SoFi Revolutionizes DevOps for Next-Gen Student Loan Refinancing Platform
“The flexibility and ease of use of the Provenir platform allowed us to complete a very complex project in record time with nearly half as many resources and over a 50% cost reduction. By adopting Provenir’s low code/no code agile best practices, we are driving improved application development efficiencies across the organization.”
Adam Colclasure, Senior Director, Risk Infrastructure
The Challenge
Following Covid and an ever-changing U.S. political landscape, many student loan holders were uncertain about their future and the student loan debt they were carrying. SoFi wanted to help as many qualified customers as possible by providing the opportunity to refinance at rates that are/were at historic lows, while making sure they were fully informed about all options available to them depending on the types of loans they held.
The goal of the project was to leverage the most advanced low code/no code technology and agile processes to increase SoFi’s approval rate and refinance as many loans as possible. It was critical that the team meet an August 1 deadline to ensure it could be rolled out nationwide before the school term started.
Why Provenir
SoFi benchmarked the project alongside its previous DevOps effort with its in-school college loan application. As a result of building out new automation and leveraging low code/no code technology enabled processes via the Provenir Decisioning platform, SoFi was able to complete the project and go live in a shorter timeframe (within 10 weeks) with a small but efficient development team (representing a reduction in development resources of 44 percent) and at a cost that was over 57 percent less than the cost of development of similar application platforms.
SoFi’s student loan refinance platform enables consumers to apply in minutes with a more than a 25 percent improvement in underwriting speed.
Additionally, a key benefit was streamlining the regulatory process. SoFi has a requirement to file for approval in all 50 states every time a policy changes and ensure compliance with 50 sets of rules and requirements governing terms and conditions such as minimums, interest rates and age restrictions, etc. By using the Provenir platform to design agile regulatory processes, SoFi has been able to adapt very quickly to policy updates and implement needed changes very quickly, for best-practice compliance and governance.
One key area for cost and time savings was in application testing. With the new student loan refinancing platform, much of the testing was automated so that thousands of testing scripts/transactions could be tested with the click of a button. SoFi also found they were able to rationalize the number of test scenarios and parameters to approximate real-world scenarios. This allowed the team to run 90 percent fewer test scenarios – from 4.5 million to 500,000 – and still deliver the same quality of product with zero defects.
The resulting DevOps efficiencies are enabling SoFi to reallocate the newfound developer resources to focus on other SoFi tech initiatives. Moreover, the new next-gen DevOps approach is empowering the SoFi development team with a new mindset as to what can be accomplished via automation.
The team has “broken free” of this instance of technical debt, by working to build out and improve the development infrastructure while building out the product. As a result, SoFi has now disseminated these learnings throughout the organization to help spread these low code/no code agile best practices to the wider application development team to adopt this new way of thinking and driving improved application development efficiencies across the organization.
