Introduction to LendAPI
What LendAPI does, the main building blocks you will work with, and how an application moves through the platform.
LendAPI is a loan origination platform. You use it to design the loan products you offer, collect applications, make automated credit decisions, price offers, and move each application through to booking.
Most of the work happens in the LendAPI dashboard, with no code required. Developers can use the REST API to create and update applications, run decisions and pricing, and get notified about application events through webhooks.
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Key concepts
These are the building blocks you'll see across the dashboard, the API and these guides.
- Tenant: your LendAPI workspace. Every product, application, user, API key and setting belongs to one tenant, and tenants never see each other's data.
- Sub-tenant: a child workspace under a parent tenant, for example a partner, dealer or brand. The parent can see and manage its sub-tenants' resources. A sub-tenant only sees its own.
- Sandbox and Production: every tenant has two separate environments. Sandbox is for building and testing. Production (live) holds real applications. Your API key decides which environment an API call uses.
- Product: a loan product you offer, such as a personal loan or a credit card. You build products in Product Studio, where you set up the pages applicants fill in, the order of those pages, and the decisioning attached to them.
- Application: one request for credit against a product. An application has a unique ID (a UUID), an application number, a stage and all the data collected for it.
- Applicant: the person or business applying. An application can have more than one applicant, for example a co-borrower.
- Stage: where an application stands in your pipeline, such as Processing, Review, Approved, Declined, Document or Booked. You can also add custom stages.
- Variable: a named data field, such as
annual_incomeorcredit_score. Variables hold everything you know about an application: applicant answers, data returned by integrations, and calculated values. - Integration: a connection to a third-party data provider, such as a credit bureau or identity verification service. Integration results are stored as variables.
- Decision tree: a set of rules, built in Rules Studio, that evaluates variables and returns a decision outcome.
- Decision outcome: the result of a decision. Each outcome belongs to an action: Approve, Decline, Review or Request Docs. Outcomes drive what happens next to the application.
- Pricing engine: a table-driven model that turns an approved application's variables into one or more offers (amount, rate, term and so on).
- Offer: a priced loan option shown to the applicant. The applicant selects an offer, which can then flow into a contract.
- Flow: an automated workflow built in Flow Builder. A flow chains steps such as running a decision tree or pricing engine, calling an integration, sending an email or SMS, waiting, or sending a webhook.
- Webhook: a message LendAPI sends to your server when something happens to an application, for example when it is approved.
How an application moves through LendAPI
Every application follows roughly the same path. Your setup may skip steps or add others, such as manual review, document requests, or a flow that handles everything automatically.
flowchart TD
A[Application created<br/>hosted pages or API] --> B[Applicant completes<br/>Product Studio pages]
B --> C[Variables collected<br/>applicant data + integrations]
C --> D{Decision tree<br/>runs}
D -->|Approve| E[Pricing engine<br/>generates offers]
D -->|Review| R[Manual review<br/>by your team]
D -->|Request Docs| Q[Applicant uploads<br/>documents]
D -->|Decline| X[Declined]
R --> D
Q --> D
E --> F[Applicant selects<br/>an offer]
F --> G[Contract sent<br/>for e-signature]
G --> H[Booked]
D -.webhook.-> W[(Your server)]
H -.webhook.-> W
- An application is created. The applicant starts on a hosted application link for your product, or your system calls the API to create the application and gets back a link to send the applicant.
- Data is collected. The applicant fills in the pages you designed in Product Studio. Integrations, such as a credit pull, add more data. Everything is stored as variables on the application.
- A decision is made. A decision tree evaluates the variables and returns an outcome. The application is approved, declined, sent to your team for review, or put on hold for documents.
- Offers are priced. For approved applications, a pricing engine generates offers and the applicant chooses one.
- The loan is finalized. Contracts are generated and signed, and the application moves to Booked. From there you can hand it over to your loan management system.
Along the way, LendAPI moves the application between stages, sends the emails and SMS messages you configured, and sends webhooks to your server so your systems stay in sync. Flows let you automate any of these steps.
Build in Sandbox firstBuild and test new products, decision trees and pricing engines in Sandbox before you use them in Production. See Sandbox and Live for how the two environments relate.
Explore the guides
Connect to LendAPI
Build your lending program
Follow an application through its stages.
Design products and the pages applicants complete.
Define the data your decisions and templates use.
Add co-borrowers to an application.
Request, collect and review applicant documents.
Connect credit bureaus and other data providers.
Decide and automate
Communicate and close
Manage your team and workspace
Updated 25 minutes ago