We’re excited to announce that Shara Chang 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:
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.
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—still present significant challenges for many lenders.
The SCRA grants active-duty service members the ability to request certain protections 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.
Blunt tools in the absence of a scalpel
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
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.) In the case of SCRA, Peach has long enabled lenders to retroactively change interest rates and waive past fees—as separate, manual actions.
Peach’s approach to SCRA
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, 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.
Peach’s approach to SCRA
Specifically, the new SCRA feature allows your agents to perform the following adjustments simultaneously on a loan of an active-duty service member:
- Lower interest rates to 6% (and lower the recurring payment during the active-duty period to account for the interest rate reduction)
- Waive fees, if necessary
- Enact these changes retroactively, if necessary, and replay the loan history with the rate and fee adjustments
- Preview the intended changes
“We launched our first product on Peach in six weeks. Eighteen months later.”
John Smith, CMO
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:
Peach’s approach to SCRA
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:
For those working directly with the API, this can be as simple as sending the following request body to the SCRA endpoint:
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.
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.
