The challenge
Prosper Capital is a Johannesburg lender focused on small business credit. Their product was solid, but the process around it was not. A borrower filled in a PDF, emailed it, and waited. Credit analysts re-keyed everything into spreadsheets, phoned for missing documents, and took an average of three days to say yes or no.
Three days is a long time when a competitor answers in an hour. Prosper tracked their funnel and found that 61% of applicants who started never finished, and a third of approved borrowers had already taken a loan elsewhere by the time the approval landed.
The leadership team knew what they needed: apply online, decide fast, and give the credit team real data instead of gut feel. What they did not have was an engineering team to build it.
The approach
We started with a two-week discovery sprint. We sat with the credit analysts, mapped every step from application to payout, and found that most of the three days was waiting, not working. The actual decision logic fit on two pages. That shaped the whole build: automate the waiting, keep humans on the edge cases.
- Mapped the full credit workflow with the analysts who run it daily
- Wrote the decision rules down as an explicit, testable rules engine spec
- Agreed a phased rollout: online applications first, auto-decisions second, analytics last
- Kept the existing loan book system in place and integrated instead of replacing it
- Shipped to a pilot group of 200 borrowers before opening the doors
What we built
The platform is a web application backed by a rules engine and a reporting layer. Borrowers apply in about eight minutes. Bank statements are ingested and parsed automatically, affordability is scored on the spot, and clean applications are approved without a human touching them. Anything unusual routes to an analyst with the full file already assembled.
- A borrower portal with document upload, status tracking, and digital signing
- An automated affordability engine that parses bank statements and scores risk
- An analyst workbench that queues only the applications that need judgment
- Integration with the existing loan management system, so no data migration risk
- A data and analytics layer with dashboards for approval rates, book performance, and arrears
61%
of applicants used to drop off before finishing
8 min
to complete an application online
74%
of applications now decided with no manual review
The outcome
Twelve months after launch, Prosper Capital had grown revenue 40% on the same headcount. Application volume tripled because brokers started sending deals they used to route elsewhere. The average decision now takes four minutes, and the analysts spend their time on the 26% of applications where judgment actually adds value.
The analytics layer changed how the business runs. The credit committee now reviews approval rates and early arrears weekly, by product and by channel, and has adjusted pricing twice based on what the data showed. The platform paid for itself inside the first year.
