CASE STUDY
Region
United States
Company size
20 – 50
Industry
Financial services
Key use case
Credit underwriting
Slope.so empowers small businesses to grow with short-term capital. The San Francisco based company enables B2B platforms to offer Buy Now, Pay Later services by handling the underwriting, lending, and debt collection while fully paying out immediately to the platform upfront. We asked Ashish Jain, Slope's CFO, to answer a few questions on how Oscilar supports the company's underwriting efforts.
"Oscilar's slick no-code UI allows anyone in the risk team to create and modify KYC and credit underwriting flows without pairing with an engineer"
Ashish Jain
Chief Financial Officer
Q: What problem were you facing before you found Oscilar?
A: The biggest problem was integrating with 3 individual data vendors and building a system to manage & orchestrate the data flows for our underwriting engine. We are solving a complex problem where the underwriting needed to assess a customer is different than many of the charge card providers that have relied upon other decisioning engines. It is not just about cash flow based underwriting, but assessing a customers ability to pay over the next 3-6 months.
Q: Where did Oscilar come into play?
We had a 2-month deadline to roll out a new underwriting system for a big customer launch. Our engine and data teams were already stretched building the core system. Integrating with individual data vendors and managing the workflows would’ve added cycles we didn’t have. Additionally, it wasn’t clear if all of it could even be done in time: contracts with credit bureaus can drag out – especially for a startup our size.
At the same time, we were in the final stages with our partner bank, WebBank, and our credit facility provider, SVB and Trinity. We take compliance and regulatory items very seriously. It was important to us to seamlessly pull KYB and KYC information on a potential customer.
Q: How was this impacting people's ability to do their jobs?
A: The initial integration work would’ve taken precious cycles away from our engine bandwidth ahead of a big launch. The orchestration work would add more overhead: either we spent even more time to build a system to easily manage & configure the workflows, or we just hardcoded everything to ship fast but incur even more work in the future.
Q: What were other tools or approaches you considered or attempted to adopt?
A: We considered building the system ourselves and Alloy.
Q: How did Oscilar help in solving this problem?
A: For us, Oscilar helped in 2 valuable dimensions:
1. Streamlined the integration process
Both in volume of work and in time-to-market. Rather than negotiating and integrating with 3 separate vendors, we only had to do it once. Because Oscilar already had existing relationships with these parties, the total turnaround-time also shortened. This helped us ship just in time for the launch.
2. A single, unified risk platform to manage the flows
The no-code UI allows anyone in the risk team to modify/create new flows without paring with an engineer. After a brief learning curve, we found it slicker and more intuitive than other platforms. This we see as the long-term value of Oscilar as we scale to more customers with different use cases.
Q: Roughly how long did it take for you to start seeing value of Oscilar on the business?
A: About 2 months. We are still gathering data, but anecdotally it has made a noticeable difference.
Q: What can you do now that you couldn’t do before without Oscilar?
A: Now we have a complete 360° view of the businesses we’re underwriting and quickly launch new workflows. If we couldn't use Oscilar anymore, it will have a significant negative impact on our ability to advance our product. We wanted to work with a strong tech platform that was also going to commit strong customer services and iteration upon the product. It was important to us that together we build a unique solution.
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