At Peach, delivering the best possible experience for our clients is at the core of our mission. For us, this means more than just bringing our extensive lending experience to the table. It’s also about operating with integrity, bringing a consultative mindset, building for the long-term, and delivering exceptionally dependable infrastructure. This approach enables our clients to lower costs, shorten time-to-market, spur innovation, and de-risk their product launches.
In order to enhance the level of service we provide to our clients, we’ve formally established a Customer Experience (CX) organization within Peach. This change brings together our Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Customer Support, and Technical Writing teams to drive the seamless experiences from implementation to post-production support that customers value when choosing Peach.
- Solutions Engineering partners with clients during implementation to provide a smooth experience while onboarding to Peach’s platform. Solutions Engineering also partners with clients post-implementation to ensure they’re able to leverage Peach’s full suite of capabilities.
- Customer Support ensures that when clients run into issues, those issues are resolved quickly through dedicated support channels. This provides a reliable level of service and documentation around resolution to issues raised to Peach’s Support team.
- Technical Writing is responsible for Peach’s Documentation Hub, which assists current and prospective clients throughout their learning journey as they endeavor to grasp the broad set of features and functionality provided by Peach’s platform. The Documentation Hub comprises technical documentation for developers as well as guides that describe system capabilities for end-user audiences.
- Customer Success has responsibility for maintaining and cultivating client relationships, including understanding clients’ needs and providing a high level of ongoing support as their lending programs scale.
Bringing these teams together in a dedicated CX organization provides our clients with continuity throughout the product lifecycle and enables us to partner more deeply. Whether your offering is consumer or business, BNPL or credit card, de novo or already at scale—we’re here to make sure you get maximum value from our best-in-class loan management and servicing platform. We look forward to partnering with you as you continue to innovate and grow.
About Russell Braden
A three-year veteran of Peach, Russell leads Peach’s newly formed Customer Experience organization. Most recently, he served as Peach’s VP of Product Management. Prior to Peach, Russell has held key roles at leading innovators like Grainger, Avant and Enova International. At Grainger, he oversaw Product Development for Customer Information, a cornerstone of Grainger’s broader digital transformation efforts. He helped scale insights and best practices from an internal startup across the entire company, replatforming their tech stack and reducing their dependence on legacy software.
Prior to Grainger, Russell was responsible for launching one of Avant’s installment lending programs—overseeing underwriting, risk, servicing, collections and remarketing, as well as development of their servicing platform. And before Avant, Russell worked in Strategy & Operations at Enova International, learning the ins and outs of their online lending business through the lens of the call center.
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.
