Guard™.

According to the report, Peach “...stands at the forefront of innovative solution providers capable of empowering financial services companies to adapt to the times.”

We’re proud to be featured in this quarter’s Fintech Spotlight. [Request a copy of the report from Aite-Novarica Group.](https://aite-novarica.com/report/retail-banking-payments-fintech-spotlight-q2-2022)


Peach spotlighted in Aite-Novarica Group's Q2 report

Peach meets strict InfoSec requirements. We are SOC 1 Type 1, SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS Level 1 and HIPAA compliant. 

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve renewed our certifications for SOC 2 Type 2 and PCI DSS Level 1, and that we’ve achieved certification for SOC 1 Type 1. These certifications position us to help a wide variety of lenders, including those at enterprise scale and with strict InfoSec requirements.

To achieve these certifications we worked with independent third-party auditors Laika and FoxPointe, who provided an important third-party validation of our internal and external processes and high level of operational excellence. The certifications complement our [Compliance Guard™](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/compliance-guard) offering, which gives lenders an unprecedented advantage in staying compliant with lending regulations.

To learn more, read the [full press release](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220606005550/en/Peach-Announces-SOC-2-Type-2-SOC-1-Type-1-and-PCI-DSS-Level-1-Certifications).

#### An excerpt from the press release

OAKLAND, Calif.--([BUSINESS WIRE](https://www.businesswire.com/))--Peach Finance, a cloud-native lending technology platform that helps lenders quickly launch and confidently scale new lending products, today announced that it has renewed its certifications for SOC 2 Type 2 and PCI DSS Level 1, and achieved certification for SOC 1 Type 1.

The certifications position Peach to serve the needs of a wide range of lenders, including those at enterprise scale and with strict InfoSec requirements. The certifications are also a significant third-party validation of Peach’s internal and external processes and high level of operational excellence. Peach worked with independent third-party auditors Laika and FoxPointe, well-known firms that provide end-to-end compliance and audit management for modern companies like Peach. In addition to its certifications in SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 1 Type 1 and PCI DSS Level 1, Peach is also positioned to support lenders subject to HIPAA.

Peach’s InfoSec certifications complement its compliance-first approach, which sets it apart in the lending technology space. Peach practices defense-in-depth security architecture and employs best-in-class practices and tools to maintain security on all levels. And Peach’s Compliance Guard™ gives lenders an unprecedented advantage in staying compliant with lending regulations. Compliance Guard conducts borrower status monitoring for bankruptcy, deceased, active military and FEMA disasters. It also scans outbound communications for compliance with federal and state regulations, and features a configurable rules engine that enables lenders to customize their policies.

Peach’s other information security practices include the following.

**Authentication, authorization and accounting**

Peach maintains role-based access control (RBAC) across all its systems. Access to all critical services requires SSO / multi-factor authentication. Accounting is carried out by logging of session statistics and usage information.

**Penetration tests and vulnerability scans**

Peach engages with trusted third parties for penetration testing and vulnerability scans and performs internal vulnerability scans continuously to identify, prioritize and remediate potential system vulnerabilities.

**Security training and background checks**

All Peach employees are required to complete mandatory security training, and all new employees complete this training as part of onboarding. Peach conducts background checks on all applicants selected for full-time employment.

**Data encryption**

Through Google Cloud, Peach encrypts data at rest and in transit using AES and a Transport Layer Security protocol. Peach also uses logging and monitoring to detect and alert staff to potential security issues, and deploys firewalls and…(continue to [Business Wire](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220606005550/en/Peach-Announces-SOC-2-Type-2-SOC-1-Type-1-and-PCI-DSS-Level-1-Certifications))


Peach announces InfoSec certifications

Peach is the only lending platform built on an Adaptive Core™, enabling lenders to easily launch credit products and modify existing ones—even at scale.

Today’s an exciting day at Peach—we’re launching our Adaptive Core™ offering, and we’ve also got a brand-new logo, visual identity and [website](/).

Our Adaptive Core is an entirely new paradigm in lending that will empower our clients to continually iterate on existing lending products, even at scale, and to launch innovative lending programs with speed and flexibility. Current Peach clients will automatically have access to the full breadth of functionality provided by Peach’s Adaptive Core.

Read more in our [press release](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220523005291/en/Peach-Launches-Adaptive-Core%E2%84%A2-Announces-Rebrand).

#### An excerpt from the press release

OAKLAND, Calif.--([BUSINESS WIRE](https://www.businesswire.com/))--Peach Finance, a cloud-native lending technology platform that helps lenders quickly launch and confidently scale lending products, today announced its new Adaptive Core™ offering, a proprietary loan management system designed to give lenders extreme configurability even as their lending programs scale. In addition, Peach today launched a refreshed brand—including a new logo, visual identity and [website](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink\&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.peachfinance.com%2F\&esheet=52726837\&newsitemid=20220523005291\&lan=en-US\&anchor=website\&index=1\&md5=c36773f5a2fab2d6234d8c885cb28066). The new brand and offering build on the company’s recent momentum, including a [partnership](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink\&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businesswire.com%2Fnews%2Fhome%2F20220510006518%2Fen%2FMission-Lane-Selects-Peach-to-Power-Inclusive-Lending-Products\&esheet=52726837\&newsitemid=20220523005291\&lan=en-US\&anchor=partnership\&index=2\&md5=c9cae6528825378855ffcad31097f0e6) with Mission Lane and [selection](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink\&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businesswire.com%2Fnews%2Fhome%2F20220510005067%2Fen%2FPeach-Selected-as-Visa-Ready-for-BNPL-Launch-Partner\&esheet=52726837\&newsitemid=20220523005291\&lan=en-US\&anchor=selection\&index=3\&md5=4c8cde1265b0a1bf9f85e6904bc9c4ba) as a launch partner for the Visa Ready for BNPL Program.

“Rigid lending infrastructure is a severe hindrance to many of today’s best-known lenders,” said Eddie Oistacher, Peach Co-Founder and CEO. “And the pace of change in lending is only increasing. To survive and thrive, today’s lenders must have the ability to continually adapt to evolving technologies, trends, regulations and market conditions.”

Oistacher continued: “Peach is the only lending technology platform that allows lenders to be just as flexible at scale as they are at launch. The Adaptive Core is an entirely new paradigm that will empower our clients to continually iterate on existing lending products, even at scale, and to launch innovative lending programs with speed and flexibility. Our product update and refreshed brand are an extension of the same forward-looking approach—rooted in deep industry experience—that has defined Peach since our founding.”

Peach’s lending technology platform comprises a loan management system, an integrated suite of proprietary servicing tools and Compliance Guard™, an automated compliance monitoring system. Peach supports virtually any non-mortgage consumer or business asset class, and gives lenders access to over 250 configuration variables for defining loan behavior. Existing clients will automatically have access to the full breadth of functionality provided by Peach’s Adaptive Core.

Peach’s rebrand features a collaboration with veteran designer Bobby Novoa of [Bien Studio](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink\&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbienstudio.co%2F\&esheet=52726837\&newsitemid=20220523005291\&lan=en-US\&anchor=Bien+Studio\&index=4\&md5=fa6783d305ae89a7211b12ecbd944db3) and software development agency [Volume7](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink\&url=https%3A%2F%2Fvolume7.io%2F\&esheet=52726837\&newsitemid=20220523005291\&lan=en-US\&anchor=Volume7\&index=5\&md5=07fba73ac49eec9af7f576d21cadf925).

“Peach is a one-of-a-kind technology innovator with a truly differentiated, best-in-class approach to lending infrastructure,” said Crayton Montei, Peach’s Head of Marketing and Brand. “Its team of leading lending authorities has deep insight into the future of lending, and a compelling vision for...(continue to [Business Wire](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220523005291/en/Peach-Launches-Adaptive-Core%E2%84%A2-Announces-Rebrand))

**About Peach**

Peach is a cloud-native lending technology platform that helps fintechs and traditional financial institutions quickly launch new lending programs. Peach is the only lending platform built on an Adaptive Core™. The company’s fully integrated suite of API-based products includes a loan management system that supports virtually any non-mortgage asset class and features 250+ configuration variables; a suite of proprietary servicing tools, including a lending-specific CRM, borrower portal, agent portal, payment processing, communications, reporting and first-party collections tools; and Compliance Guard™, a proprietary compliance monitoring system. Peach was built by leaders from top fintechs like Affirm, Avant and Prosper, who set out to create the most configurable, robust, compliance-forward and future-proof lending platform in the market. Learn more at [peachfinance.com](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink\&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.peachfinance.com%2F\&esheet=52726837\&newsitemid=20220523005291\&lan=en-US\&anchor=peachfinance.com\&index=7\&md5=9f4da8eb4ebb39539eb4b985ade48be3).


Peach Launches Adaptive Core™, Announces Rebrand

Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher will discuss the keys to modern lending products at LendIt Fintech USA 2022, the leading event for innovation in financial services. 

Join us at LendIt Fintech USA next week, where Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher will be speaking about the keys to creating modern lending products. He’ll be joined by John Scrofano, a VP at Remitly in New Products, and moderator Hal Bienstock of Prosek Partners. The session will take place in Room 4 on Wednesday, May 25 at 5:05pm.

Peach will also be exhibiting at Booth 455.

\--

Update: [Listen to a recording of the panel](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fintech-nexus/id1628673650?i=1000565707424), and check out the [2023 panel featuring Eddie Oistacher](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/fintech-nexus-panel-2023).

#### About LendIt Fintech USA

LendIt Fintech USA is the leading event for innovation in financial services. Taking place on May 25-26 in the financial capital of the world, New York City, this event brings together the most innovative and disruptive financial services companies for 2 days of world-class content and face-to-face networking. Key topics include digital banking, web3, identity, consumer lending, embedded finance, financial health and much, much more. Save 15% on your ticket with code SPONSOR15_PEACH. For more information, [visit the Fintech Nexus website](https://www.fintechnexus.com/).


Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher to speak at LendIt Fintech USA

Read how Peach partnered with Mission Lane to help power their Credit Builder Account, a loan product that helps consumers build their credit. 

We’re proud to officially announce our partnership with [Mission Lane](https://www.missionlane.com/), helping power their Credit Builder Account—a new credit builder loan product aimed at setting consumers on the path to establishing strong credit.

Purpose-driven companies like Mission Lane that are pushing the boundaries of innovation in lending are helping create a better world for everyone. Learn more about the partnership in our [press release](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220510006518/en).

#### An excerpt from the press release

OAKLAND, Calif.--([BUSINESS WIRE](https://www.businesswire.com/))--Peach Finance, a modern and configurable lending technology platform that helps lenders efficiently launch, grow and scale new lending products, today announced a partnership with Mission Lane, a purpose-driven financial technology company that provides better products and experiences for people trying to build or rebuild their credit and improve their financial lives.

The partnership is designed to power Mission Lane’s Credit Builder Account, a new credit builder loan product aimed at setting consumers on the path to establishing strong credit. As borrowers pay off the loan that is deposited into a secured savings account, they can build positive credit history while adding to their savings.

For decades, inflexible lending technology has slowed the pace of innovation within financial services, leading to limited choices for borrowers. Peach’s novel lending technology platform upends this construct by making it possible for every lender to be an innovator—from enterprise financial institutions to fintech startups. Peach will provide Mission Lane with a loan management system, a fully integrated suite of servicing tools and a compliance monitoring system, Compliance Guard™. Through Peach’s flexible infrastructure, Mission Lane will be able to quickly launch and scale the Credit Builder Account and future new lending products.

“At Mission Lane, we’re focused on serving consumers who don’t have ready access to quality financial products from traditional financial institutions,” said Mission Lane CEO Shane Holdaway. “We have an extensive roadmap of innovative products to support these consumers, which means that the robustness and dependability of our lending infrastructure is critical to our long-term success.”

According to Holdaway, innovative products like those offered by Mission Lane require a software platform that’s flexible and modern enough to support novel constructs and configurations.

“Legacy technology solutions were built for yesterday’s lending programs, and aren’t designed to serve all types of consumers. As we launch innovative products like the Credit Builder Account, our partnership with Peach will help us continue to build on an all-in-one platform that can support modern and innovative approaches to lending, and can scale with us.”

Eddie Oistacher, Co-Founder and CEO of Peach, added: “Mission Lane is a sophisticated lender doing innovative and important work to expand financial access for underserved consumers. They have quickly grown their credit card product to enterprise scale, and we’re excited to partner with them as they scale additional lending products in support of their mission.”

Peach is designed to be the first lending technology platform that is both compliance-first and fully configurable. The platform is…(continue to [Business Wire](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220510006518/en))


Mission Lane Selects Peach to Power Inclusive Lending Products

Peach is a launch partner for the Visa Ready for BNPL Program. Read the full press release to learn how Peach is enabling BNPL capabilities for lenders. 

We’re excited to announce that Peach has been selected as a launch partner for the Visa Ready for BNPL Program. This means that Peach will be readily available to any Visa clients looking to stand up BNPL capabilities.

Read the full [press release](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220510005067/en/Peach-Selected-as-Visa-Ready-for-BNPL-Launch-Partner) for more information. Visa clients who would like to learn more about Peach can connect with us at <info@peachfinance.com>.

#### An excerpt from the press release

OAKLAND, Calif.--([BUSINESS WIRE](https://www.businesswire.com/))--Peach Finance, a modern and configurable lending technology platform that helps lenders build, launch and scale new lending products, today announced that it has been selected as a launch partner for the Visa Ready for BNPL Program.

As part of the program, Peach will help Visa clients power BNPL programs.

Peach’s platform is designed to help lenders launch and scale modern lending products. Peach provides a loan management system, an integrated suite of servicing tools and Compliance Guard™, a proprietary compliance monitoring system. Unlike other lending platforms, Peach gives lenders full configurability both at launch and at scale—so they can adapt to evolving technologies, markets, regulations and customer preferences. Peach was built by leaders from top fintechs like Affirm, Avant and Prosper, who set out to create the most configurable, robust, compliance-forward and future-proof lending platform in the market.

“We’re proud to be part of the Visa Ready for BNPL Program,” said Russell Braden, Peach’s VP of Product. “Visa is playing an important role in bringing Visa clients and partners together to strengthen the BNPL ecosystem and foster innovation. We look forward to parlaying our team’s unique background in BNPL and modern lending technology into helping Visa clients launch best-in-class BNPL programs that deepen customer engagement and loyalty.”

More information can be found on the Visa Ready website at [https://partner.visa.com/site/programs/visa-ready.html](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpartner.visa.com%2Fsite%2Fprograms%2Fvisa-ready.html&esheet=52711796&newsitemid=20220510005067&lan=en-US&anchor=https%3A%2F%2Fpartner.visa.com%2Fsite%2Fprograms%2Fvisa-ready.html&index=1&md5=d4ac3e4cb03c74f392fb52fa9ffce515). Visa clients interested in...(continue to [Business Wire](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220510005067/en/Peach-Selected-as-Visa-Ready-for-BNPL-Launch-Partner))

\--

Related: [Peach joins Mastercard Engage](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/mastercard-engage-installments) Partner Network.


Peach selected as Visa Ready for BNPL launch partner

Our VP of Product, Russell Braden, is leveraging his extensive lending background as he evolves our modern, API-first loan management system to address even more lender pain points. 

Today we’re spotlighting [Russell Braden](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/peach-adds-product-and-infosec-leaders), our VP of Product. Russell is responsible for the suite of APIs that powers our modern loan servicing capabilities. That includes our expanding feature sets around payment processing, communications, agent tools, user portal and strategic partnerships. It also involves expanding our card program—partnering with leading card issuers to support a wide variety of physical and virtual card products for our clients.

Russell has previously held key roles at well-known companies like Grainger, Avant and Enova International. Most recently at Grainger, he oversaw Product Development for Customer Information, a cornerstone of Grainger’s broader digital transformation efforts. He helped scale insights and best practices from an internal startup across the entire company, replatforming their tech stack and reducing their dependence on legacy software.

Prior to Grainger, Russell was responsible for launching one of Avant’s installment lending programs—overseeing acquisition, underwriting, risk, servicing, collections and remarketing, as well as development of their servicing platform. And before Avant, Russell worked in Strategy & Operations at Enova International, learning the ins and outs of their online lending business through the lens of the call center.

“I’ve seen the severe customer pain caused by inaccurate and improper loan servicing,” Russell said. “And I’ve seen how resource-intensive corner cases can be. Manual operations has always been a fact of life for lenders—but Peach has managed to turn this on its head. Peach’s modern servicing platform helps eliminate or significantly reduce the manual processes needed to run a successful lending business, helping lenders increase both profits and customer satisfaction.”

Peach’s ability to leverage technology to solve common pain points is in part due to its position at the crucial intersection of borrowers, operations and servicing technology. It’s also due to a very intentional focus on solutions that are scalable to many asset classes and types of lenders, and are configurable enough to feel custom to both agents and borrowers.

“We’re leveraging technology to solve pain points many lenders have dealt with for decades,” Russell said. “But it doesn’t stop there. Our technology platform also unlocks lenders’ ability to innovate. Whether it’s speed, flexibility or robust functionality, we’re continually focused on delivering a product suite that is technologically differentiated.”

Eddie Oistacher, CEO of Peach, added: “The pace of change in lending is accelerating, and it’s our job to empower lenders to innovate ahead of the curve—today and into the future. So we have to be two steps ahead, building the infrastructure for continued innovation.”

“That’s the real importance of Russell’s work,” he went on. “Russell is ensuring that we can support clients as they push the envelope, expanding our features and functionality as well as our support for asset classes and client types. Russell has seen what success and failure look like across origination, servicing and collections, and he has the vision to help us point lenders of all kinds in the direction of success.”

Outside of work, Russell is an avid athlete—most recently channeling his passion for sports into platform tennis. Russell lives in Chicagoland with his wife and three kids.

**Curious about Peach? We’d love to talk—we’re at** [**info@peachfinance.com**](mailto:info@peachfinance.com)**.**


Leadership Spotlight: Russell Braden, VP of Product

This blog post explores key features that a lender's customer relationship management software should have. Whether you're buying or building, here's what to look for.

Whether you’re buying or building the customer relationship management (CRM) technology for your lending program, there are some important ways in which it should differ from a general-purpose CRM. Here are 9 key features to look for that will help you lower your servicing costs and increase agent and borrower satisfaction.

#### 1. Omnichannel communications

A modern approach to servicing means having a CRM that supports a wide variety of communications channels, including email, SMS (including two-way texting), chat and direct mail. You’ll want asset class-specific default cases, workflows and templates that are vetted by industry and compliance experts. For instance, if a customer reaches out via email to say that they’ve declared bankruptcy, agents should receive predefined workflow steps and communications templates out of the box—ensuring consistent application of your policies and compliance with applicable bankruptcy laws. You’ll also want the flexibility to configure your own cases, workflows and templates as your lending program scales.

#### 2. Compliance built in

Lenders know that complying with federal, state and local regulations—including the recently implemented [Reg. F](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/how-peach-helps-lenders-comply-with-regulation-f)—is as important as it is challenging. That’s why you’ll benefit from a CRM that automates much of the complexity in meeting your servicing and collections compliance requirements.

Your CRM can help you take proactive steps to support borrowers during significant life events by monitoring borrower accounts for bankruptcy, death, active military duty, and federally declared disasters. The CRM can automatically provide legally required protections, proactively offer hardship solutions and receive automatically generated cases for review.

Your CRM should also check outbound communications for compliance with servicing regulations and borrower preferences, providing you with default rules that you can further configure. It should automatically block communication attempts that are in violation—for instance, a collections call during a time when a borrower has expressly asked not to be contacted.

#### 3. Support supercases

The future occurrence of natural disasters, pandemics and the like is an unfortunate but inevitable reality. That’s why your CRM should support automatic monitoring of FEMA disasters, and enable you to cluster impacted customers and generate corresponding cases and notes. Likewise, you’ll want to be able to cluster do-not-interact rules to avoid inappropriate servicing and collections communications during disasters. The alternative, which is still a reality for many lenders today, is to rely on spreadsheets and manual processes—a resource-intensive approach that’s prone to human error.

#### 4. Enable remote servicing

Though the need to support remote work arose seemingly overnight, it’s now mandatory for many employers—not to mention cost-effective. Whether or not your agents are currently working from home, a CRM that supports remote servicing is at minimum an important hedge against future remote-work needs. Look for a CRM that’s cloud-hosted and browser-based, where agents need only a computer and an internet connection. From an information security perspective, your CRM should support multi-factor authentication, data encryption, role-based access, real-time security monitoring and a strong password policy.

#### 5. See what the borrower sees

Many servicing platforms give agents an entirely different interface than what borrowers see. In reality, though, there isn’t any reason the agent and borrower interfaces need to be fundamentally different. A better approach is to give agents the same view as borrowers—just with augmented capabilities—so that agents intuitively understand the borrower experience and can more easily guide borrowers toward self-service actions.

#### 6. Robust and modern borrower self-service

Though not a CRM feature per se, robust and intuitive borrower self-service features—enabling borrowers to easily make and schedule payments, update account information, customize their payment plan and more—have a direct impact on servicing costs by reducing customer contacts and simplifying resolution. A thoughtfully designed borrower portal can increase repayment rates, improve the customer experience, and make borrower actions quicker and easier—benefits that accrete both to your brand and to your bottom line.

#### 7. Superior agent experience

It sounds obvious, but it’s not a given in most lending CRMs—the experience of your agents deserves as much attention as the experience of your borrowers. When your CRM accords with the same user experience principles as your borrower portal, training can happen more quickly, agent efficiency and satisfaction rise, and resolution times are reduced. Not to mention that the positive experience of your agents will inevitably translate to a better experience for your end customers.

#### 8. Fully integrated tools

Most lenders have separate servicing, CRM and ticketing systems—requiring agents to toggle between multiple windows to execute even basic tasks. This approach should be avoided because of negative impacts to data consistency, resolution time, agent satisfaction and vendor costs. Instead, look for an integrated, all-in-one solution where your CRM and servicing systems stay in sync by default. Your CRM should know of open cases, update information seamlessly between systems and automatically check actions for compliance.

#### 9. Smart case matching

When your servicing system and CRM talk to each other, you can distribute work in efficient and powerful ways. This unlocks team ownership of tasks and cases, eliminating dependency on a single agent. Your task system can automatically distribute work by matching it to appropriately skilled agents, and the first available agent can then take the work and triage from a shared task queue.

**Lenders can get by without some of these features, but it will likely come at the expense of efficiency, resolution times, and agent and customer satisfaction. In today’s advanced lending technology ecosystem, there’s no reason your CRM can’t deliver on all these key features, enabling you to maximize efficiency and keep servicing costs down.**

**If you’d like to learn more about Peach’s CRM, send us a note at** [**info@peachfinance.com**](mailto:info@peachfinance.com)**.**


Your lending CRM should have these 9 features

Peach has expanded its leadership team. Its new senior leader brings deep product expertise to helping scale Peach's API-first software platform. 

Here at Peach, we’re proud to have added a key member to our leadership team: Russell Braden joins us as VP of Product.

In his Product role, Braden will focus on financial products—continuing to build out Peach’s robust feature set around payments, communications, agent tools, user portal, strategic partnerships and more.

Braden joins from Grainger, where he oversaw Product Development for Customer Information, a cornerstone of Grainger’s broader digital transformation efforts. Prior to Grainger, Braden held key roles in Product and Strategy & Operations at fintech lenders Avant and Enova International.

“Investment in Product is and always has been central to our mission,” said Eddie Oistacher, CEO of Peach. “A loan management and servicing platform that’s as modern and configurable as ours requires technical expertise, thoughtful design and continuing investments in feature development to deliver a product fit for enterprise clients. Russell Braden brings expertise in all these areas, plus practical experience building lending programs at some of today’s best-known fintechs.”

Braden joins Peach’s existing leadership team, which includes CEO Eddie Oistacher, CTO Eran Sandler and COO Gur Brosh. Other members of the leadership team include [Shara Chang](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/announcing-peach's-new-general-counsel), General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer; Noah Trugman, VP of Sales and Partnerships; and Dave Waller, VP of Enterprise Sales.

**If you’d like to learn more about how Peach can help you launch new lending programs and automate compliance monitoring, email us at** [**info@peachfinance.com**](mailto:info@peachfinance.com)**.**


Peach adds senior leader to bolster product capabilities

Learn more about Regulation F, a new debt collection rule from the CFPB that lays out important compliance requirements for debt collectors, lenders, and servicers. 

The CFPB’s new debt collection rule, [Regulation F](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/1006/), lays out important requirements for lenders, servicers and debt collectors. Because Regulation F just recently took effect, we wanted to expand on our [previous Regulation F blog post](https://blog.peachfinance.com/posts/what-the-cfpb's-new-debt-collection-rules-mean-for-creditors-and-first-party-servicers/)—and to outline some of the ways we’re helping alleviate the Regulation F compliance burden for our customers through smart automation and forward-looking product development.

## Who Needs to Comply with Regulation F?

Regulation F is the implementing regulation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), which is written to apply to “debt collectors.” While this seems to exclude creditors and first-party servicers, these entities can in fact be in violation of certain FDCPA requirements according to longstanding [CFPB guidance](https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201307_cfpb_bulletin_unfair-deceptive-abusive-practices.pdf).

As a result, many banks, credit unions, and fintech lenders and servicers have decided it’s important to comply with at least some of Regulation F’s new requirements. For your organization, the decision ultimately comes down to risk tolerance.

## What Parts of Regulation F Pose the Greatest Implementation Challenges? 

Regulation F introduces several new requirements, including call frequency limits, text and email rules, model validation notices, and additional disclosures. In our prior blog post, we talked about how [Peach](https://www.peachfinance.com/) helps lenders and servicers comply with call frequency limits. Now we’ll cover our approach to two additional provisions that present major implementation hurdles: (1) compliance with “inconvenient time and place” requirements, and (2) safe harbor procedures for text messages and emails.

### Challenge 1: Inconvenient Time and Place Requirements 

It’s well known in the industry that the FDCPA prohibits debt collectors from contacting consumers for debt collection purposes between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. But Regulation F clarifies that the FDCPA’s statutory language is actually significantly more restrictive.

*   **Consumer-Designated Preferences.** Regulation F states that a debt collector cannot contact a consumer for debt collection purposes at any time or place “known or which should be known to be inconvenient to the consumer.” This puts the onus on the debt collector to honor consumer requests regarding when and where they want to be contacted. For example, a consumer might ask not to be contacted between 3–5 p.m. on Tuesdays.
*   **Conflicting Information on the Consumer’s Location.** Regulation F adds that if a debt collector has conflicting information about a consumer’s local time zone, it can’t attempt to communicate at a time that would be inconvenient in any of the consumer’s possible locations.

### Challenge 2: Safe Harbor Procedures for Text Messages and Emails

Regulation F confirms that text messages and emails can be used for debt collection purposes. At the same time, debt collectors have a responsibility to prevent unintentional third-party disclosures of debt. While debt collectors are free to implement their own procedures, Regulation F outlines specific ones that provide safe harbor protection against unintentional third-party disclosure claims brought under the FDCPA.

## How Peach Helps Creditors and Servicers Comply with Regulation F 

One of the challenges with legacy solutions is that most lack a thoughtful and ongoing commitment to compliance. As regulations evolve, these legacy solutions typically require significant resource investments to power manual processes and ad-hoc solutions.

By contrast, Peach allows creditors and servicers to swiftly implement an automated plan to comply with new federal and state requirements. You can instantly turn on any of our new Regulation F capabilities.

### Solution 1: Inconvenient Time and Place Requirements 

Peach’s proprietary Compliance Guard™ solution automates compliance for inconvenient time and place requirements. We capture consumer-designated preferences on inconvenient times and places and issue an alert to block any communication attempts that would be in violation. Compliance Guard also scans multiple borrower data points to ensure that outbound communications are made during compliant periods if there’s ambiguity about where the borrower resides. Compliance Guard applies to debt collection calls, texts and emails.

### Solution 2: Safe Harbor Procedures for Text Messages and Emails

Peach makes it easy for organizations to take advantage of Regulation F’s new safe harbor protections for text messages and emails if they choose.

*   For **text messages**, Peach’s Compliance Guard modules have been updated to obtain re-consent from consumers and to provide scanning of the Federal Communications Commission’s Reassigned Numbers Database to confirm that phone numbers have not been reassigned. As with other automated rules, Compliance Guard would recommend blocking any non-compliant text messages.
*   For **emails**, Peach’s platform already tracks consents and opt-outs, ensuring that consumer requests are promptly stored and honored.

***

While Regulation F introduces additional regulatory complexity for lenders and servicers alike, and raises the stakes for staying compliant, Peach’s compliance-by-design approach makes it easy for our customers to stay ahead of ever-evolving regulations like Regulation F.

**If you’d like to learn more about how Peach can help your organization automate compliance while providing a best-in-class servicing experience, email us at** [**info@peachfinance.com**](mailto:info@peachfinance.com)**.**


How Peach Helps Lenders Comply with Regulation F

Is it better to buy lending software or build it in-house? This blog post walks through some of the pros and cons of each approach.

At [Peach](https://www.peachfinance.com/), we work with many early-stage fintechs looking to launch new lending products. A common question they face is whether to buy a piece of the lending technology stack or build it in-house.

These fintechs are technology companies themselves, with strong in-house product and engineering teams. So it’s no surprise that they’re often strongly inclined to build. Here’s how we help our customers think about this decision with regard to servicing tech specifically.

The first question is: What functions are core and differentiated to your business? Our view is that in lending there are two core differentiators: 1) marketing and customer acquisition, and 2) underwriting and risk management. Though loan servicing is an important part of the lending business, it isn’t core or differentiated.

From an investment standpoint, our customers typically find that it isn’t a good use of engineering resources to build and maintain a proprietary servicing platform. At least not if there’s a flexible, modern servicing technology partner that can support the needs of your current and future lending products without months of customization effort.

Fintechs who come to this view naturally gravitate toward a partner like Peach that specializes in modern servicing technology and gives lenders a choice between a true all-in-one solution (including system of record, payment processing, white-label borrower portal, CRM and compliance) and modules with open APIs they can build on top of.

Other fintechs go through the exercise of measuring and comparing the costs of buying versus building. However, the cost to build servicing technology is surprisingly difficult to forecast, for a few reasons.

First, lending products often start off simple—no interest accruals or fees, simple terms, single repayment method, etc. The requirements (and costs) for your servicing tech will grow as your product requirements change. Second, servicing tech has many constituents, including finance and accounting, credit risk, operations and collections, legal and compliance, and capital markets. And don’t forget about your end users! Building technology that truly works for all these stakeholders is not easy or cheap.

And third, approximately 90% of your servicing costs will come from 10% of your customers. Within that 10% group are many different cases you’ll need to deal with—payment failures, product returns, bankruptcies, identity theft, active military cases, FEMA federal disasters and identity theft, not to mention hardship and loan modifications (which can be forward-looking or retroactive). To forecast accurately you have to plan for every corner case and build these into your cost model in advance. It’s difficult to do this if you haven’t built a servicing system before.

That’s why we built Peach. Peach is the third generation of the modern servicing platform our team has worked on at companies like Affirm, Enova International, and Prosper. We support a wide variety of asset classes, including credit cards, charge cards, cash advances, BNPL/POS, RISAs, personal loans (installments and lines of credit), home improvement loans, private student loans, business loans, MCAs, and auto loans and leases.

Our loan management system has 250+ configuration variables that define loan product behavior. We can configure new loan types in a day and launch new lending programs in weeks. And if your requirements change or you want to launch a new product, we’re well-positioned to support your growth.

We love consulting with early-stage fintechs! If you’re planning to launch a lending product, please connect with us at <info@peachfinance.com>. We’d love to hear from you.


Fintechs - Buy or Build?

The CFPB recently established new debt collection rules. Here's what these regulations mean for creditors and first-party servicers. 

The CFPB’s final rules on debt collection issued in October and December 2020 have left creditors and servicers wondering what to do with them. These rules were the result of a 7-year long process and represent the first major rulemaking under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) since the law’s inception over 40 years ago. Even with the rules finalized, as described in greater detail below, incoming CFPB leadership has questioned whether the final rules need to be further refined.

By definition, creditors and first-party servicers are excluded from coverage because they are not “debt collectors” under the FDCPA. But even then, creditors and servicers comply with many FDCPA requirements in large part due to longstanding [CFPB guidance](https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201307_cfpb_bulletin_unfair-deceptive-abusive-practices.pdf) stating that entities that are not debt collectors could still violate consumer protection laws by engaging in conduct prohibited by the FDCPA. The CFPB’s powers to enforce such violations would not come through the FDCPA itself, but through the CFPB’s broad powers to prohibit unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices (UDAAPs).

One of the notable requirements under the final rules effectively proposes 2 distinct limits on how often debt collectors can call consumers. Subject to limited exceptions, the final rules create a presumption that a debt collector violates the FDCPA if it (a) calls a person more than 7 times within 7 consecutive days; or (b) calls a person within 7 days of having a phone conversation with that person. These limits apply at the per-debt level, with the exception of student loans which may be aggregated by account number.

In the 1000+ pages of the rules’ text, the CFPB expressly refused to apply the new rules to creditors and first-party servicers or take a position on whether any conduct under the rules could give rise to a UDAAP. However, much could change between now and the rules’ effective date of November 30, 2021. The CFPB Director who issued the final rules, Kathy Kraninger, stepped down from her post at the request of the Biden administration in January and is expected to be succeeded by FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra. On several occasions, FTC Commissioner Chopra has publicly expressed his views that the final rules don’t do enough to protect consumers from abusive debt collection practices. In particular, he has [opined](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/1544795/chopra_-_comment_submission_on_cfpb_proposed_debt_collection_rule_9-18-19.pdf) that the new phone call frequency limits “seem excessive” and has [admonished](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/1583802/chopra_statement_for_midwest_recovery_systems.pdf) the CFPB for failing to follow through with its plans to regulate first-party debt collection practices. Earlier this month, Acting CFPB Director Dave Uejio directed CFPB staff to explore options for preserving the status quo with respect to the debt collection rules, sending a strong signal that the final rules could be delayed until the CFPB implements more consumer-friendly requirements with FTC Commissioner Chopra at the helm.

With these developments, the risk is apparent that the CFPB under a new presidential administration will eventually apply at least some aspects of the final rules to creditors and first-party servicers. Prudent creditors and first-party servicers will need to assess the potential impact the final rules could have on their operations and whether, and the extent to which, they might proactively comply with some of the new requirements, at least as we understand them today.

At a time when applicable regulatory requirements appear uncertain and subject to swift amendment, more creditors and servicers are turning to [Peach](https://www.peachfinance.com/). Peach has developed a [suite of services](https://www.peachfinance.com/platform/compliance-guard) to help creditors and servicers achieve compliance with the complex web of requirements that apply to the servicing and collection of consumer purpose credit. For instance, Peach’s Compliance Guard - Rules module checks outbound servicing and collections-related communications against federal, state, and local laws that apply to creditors and servicers. The Compliance Guard - Rules module automates compliance for requirements under the FDCPA (including unusual time and place restrictions and limitations on third-party contacts) and already incorporates existing call frequency limits in jurisdictions that require them, such as Massachusetts and New York City. As part of the onboarding process, Peach presents creditors and servicers with its catalogue of pre-programmed business and legal rules, which in coordination with Peach, can be tailored to meet a company’s operational needs and risk tolerance. Once in action, Compliance Guard - Rules smartly selects applicable rules by loan type, licensure, servicer or creditor’s charter, and borrower’s state of residency. If the Compliance Guard - Rules module determines that a proposed communication would violate a legal or business requirement, it will recommend blocking the communication attempt.

If you’d like to learn more about how Peach can help creditors and servicers automate compliance, while providing a best-in-class servicing experience, email us at <info@peachfinance.com>.


Implications of the CFPB's new debt collection rules

We're pleased to announce that Shara Chang is now Peach's General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer. Shara brings an extensive legal and compliance background within financial services.

We’re excited to announce that [Shara Chang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shara-chang-20b27b16/) has joined [Peach](/) as our General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer.

Shara’s addition will enable us to build and scale our lending and servicing systems with compliance considerations at the forefront. Because one of our main value-adds for lenders is mitigating compliance risk, our own investment in legal and compliance personnel is critically important. Our solutions incorporate federal and state laws in a way that keeps lenders compliant on all fronts while at the same time helping borrowers maintain or improve their financial health.

Shara brings keen insight into lending regulation, technology, payments and privacy. She previously helped Affirm, Inc. scale its lending products to millions of borrowers while successfully navigating a shifting regulatory landscape. Her exceptional knowledge of lending product functionality will help us build and deliver state-of-the-art solutions that are true innovations never seen before in market.

“Loan servicing has been a priority for federal and state regulators and we should expect an intensified focus in this space, particularly in today’s economic climate where borrowers with financial hardships need flexible repayment options to get by,” Shara said. “Peach’s suite of services features a sleek servicing platform that unlocks these options for borrowers and automated tools that help lenders navigate the patchwork of federal and state laws impacting their servicing operations. I look forward to leveraging my experience with disruptive tech companies and leading financial institutions to help Peach deliver on its strategic initiatives and modernize the loan servicing industry.”

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Shara to the Peach team!

About [Shara Chang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shara-chang-20b27b16/):

Shara brings 10+ years of experience in financial services and consumer protection law, having advised leading tech companies, fintechs and banks on product development, risk management, regulatory compliance and enforcement. Before joining Peach, Shara led a team of privacy lawyers at Facebook that advised on global payments, research and integrity initiatives. Shara was the first and lead Product Counsel at San Francisco-based fintech Affirm, and worked in private practice at Buckley LLP and at Cleary Gottlieb. She has also held leadership roles in the American Bar Association’s Banking Law and Consumer Financial Services Committees.

About [Peach](/):

Peach is an Oakland-based startup providing modern loan management and servicing software for lenders and servicers. Our system is entirely post-origination and manages the loan until pay off or write off. We provide the financial ledger (system of record), payment processing, borrower portal, communications, CRM for collections, and compliance.

#### Key benefits:

*   **A+ Borrower Experience**: Peach provides a simple and intuitive white-label portal where borrowers can access and modify their loans from any device.

*   **Lower OpEx**: Peach’s comprehensive, easy-to-use suite of agent tools allow for fast agent training, expedited customer issue resolution, and lower agent turnover. Peach’s machine learning models also optimize collections strategies.

*   **Eliminate Compliance Risk**: Our proprietary Compliance Guard software conducts monitoring and real-time checks on federal and state regulations to ensure you stay compliant.

*   **Faster Go-To-Market**: Peach consolidates 5 systems in a single, integrated platform. Lenders can configure 80+ variables and launch new loan products in under one hour. Modern APIs allow quick integration with the lender's origination system.



Announcing Peach's New General Counsel

Learn more about how Peach's loan management and servicing system can help companies meet borrowers' needs in a post-pandemic world. 

### How to Prepare Your Servicing Operation for a Post-Pandemic World

The dual public health and financial crises set off by COVID-19 has created unforeseen challenges for both borrowers and lenders. In a [previous post](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/covid-19-part-1-helping-borrowers-through-hard-times), we highlighted how Peach’s modern loan servicing platform can provide flexible payment plans and loan modification options to borrowers in times of emergency. In this post, we’ll address the challenges lenders face in converting servicing call centers to remote-work operations—and how Peach’s software solutions can make this transition easy.

#### The Challenges of Remote Work

The recent COVID-19 outbreak has transformed call centers into potential transmission zones, creating health risks for workers. Regardless of whether states [allow call centers to remain open](https://www.insidearm.com/news/00046043-new-state-shelter-place-orders-shut-down-/), we believe all lenders need to be able to quickly shift servicing operations to remote work where legally possible to protect the health and safety of their employees—and to ensure business continuity.

However, this shift to remote work creates challenges that span across operations, technology, privacy, data security and compliance. Agents need remote access to servicing systems and tools to interact with borrowers while still protecting borrowers’ data in a home environment. Supervisors need to maintain the ability to audit and monitor agent performance for quality. Back office personnel need escalation tools, audit trails, and controls to ensure compliance.

[Peach’s](https://www.peachfinance.com/) modern loan management and servicing platform addresses these challenges and gives lenders a push-button option to enable call center agents to work from home.

#### How Peach Enables Remote Work

Peach’s servicing platform is a scalable cloud-hosted solution (built on Google Cloud). That means anyone with internet access can be granted access to the system, including those with VoIP connections (without the need for VPN interference). Call center agents working remotely just need to connect an employer-provided computer to the internet and log in to Peach. The Peach application runs in the browser, so even a basic laptop is sufficient.

For each job function, Peach provides the tools and data employees need to do their job.

For agents, Peach provides an integrated suite of servicing and collections tools including a loan management system, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, cases and workflows and communication tools.

For supervisors, Peach provides real-time performance and SLA reports, call analytics, and recordings so supervisors can coach agents, monitor trends, and ensure quality.

For back office and compliance personnel, Peach provides access to real-time data and audit trails.

Peach provides a full set of controls and permissions to restrict agent access to shift hours. We also run velocity checks to prevent data abuse, prevent data from being inappropriately copied or downloaded, and ensure agents are working from an approved remote location.

#### Scaling and Training for Increased Demand

Current and future public health crises may stretch the limits of existing call-center capacity and create the need to onboard temporary workers. Legacy servicing systems are difficult to learn and take weeks of in-person training to use properly. Peach provides servicing tools that are intuitive and easy for agents to use. New agents can be trained on the Peach platform in days, not weeks, to allow lenders to quickly scale up to meet increasing demand.

If you’d like to learn more about how Peach helps lenders modernize their servicing operation, please email us at <info@peachfinance.com>.

### \*\*\*\*

**About Peach**

Peach is a cloud-native lending technology platform that helps fintechs and traditional financial institutions quickly launch new lending programs. Peach is the only lending platform built on an Adaptive Core™. The company’s fully integrated suite of API-based products includes a loan management system that supports virtually any non-mortgage asset class and features 250+ configuration variables; a suite of proprietary servicing tools, including a lending-specific CRM, borrower portal, agent portal, payment processing, communications, reporting and first-party collections tools; and Compliance Guard™, a proprietary compliance monitoring system. Peach can also accrue interest and generate repayment schedules during loan origination. Peach was built by leaders from top fintechs like Affirm, Avant and Prosper, who set out to create the most configurable, robust, compliance-forward and future-proof lending platform in the market. Learn more at [peachfinance.com](https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink\&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.peachfinance.com%2F\&esheet=52740188\&newsitemid=20220606005550\&lan=en-US\&anchor=peachfinance.com\&index=1\&md5=31f321d027ee89a322323dcfb6c40aa8).


COVID-19 Part 2: Your post-pandemic servicing operation

COVID-19 has created major challenges for lenders and servicers. Here's how Peach's loan management and servicing technology can help lenders meet borrowers' needs in a crisis.  

### Helping Borrowers Through Hard Times

The COVID-19 public health crisis has created unprecedented challenges for borrowers, lenders and servicers. This post focuses on how lenders and servicers can leverage Peach’s solutions to help borrowers in times of emergency and financial hardship.

### What Borrowers Need

The full impact of COVID-19 on the economy is uncertain. But in the past few weeks, millions of workers have lost their jobs and small businesses are running out of capital. The federal government is racing to send checks to households, extend [loans to small businesses](https://www.inc.com/brit-morse/sba-loans-coronavirus-stimulus-package-cares-act.html), and encourage banks to start offering [responsible small dollar loans](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/bank-regulators-urge-small-dollar-lending-in-covid-19-crisis) to consumers. Federal and state governments are encouraging lenders to offer flexible accommodations to borrowers impacted by COVID-19.

As economic conditions deteriorate and borrower delinquencies increase, lenders need powerful tools to provide borrowers with flexible payment plans and loan modification options.

Most legacy servicing systems are too rigid to accommodate custom hardship programs, or they require significant manual work by back office personnel. This is costly and does not scale. We built Peach to provide greater flexibility. With Peach, you can deploy a wide range of tools to respond to borrower hardship, benefiting both borrowers and lenders.

### What Peach Enables

Peach’s solution gives lenders and servicers various ways to handle hardships and loan modifications, including the ability to:

1.  Defer due dates to a future date, either within an existing loan term or with an extended term.
2.  Lower interest rates and suspend late fees.
3.  Pause collection efforts, including calls and/or overdue notifications.
4.  Lower recurring payment amounts by changing due date frequency.
5.  Lower recurring payment amounts by extending loan duration.
6.  Allow borrowers to prepay future recurring payments.
7.  Offer settlement plans to prevent charge-offs.
8.  Automatically execute a natural disaster relief plan according to lender specifications.
9.  Report loans as current to credit bureaus if the consumer fulfills the terms of the accommodation.

Peach automatically recalculates and/or re-amortizes in real time, allowing customer care agents to go over revised numbers and find the best solution for the borrower. There’s no custom code required.

### Automation and Self-Service

Many of these features can be enabled in Peach’s white-label borrower portal as self-service actions for borrowers. Giving borrowers the ability to modify loans on their own gives them control and eases their burden in difficult times. This can significantly lower the load on customer care and collections teams, allowing them to focus on the most difficult cases.

In our [next post](https://www.peachfinance.com/blog/covid-19-part-2-how-to-prepare-your-servicing-operation-for-a-post-pandemic-world), we address the challenge of keeping call centers operational during a crisis and how lenders can shift quickly to remote-work operations for loan servicing.

If you want more flexible ways to accommodate borrowers experiencing financial hardship, please email us at <info@peachfinance.com>.


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