The buy approach refers to purchasing pre-made software developed by a third party. These solutions are designed to meet the general needs of a broad market segment and can be convenient for many commodity functions or highly niche solutions. However, with broad market application comes rigidity in design and infrastructure. There are trade-offs, just like a full build decision, that lenders should consider when evaluating the buy, build, or integrate decisions.
Advantages of Buying:
- Cost Efficiency: Lower initial costs and a predictable expense model (often subscription-based). The development costs are spread out among multiple buyers.
- Quick Deployment: Immediate implementation allows businesses to benefit from the software right away.Reliability: Often tested broadly across diverse environments, potentially offering greater stability out of the box. Vendor responsible for maintaining SLAs and uptime.
- Updates and Support: Vendors typically provide ongoing support, maintenance, and updates, including bug fixes, security updates, and
- Leverage Existing Expertise: Vendors often have extensive experience and expertise in the software and its capabilities. This focused expertise makes it easier for the vendor to support roadmaps specific to the technology and invest in upgrades for the whole platform.
Disadvantages of Buying:
- Limited Customization: May not perfectly align with every business process, requiring workarounds.
- Dependency: Reliance on the vendor for updates, support, and scalability. Lenders have no roadmap ownership.
- Generic: May lack unique features that could provide a competitive edge. If lenders purchased software, a competitor can easily buy it too.
- Potential for Higher Long-Term Costs: Off-the-shelf software license fees can add up over time.
- Data Protection and Usage: Lenders have less control over data protection and usage.
While the initial cost advantage of off-the-shelf software is tempting, lenders must carefully consider long-term expenses and the potential for limited competitive differentiation. Ultimately, the decision to 'buy' should align with a lender's strategic priorities, and Peach offers a compelling evolution of this approach. We provide the advantages of a rapid, cost-effective 'buy' decision, coupled with the flexibility and customization of a 'build' strategy, through our robust, API-first integration capabilities.
Peach's highly configurable platform, exemplified by features like embedded Loan Replay for transparent change management, empowers lenders to deploy market-ready post-origination servicing tools swiftly. This allows for rapid market prototyping and immediate implementation, while simultaneously enabling the development of bespoke internal systems. Our API-driven architecture ensures that when a lender’s internal systems are ready, seamless redirection of API calls, events, and webhooks can occur without functional redesigns. Effectively, Peach allows lenders to leverage the speed and efficiency of a 'buy' decision, while maintaining the capacity for strategic, phased internal development, maximizing both agility and long-term control.
With Peach, it’s not a binary decision to build or buy, we offer the best of both options through integration. Interested in how we offer similar advantages to a “build” decision with Peach? Check out our article on Strategic Integration: Save Time, Build Smarter or read our industry case study or contact us today to setup a discovery meeting.
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.
