Leobit
Mortgage Loan Origination Platform
Reengineering and continuous development that helped a US mortgage technology company seamlessly integrate external services critical for decision-making
ABOUT the project
- Client:
- Mortgage Technology Company
- Location:
-
USA
- Company Size:
- 200+ Employees
- Industry:
- PropTech
- Solution:
- Software Reengineering and Modernization
Leobit helped the customer rebuild a digital mortgage loan origination platform that had outgrown its original technology stack. The platform guides loan applicants through the full origination process, from the first application step to a lending decision, and gives loan officers and administrators the tools to process those applications and connect them to the external services a mortgage decision depends on.
The engagement began with support and modernization running in parallel: Leobit maintained the existing solution while developing the new platform on a new architecture. As the new platform matured, the focus shifted to maintaining the legacy system and actively building out its replacement. At the start of the rebuild, the new platform covered roughly 1–5% of the required functionality and consisted of a single application.
Leobit has been a fantastic partner and has continuously delivered robust solutions in a timely manner. They meet or exceed my needs and expectations. One thing I really appreciate about Leobit is their proactive engagement in advancing my business. They took the initiative to not just monitor the output of their resources, but also to evaluate our internal processes and make recommendations for improvement.
Customer
Our customer is a US mortgage technology company that develops digital mortgage POS systems to streamline loan origination, reduce manual work, and improve borrower–lender communication. The platform is multi-tenant: it serves multiple lending customers from one system, with each customer configured for the products and workflows they offer.
Since the customer was acquired by another company, the combined organization needed to consolidate services in the administration panel to remove duplication, which added integration with the parent company’s services.
Business Challenge
The customer’s platform had missed a generation of technology transitions. It was built on aging frameworks (.NET Framework, and AngularJS), carried significant accumulated complexity, and reflected architectural decisions that made the application difficult to understand, extend, and maintain. Continuing on that foundation limited the company’s ability to grow the product and support new requirements.
The customer also faced a shortage of the right expertise and available engineering capacity to carry out a rebuild of this scale on its own. The core concern was product development: moving forward on a maintainable architecture without interrupting the service their lending customers already depended on.
Design was a second constraint. By the time Leobit joined, design work was already actively underway, but its foundation had been laid without a clear long-term view and was not consistent enough to support a growing toolset. With limited design expertise on the customer’s side, developers were building design components themselves, and there was no shared understanding of how the design should translate into the product or how the platform’s look should scale.
Why Leobit
The customer first approached Leobit for a consultation about expanding into a mobile application. Communication and the way Leobit presented its approach during that early engagement were the deciding factors in choosing Leobit as the partner for the wider modernization effort. The relationship then grew from a single consultation into a full rebuild of the platform’s front end, back end, and vendor integrations.
Project
in detail
The new platform was a ground-up rebuild on a modern architecture. To protect the running business, development happened on both platforms at once: Leobit supported the legacy solution while building its replacement, then narrowed legacy work to maintenance as the new platform took on more of the product.
Leobit wrote the front end from scratch. With no design available at the start, the team built an interface that had to work across desktop, web, and mobile and meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility requirements.
The administrative application is organized into many tabs and linked sections and is built on a multi-tenant model. Each lending customer sees its own configuration: tabs and features available to one customer can be disabled for another. A permissions and rights-management system controls what each user can see and do.
The back end is built around services that integrate with external mortgage vendors. A dedicated communication layer encapsulates the specifics of talking to each vendor, so that integration details are described in one place rather than spread through the application.
Our team integrated Ocrolus to automate income verification during loan origination. Using computer vision, Ocrolus extracts and analyzes financial documents, including W-2s and other income records, to build a picture of the borrower’s cash flow and feed verified data into the lending workflow.
Our team built an eSign service by integrating DocuSign into the lending platform. The service enables borrowers and other participants to securely sign loan documents electronically, streamlining approvals and reducing manual paperwork.
The Plaid integration pulls data from a borrower’s bank accounts to support the loan officer’s review. The data informs the workflow; the lending decision stays with the loan officer.
Login runs through single sign-on backed by an internal identity server and Azure Entra ID. The internal identity server performs the checks, including verification of multi-factor authentication tokens.
The AUS integration determines borrower eligibility. The platform collects borrower data (such as interest rate and loan term) in JSON, converts it to MISMO format under the ULAD standard, and submits it to the semi-government vendors Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Their responses, which return a large volume of assessment data and identify issues, are reformatted from MISMO back into a readable, structured form for the loan officer.
After the customer was acquired, the administration panel was extended to integrate with the parent company’s services to consolidate functionality and avoid duplication across the combined organization.
Electronic signature via the Encompass Loan Origination System
Leobit built an electronic signature workflow that integrates the Encompass Loan Origination System with the company’s internal eSign service powered by DocuSign. The service retrieves disclosure packages from Encompass, prepares them for signing, sends them through DocuSign, presents them to users, supports document downloads, and returns the signed packages to Encompass to update the loan workflow.
Our team implemented the entire orchestration layer, including document processing, secure communication with Encompass and DocuSign, and request validation using signing and client keys, delivering a secure, automated, end-to-end signing process.
Design system built during active development
When Leobit joined, the design system was only 7–10% complete, components were duplicated, and parts of the redesign had been done only at a surface level. Because the product was in active development, the team had to set up the design system and build consistent components on the go, without pausing delivery.
Leobit’s design team established shared patterns aligned with WCAG accessibility guidelines and worked to align design, development, and project management to ensure new components remained consistent. The design system now stands at roughly 30% coverage, reflecting the platform’s scale, and pages built on the earlier design are being refined to match it as the system matures.
Setting up valuation and property data integrations
Loans are created in the administration panel, where the user selects the products that determine which third-party information to request; the loan officer then works with the results. Leobit implemented some of these integrations through messaging. The product set that the Leobit team delivered included:
- Snapshot — Snapshot, Snapshot Plus, and Current Owner Search (the latter exposed as a separate CTS/Title product, though served by the same integration).
- Valuation — 1004 Appraisal, Automated Valuation Model, Broker Price Opinion, Property Condition Report, and Property Evaluation Report.
- Lereta — flood certificates: Basic Certificate and Life of Loan.
The application submission flow development
The most complex module is the borrower application submission flow. The borrower moves through a large number of steps in a wizard, and the flow ends in either loan approval or denial. The path is driven by prior calculations: if the borrower returns to an earlier step and changes an answer, the subsequent steps and the flow itself change accordingly.
To support this, Leobit added a substantial layer of logic to manage the application state and module completion, and to keep the flow flexible as inputs change. The module also handles unstructured data, which had to be accounted for throughout development. Caching is supported with Redis, web technologies, and local caches for managing information across the flow.
The Journey
Behind Our Success
Technology Solutions
- Used Redis for caching to support the application flow, alongside web and local caches.
- Integrated Azure Entra ID + internal identity server for a single sign-on, including multi-factor authentication token verification.
- Used MISMO / ULAD data standard to exchange borrower data with the AUS vendors.
- Performed vendor integrations with N-compass (disclosures / e-signature), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (automated underwriting), Ocrolus (income and cash-flow verification), Plaid (bank account data), Snapshot, Valuation, and Lereta (property and flood data).
Value Delivered
- Delivered a modern, future-ready platform, eliminating the limitations of legacy frameworks and creating a solid foundation for ongoing product evolution.
- Ensured uninterrupted business operations throughout the modernization process by running development in parallel with the live system and maintaining full service continuity.
- Expanded the customer’s development capacity with full-stack engineering, architecture, and integration expertise, accelerating delivery across multiple product areas and mortgage vendor integrations.
- Streamlined operations following an acquisition by providing a unified administrative experience, reducing duplicated processes and improving organizational efficiency.
- Introduced a design system during active development, growing it from 7–10% to roughly 30% coverage and replacing duplicated, inconsistent components with shared patterns aligned with WCAG guidelines.
