Loan application use case

Lending is a cornerstone of the financial industry and a mission-critical process for many businesses. For developers building solutions in this space, it’s about more than just processing a transaction. It’s about empowering businesses to acquire and retain customers by offering flexible financing options.

The customer journey—from the moment a user applies for a loan to managing their account—is deeply integrated with a business’s core systems and customer touch points. This presents an opportunity to build seamless digital experiences that not only expedite the loan process but also enhance customer engagement and trust. The right tools can help you build solutions that turn a complex, regulated process into a streamlined experience that delights both businesses and their customers. These solutions can integrate the loan application process with an organization’s core systems that handle customer relationship management (CRM), loan processing, storage, digital onboarding, marketing, analytics, and compliance.

The developer challenge

Integrating a business’s loan application process with its core systems is a complex project that involves far more than merely creating an online loan application form. Developers must consider the following challenges when creating a truly integrated solution:

• Multiple loan scenarios: Depending on the business or financial institution and the available loan types, the solution must be able to offer different loan application forms, collect various types of information, include additional forms, and route the completed application package to different personnel for review, approval, and funding.
• Identity verification: When a financial institution requires a customer to verify their identity during a loan application process, it’s not simply a matter of policy. It’s a fundamental requirement for legal compliance, fraud prevention, and risk management. This process, referred to as Know Your Customer (KYC), is a cornerstone of global Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorist Financing (CTF) regulations. Each institution has its own KYC requirements, which are often risk-based.
• Data integrity and validation: The information the customer enters must be accurate and complete. Information about existing customers may be cross-checked against internal records, and new customer information must be validated against external sources or may require in-person reviews.
• Export of customer information: Storing the completed form as a static PDF or other file type isn’t enough. The customer’s information and the terms of the loan must be transcribed into the business’s systems of record, such as its CRM platform, core system, and imaging system. The export of this information can trigger downstream services to enable straight-through processing.
• Self-service: An ideal solution would enable customers in as many scenarios as possible to open accounts, fill out loan applications, and update their personal information without supervision or input from staff. In many cases, business rules can automate loan review and approval.
• Compliance: Any solution should meet legal requirements for customer signature, document retention, fair lending practice disclosure and adherence, verification of financial means to pay, and audit trails.

Building an app that handles all this can be costly and time-consuming. With Docusign for Developers, your organization can make use of existing components that meet these requirements.

How Docusign for Developers can help

Docusign for Developers includes a number of technologies that directly address the needs of developers building loan application processes that connect with their internal platforms. Let’s review these technologies and how each of them can be used for this purpose:

Workflow Builder

Workflow Builder is a powerful, no-code orchestration tool that enables you to create customizable workflows to automate any agreement management process. Within a workflow, you can collect data from your user; create branching rules based on that data to collect data for different loan types or set different routing rules for approval and funding; call external systems to share, store, and validate that data; verify the user’s identity; present forms to your user and have the user complete and electronically sign them; and export the final completed application to business systems and cloud storage.

The Workflow Builder API gives you programmatic control over your workflows so you can integrate them into your solutions. You can use the Workflow Builder API to trigger, monitor, and manage workflows from your application.

Web Forms and the Web Forms API

Web Forms is a no-code form designer and management tool that lets you build and present online forms to collect information from your users, then use that data as you wish. You can build stand-alone web forms or create them from an eSignature template. Data from template-based forms can be populated automatically in an eSignature envelope that a customer reviews and signs.

With the Web Forms API, you can create web form instances to present to your users and get status information on their progress. This enables you to trigger web forms from your application and integrate them into your application’s flow. You can choose to host a web form in your application, redirect the user to Docusign to view the form, or send the form via email for the user to fill out.

Private extension apps

Extension apps are a way to import your functionality into Docusign itself, enabling Docusign features to access your systems. While many extension apps are public (available to all Docusign users), Docusign also lets you publish extension apps privately, only to those Docusign accounts you designate: this lets you build extension apps that access your own internal systems without compromising their security.

Extension apps are designed to be triggered at specific steps in Docusign agreement processes, so you can work them into a simple e-signing experience or a sophisticated agreement workflow.

So, what can you do with extension apps? A lot:

• Data IO extension: This extension connects Docusign with external data sources. With data IO, you can retrieve customer data, say from your CRM platform, and prepopulate web forms with it; take data input from customers and send it back to your CRM platform; and store it for access in later steps in your workflow.

• Connected fields extension, data verification extensions, and Connected Fields API: These features let you validate user-supplied data against a source of truth. In the context of loan applications, you can use the connected fields extension to validate your customer’s input on their loan application against your system of record. Beyond validating simple data such as their address or phone number, you can use this extension to, for instance, confirm whether they already have an account, live in an area serviced by your business, or belong to a list of blocked individuals or of those who qualify for improved loan terms. The data verification extensions each verify a specific type of value, such as a bank account number or Social Security Number, using a verification service.

  While the connected fields extension and data verification extensions send data for validation, the Connected Fields API lets you discover which data items in your agreements map to information you can validate against your own or external data sources.

• File output cloud storage extension: This extension can be triggered from a Workflow Builder workflow to automatically write completed loan applications and loan agreements to a cloud storage system. To meet business requirements, the documents can be stored to a specified cloud storage location using an appropriate naming convention.

Docusign for Salesforce

Docusign has tools to closely integrate your solutions with the leading SaaS CRM platform on the market:

• Docusign eSignature for Salesforce lets you send, sign, track, and save agreements in Salesforce.
• The Apex Toolkit lets you build Docusign solutions in Apex, Salesforce’s own integration language.
• The Salesforce extension app lets you run Docusign agreement processes within your own solution while keeping your Salesforce data current. You can use the Salesforce extension app to enable your workflow to poll Salesforce for existing customer data to prepopulate forms, and then write new or updated customer data back to Salesforce.

Workspaces and the Workspaces API

Loan applications are one example of an agreement process with complex procedures, multiple documents, and any number of participants in different roles: the customer, the joint applicant, the sales agent, the loan officer, the underwriters, and more. Workspaces are designed to simplify complex scenarios like this by creating a single digital interface with all the necessary documents and with participants’ roles defined, enabling you to upload documents, assign tasks, and track the progress of everything in the process.

The Workspaces API gives your application access to all these functions programmatically, enabling you to create workspaces, add and update users, assign roles and tasks, and pull status information.

Docusign Identity Verification and the ID Evidence API

Docusign Identity Verification is a suite of tools designed to securely and efficiently confirm the identities of individuals signing documents electronically. It integrates advanced technologies to ensure that the person signing is indeed who they claim to be, thereby enhancing trust and compliance in digital transactions.

The ID Evidence API lets your application track the success of identity verification and retrieve the identity documents the user presents for verification. This is a key element of compliance with the applicable legal requirements for your business, industry, or location.

Resources for implementing your solution