This guide is for tech-savvy backend developers who know how to use an API. No frontend experience is needed.
Summary
🎯 Codat makes lending easier by getting you trusted data with which to check a loan applicant’s finances. With our demo app, you will experience the end-to-end lending process flow with automatic decision-making supported by Codat's Lending API. We will focus on the lender's perspective.
⏳ Estimated time to complete: 20-30 minutes
🛠️ The demo project is implemented in .NET 7.0 as a backend API. You can configure and run the demo app in the terminal, or use your preferred IDE or code editor.
✔️ Delve into the demo app to...
- Create and submit an example loan application form,
- Create a test company via Codat’s API to represent the borrower,
- Link the test company to Codat's sandbox source of financial data,
- Fetch that data using Codat’s Enhanced Profit and Loss and Enhanced Balance Sheet endpoints,
- Use Codat’s webhooks to trigger the lending of a loan,
- Produce an automated lending decision based on custom financial data points.
❌ This guide does not cover...
- Building any application form and dashboard UIs.
- Details or recommendations of various financial data points used in different lending models.
- Details on how to perform loan writeback for general lending (see also: Recording general loan payments).
About the demo app
The app's codebase is available via our GitHub repo. Clone it locally to try out the application.
The codebase uses Codat and its Lending API to make a lending decision. We will walk you through the setup in the Portal and the code next.
Why we use Lending API
The demo app makes use of the categorization feature of Lending API. This feature analyses the full list of a company's accounts and assigns a category to each account. This solves the problem of bookkeepers giving different names to the same accounting category.
For example, one bookkeeper may name their marketing account "Facebook Ads", and another may call it "Online Marketing". Lending will categorize both accounts in the same way - as Expense > Operating > Marketing. This enables lenders to use a standardized taxonomy, no matter how the bookkeeper manages their accounts.
This standardizes the data irrespective of its source and helps you make a comprehensive assessment of your customer's financial health, produce additional insights (e.g. calculate financial ratios), and automate decisioning based on these insights.
Read next
Now that you know the focus and purpose of our demo app and its guide: