Lendistry is a minority-led and technology-enabled organization which is focused on small business and commercial real estate lending. Lendistry has both Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) and Community Development Entity (CDE) certification. The business is a non-bank lender that is responsible for providing financing to small business owners and the under served communities across the entire United States.
In light of the recent pandemic, Lendistry had to adjust its business model and in 2020 and 2021 they branched off into providing Pay check Protection Program (PPP) loans to small businesses in all 50 states. Lendistry was selected by the State of California to administer the California Small Business COVID-19 Relief Grant Program, which distributed grants to small businesses that lost significant revenues during the pandemic.
Lendistry was pulled into the US government led Restaurant Relief Fund program at the last minute. There were several big partners and payment processors involved in the program, but what the project organizers didn't realize is that they didn't have a community development partner, and so Lendistry was nominated to assist in the implementation and administration of the relief program. The other project partners had months in advanced planning to structure and implement their solutions. However, Lendistry was pulled into the program one week before its initial launch and was required to rapidly build a solution to manage the data from countless applicants within a few days.
Strategic Growth, who have worked with Lendistry on several projects, recommended Synatic as an iPaaS solution partner as API management is one of Synatic’s strengths, with their multifaceted hybrid automation platform. Leeann Lynch, COO at Lendistry said “This iPaaS and vendor relationship came out of a need for speed and Synatic was able to deliver.”
With less than a week to build an intricate integration between multiple applications, Synatic set out to build,test, and integrate Lendistry’s application process solution. Lendistry needed a way to process applications completed on Lendistry’s Salesforce-led community page and transfer that information directly to the SBA. Salesforce was selected as it would be the most efficient way to facilitate and administer the creation of application data.
Typically,a complex API integration between Salesforce and SBA would take weeks, in some cases months to complete. However, Synatic was able to deliver data automation at speed that empowered Lendistry to perform nimble data sharing across multiple data systems and applications within days.
Within that short space of time,Synatic quickly built a multi-faceted solution that was able to result in large volumes of data being sent through to SBA.
Clark Huang, Head of Consumer Lending at Lendistry said, “From the onset, this complex integration project seemed like an impossible mission, but with integration and automation partners like Salesforce, Synatic and Strategic Growth, we were confident that as a collective they would be able to get the job done.”
Synatic and Strategic Growth were able to swiftly acclimatize to the project environment and build a solution that allowed Lendistry to dynamically transfer data to the SBA. Once the applicant’s data was received, Synatic automatically entered the data into the correct objects in Salesforce, allowing Lendistry to work these applications into specific cues and processes. Huang said “Usually we would develop that process internally, however, that requires months of development work to map. I don't think we could have built such a complex solution within the allocated time frame without the help of Synatic.”
Not every application was accepted, and this happened for a variety of reasons:
· Bad Merchant Bank Id (BIN)
· Duplicate application
· Incorrect PPP number
Synatic was able to create an automated rejection process that digested the information from rejected applications and pushed that payload back in order to update Lendistry’s Salesforce environment.
Huang said, “Synatic enabled us tooperate more efficiently, not only were we able to easily send successful submissions to the SBA, but we were also able to receive responses back from the SBA and efficiently work through the rejection reasons and accurately inform the applicants of their application status.”
Lendistry needed a way to contact the customer, update them on their status, as well as inform them if there was any additional documentation required from their applicants. To communicate tha tmessage from their systems to the applicant, Synatic integrated SendGrid, a bulk email service, into their Salesforce environment; thereby automating the communication process. Huang said, “If Synatic didn't automate our email communication system, we would have had to manually send emails out to each applicant, which would have been a time consuming and cumbersome process.”
The Restaurant Relief Program was a unique project that brought together multiple teams. Synatic, Strategic Growth and Lendistry all partnered to create a great product and the project would not have been successful without all partners working in sync to make sure that the project was launched within less than a week. Leeann said that working with Synatic was a seamless and extremely professional experience. Synatic offered flexibility, speed and agility that made creating a complex Salesforce integration solution seem effortless.
Clark Huang, Head of Consumer Lending at Lendistry - “Working with Synatic was a great experience. They knew a lot about Salesforce, and once we consulted with them to define the requirements of the solution there weren’t any roadblocks and the speed to market was impressive.”
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