Sagent: Streamlining Product Development Processes, Migrating on-premises Components to the Cloud

Sagent

Streamlining Product Development Processes, Migrating on-premises Components to the Cloud

Industry: Banking, Financial Services & Insurance

Delivery Center: India

Industry Context

In recent years, American households have increasingly shifted from net savers to net borrowers. The shift has driven a surge in demand for credit and spurred the rapid growth of lending technologies, or "LendTech." This heightened demand has intensified competition among LendTech companies, which are turning to advanced technologies to stay competitive and meet evolving consumer needs. Leveraging real-time data and sophisticated analytics allows these companies to streamline lending processes, enhance decision-making, and effectively balance risk factors with growth opportunities. Advanced technology enables LendTech firms to provide more personalized and efficient services, adapt quickly to market changes, and maintain a competitive edge in the fast-evolving financial landscape.

Client Challenge

Sagent Lending Technologies, a provider of loan origination and servicing solutions for banks and credit unions, faced significant challenges in keeping pace with the rapidly evolving LendTech landscape. Despite their offerings, the company struggled with prolonged product enhancement cycles that lagged market demands. High developer attrition disrupted the consistency of product development, while a lack of focus on innovation slowed platform advancements. Additionally, software defects compromised user experience, stretched resources, and hindered the company's ability to respond swiftly to industry shifts. Prolonged development cycles allowed competitors to gain an edge, emphasizing the need for more agile and effective solutions to meet the dynamic needs of the market.

Approach

To resolve Sagent's business challenges, Encora selected Azure as the platform of choice, given its extensive range of cloud services. The suite provided the scalability, flexibility, and security needed to support large-scale data handling and enhanced collaboration while offering a cost-effective, compliant, and resilient platform. The services provided by Encora spanned:

Product Management: Streamlined the product roadmap by articulating plans for innovative products and proactively planning for legacy product sunsets

Cloud Architecture & Engineering: Established a new environment for development and product hosting and migrated on-premises components to Azure cloud

Product Development: Assumed end-to-end responsibility for developing products related to loan origination, loan servicing, default management, construction loans, settlement, and vendor management

Data Analytics, Visualization & BI: Expanded service offering to cover reporting needs under MS SQL Server and later PowerBI for Data Science Spark, Scala, and Hadoop

Application & Product Maintenance: Delivered capabilities to meet the reporting requirements for servicing government loans (e.g., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, VA, etc.)

Continuous Integration (CI) & Continuous Deployment (CD): Supported the implementation of CI/CD using Jenkins, Terraform & Kubernetes

Test Automation: Expanded and streamlined the processes related to performance, usability, functionality, and accessibility testing

Azure Services

Azure WAF

Azure SQL

Azure Event Hubs

Results

Within the first six months of partnering with Encora, Sagent experienced significant improvements in product development efficiency, quality, and overall operational performance. It led to cost savings and enhanced business outcomes. The overall results include:

Improved product development throughput and quality, reducing schedule and defect variances to below 1%

Increased story points per release by 22%, boosting productivity

Reduced developer turnover, enhancing team continuity and preserving intellectual property.

Saved money and reduced capital expenditures by utilizing over 95% Azure PaaS services across seven environments from development through production