Today we’re spotlighting Russell Braden, our VP of Product. Russell is responsible for the suite of APIs that powers our modern loan servicing capabilities. That includes our expanding feature sets around payment processing, communications, agent tools, user portal and strategic partnerships. It also involves expanding our card program—partnering with leading card issuers to support a wide variety of physical and virtual card products for our clients.
Russell has previously held key roles at well-known companies like Grainger, Avant and Enova International. Most recently 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 acquisition, 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.
“I’ve seen the severe customer pain caused by inaccurate and improper loan servicing,” Russell said. “And I’ve seen how resource-intensive corner cases can be. Manual operations has always been a fact of life for lenders—but Peach has managed to turn this on its head. Peach’s modern servicing platform helps eliminate or significantly reduce the manual processes needed to run a successful lending business, helping lenders increase both profits and customer satisfaction.”
Peach’s ability to leverage technology to solve common pain points is in part due to its position at the crucial intersection of borrowers, operations and servicing technology. It’s also due to a very intentional focus on solutions that are scalable to many asset classes and types of lenders, and are configurable enough to feel custom to both agents and borrowers.
“We’re leveraging technology to solve pain points many lenders have dealt with for decades,” Russell said. “But it doesn’t stop there. Our technology platform also unlocks lenders’ ability to innovate. Whether it’s speed, flexibility or robust functionality, we’re continually focused on delivering a product suite that is technologically differentiated.”
Eddie Oistacher, CEO of Peach, added: “The pace of change in lending is accelerating, and it’s our job to empower lenders to innovate ahead of the curve—today and into the future. So we have to be two steps ahead, building the infrastructure for continued innovation.”
“That’s the real importance of Russell’s work,” he went on. “Russell is ensuring that we can support clients as they push the envelope, expanding our features and functionality as well as our support for asset classes and client types. Russell has seen what success and failure look like across origination, servicing and collections, and he has the vision to help us point lenders of all kinds in the direction of success.”
Outside of work, Russell is an avid athlete—most recently channeling his passion for sports into platform tennis. Russell lives in Chicagoland with his wife and three kids.
Curious about Peach? We’d love to talk—we’re at info@peachfinance.com.
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.
