Sub-tenants

A sub-tenant is a business that originates applications through your LendAPI workspace but is not part of your own team. Typical examples are merchants offering point-of-sale financing, auto dealers, brokers and referral partners.

Your workspace is the parent tenant. It owns the products, decision logic, templates and settings. Each sub-tenant uses your products, gets its own users and application links, and sees only its own applications. You see everything across all of your sub-tenants.

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Sub-tenants must be enabled

Sub-tenants are turned on for your workspace by LendAPI. Whether sub-tenant users can sign in to the dashboard is also an account-level option. Contact your LendAPI representative to enable either.

Key concepts

• Tenant: a LendAPI workspace.
• Parent tenant: your workspace. It owns products and configuration and can see all sub-tenants.
• Sub-tenant: a partner business under your workspace. Shown on the Tenants page.
• Tenant product: a product of type Tenant, built in Product Studio, that serves as the onboarding application for new sub-tenants.
• Assigned products: the products a sub-tenant's users can use to create applications.
• Branch: an optional third level under a sub-tenant, such as a store or office. See Users and Teams.

How sub-tenants fit together

flowchart LR
    P[Parent tenant<br/>your workspace] --> S1[Sub-tenant A]
    P --> S2[Sub-tenant B]
    S1 --> B1[Branch, optional]
    S1 -. uses .-> PR[Your products]
    S2 -. uses .-> PR

What each side can see

An application is tagged to a sub-tenant when the applicant starts from that sub-tenant's product link, or when a sub-tenant user creates it.

Set it up in the dashboard

1. Build a Tenant product

New sub-tenants are onboarded through an application, just like a borrower.

1. Go to Product Studio and create a product.
2. Choose the Tenant product type.
3. Design the pages to collect the partner's details, such as business name and address, then publish it.

If you have no Tenant product yet, the Tenants page shows "No Tenant Products available" with a Go to Product Studio button.

2. Add a sub-tenant

1. Go to Tenants and click Add Tenant.
2. Pick the Tenant product to use. Its onboarding application opens in a new browser tab.
3. Complete and submit the application, or share the product's link with the partner so they fill it in themselves.

When the application is submitted, LendAPI creates the sub-tenant and it appears in the Tenants list. The onboarding application stays linked to the sub-tenant, so you can review it on the sub-tenant's page (Underwriting, Docs, Email, Data, Integrations, Activity and Notes) and move it through your review statuses.

3. Review and configure the sub-tenant

Open a sub-tenant from the Tenants list. Its page has:

4. Assign products

1. On the sub-tenant's Overview tab, find Assigned Products.
2. Click Assign and select the products this sub-tenant may use.
3. Each assigned product gets a launch button and a Copy link button. The copied link is specific to this sub-tenant, so applications started from it are tagged to the sub-tenant.

To remove a product, click Unassign next to it. Assigning products requires Tenants → Tenant List: Edit.

5. Give the sub-tenant users

Add users from the sub-tenant's Users tab. They can be given the built-in Admin or Analyst role, or a custom role you created with Available for: Tenant in Manage Roles. Sub-tenants cannot create their own roles. See Roles and Permissions.

Disable or re-enable a sub-tenant

Use the status switch on the sub-tenant's row in the Tenants list. Disabling asks you to confirm, then immediately suspends access for all of the sub-tenant's users. Turning it back on restores access for its users.

Disabling needs the Disable Tenant sub-action; re-enabling needs Update status.

Use the API

You can create and look up sub-tenants with your API key. These endpoints are called as the parent tenant.

Create a sub-tenant

Send name (required, up to 120 characters) and optionally client_id, your own external ID for the partner.

If sub-tenant login is enabled for your workspace, first_name, last_name, email and password are also required. They create the sub-tenant's first user with the sub-tenant Admin role. The password must be at least 12 characters and include an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number and a special character. The email must not already be used by another LendAPI account. If sub-tenant login is not enabled, leave these fields out.

curl -X POST https://app.lendapi.com/api/v1/sub_tenant/ \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Example Furniture Co",
    "client_id": "partner-1042",
    "first_name": "Jane",
    "last_name": "Doe",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "password": "Example-Passw0rd!"
  }'

{
  "object": "sub_tenants",
  "url": "/v1/sub_tenant/",
  "result": {
    "name": "Example Furniture Co",
    "id": "3f1c2b9e-0000-4000-8000-000000000000"
  }
}

If sub-tenants are not enabled for your workspace, the call returns 400 with "Tenant has not enabled sub-tenant".

Look up a sub-tenant

GET /api/v1/sub_tenant/{id} returns the sub-tenant's id, name and an applications list with an entry for each of your active products. Each entry has the product id, the product name, and a url: the application link for that product, specific to this sub-tenant. Use these links to embed or share the right application with the partner.

{
  "object": "sub_tenant",
  "url": "/v1/sub_tenant/3f1c2b9e-0000-4000-8000-000000000000",
  "result": {
    "id": "3f1c2b9e-0000-4000-8000-000000000000",
    "name": "Example Furniture Co",
    "applications": [
      { "id": 101, "product": "Personal Loan", "url": "https://apply.example.com/v2/application/product/AB12CD34_3f1c2b9e-0000-4000-8000-000000000000" }
    ]
  }
}

Access and best practices

Required permissions

The Tenants module in the role editor controls this area. Tenant List covers the list, sub-tenant details and assigned products, with the sub-actions Add Tenants, Disable Tenant and Update status. Users covers sub-tenant users. See Roles and Permissions.

Best practices

• Store your own partner ID in client_id so you can match LendAPI sub-tenants to records in your CRM.
• Assign only the products a partner should sell. Sub-tenant users can only create applications for assigned products.
• Share sub-tenant links, not your general product link. Otherwise applications are not tagged to the partner.
• Create Tenant roles for partner staff (for example "Merchant Clerk" with Agent Dashboard only) instead of giving everyone the sub-tenant Admin role.
• Limit Tenants → Users: Edit. Anyone with it can make a partner user a sub-tenant Admin.

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