The Challenge
CreditNinja utilized a third-party platform to receive leads as part of its marketing strategy.
As CreditNinja grew, fine-grained control of lead processing and purchasing became strategically important.
CreditNinja decided to build an in-house system for lead processing and purchasing. According to VP of Engineering at CreditNinja, Lee Ebreo, “Building out our own internal lead system was strategically important because we could reduce our own underwriting and marketing costs per loan application.”
CreditNinja decided to build an in-house system with two goals:
- The ability to quickly make changes to lead processing/purchasing including work integrating with new data vendors and adjusting our purchasing criteria based on internal analysis.
- The ability to provide custom control for Marketing and Data Science to operate the system.
The company consulted with Sphere to partner on a strategy and augment development capabilities, while its current staff could focus on other core parts of the business.
How We Solved It
The Sphere team in collaboration with CreditNinja, developed a strategy for the buildout of the UI for the new platform. This new customized system would also enable CreditNinja’s marketing team to adjust their strategy for purchasing leads.
According to Ebreo, “We want to pull data that provide us with enough information to decide whether a lead is not for us. In this way, we save money.”
To enhance lead processing and reduce marketing costs on the new lead system, Sphere integrated improvements, including:
- Backend written in Python: Allowed for automated report generating process.
- Integration with Data Vendors. Data vendor integration is key for making the right lead purchase decision and controlling marketing costs. Sphere helped build a system that allowed the risk and data science teams to have full control of the data they needed to extract.
The Results
With the new lead system fully deployed, the result was an overall 4X savings on Customer Acquisition Costs. CreditNinja is able to reduce their underwriting costs substantially, which dropped by 75%. The company also achieved a 50% savings for marketing costs.
“These things would not have been achievable if we did not build our own in-house system. We augmented our development team capabilities using Sphere’s developer, who works very well with our Dev Lead in Chicago. Sphere’s developer was an expert in the new system, and continues to be an expert as we evolve it.”
See how we helped another lending company, Integra Credit, by migrating from their legacy system to a modern new platform.
