Staying ahead in the digital age demands constant innovation and investment.
Lendscape has continued to evolve and re-architect its platform frequently to ensure clients benefit from the most advanced, secure and robust finance technology in the market. Jon Jenkins, Head of Engineering, discusses our philosophy and highlights some of the key decisions the Lendscape team made along the way, and shares our outlook on the future.
Embracing innovation
We launched the first packaged software solution for receivables finance 40 years ago and continue to lead the market today. Even if you have an excellent product, technology never stands still, and you don't achieve that kind of longevity without the ability to adapt and embrace change.
Our original solution, iFactor, was superseded several years ago to move from the 'green screen' technology still in wide use at that time to a state-of-the-art architecture. Since then, we've made countless updates and enhancements across our platform to stay ahead of clients' needs as operating systems, languages and frameworks continue to evolve.
One of the most pivotal decisions we made was to adopt Java as our programming language of choice, which we still use today. COBOL, the language originally used to build the iFactor system, wasn't giving us the flexibility we and our clients increasingly needed. As more programmers with COBOL skills began to retire or switch to newer languages, we also saw scarcity of expertise as a future operational risk.
Building our modern tech stack
After an extensive review of languages and code generation tools, we determined that Java as the best option for us. It was stable and portable, which was crucial as we had customers on a range of different operating systems such as UNIX, iSeries and, of course, Windows. Java's 'write-once, run anywhere' capability allowed our teams to write code once and deploy it across multiple platforms, which was more efficient. Even then, Java was a rapidly growing language with a broad pool of available developer talent, and it continues to be one of the most powerful, popular languages today, making our business more resilient.
Another key step in staying at the forefront of technology was transitioning to a fully browser-based presentation layer. Our latest version of Lendscape reflects significant investment in user experience (UX), offering greater accessibility, more intuitive navigation, and improved usability for all users. Furthermore, it gives us even more integration flexibility, which is critical for collaborating with best-in-class partners and supporting clients in building their own ecosystems of apps and services.
Today and tomorrow: open APIs, cloud tech, and client empowerment
More recently we've focused on cloud transition and API-led connectivity, giving clients more options for consuming structured data and building their own presentation layers. This is allowing them to integrate our data with other financial data in their own products, transforming Lendscape into an open data platform accessible across clients' organisations for purposes such as risk assessment. Our technology roadmap is to move towards event-driven architecture (EDA), where systems communicate by producing and responding to events rather than direct calls. This approach enables faster integration of new services and analytics and will make our platform even more responsive and scalable, a key driver of our Open Systems strategy.
Crafting our asset finance solution entirely in the cloud provided a blank canvas for revolutionising how we build, deploy and maintain the platform. This has allowed us to take elements of that digital-first development work into our core receivables finance platform, advancing our strategy to fully adopt a cloud-native architecture and leverage the full benefits of cloud technology. Our objective is to enable our clients to take advantage of horizontal scaling in cloud environments, enabling them to add extra capacity quickly and easily as and when needed. These additional resources can be configured to automatically “switch off” when not in use, which is a cost-effective option.
The Lendscape platform today is light-years ahead of where we started and continues to evolve. We're always looking for new ways to innovate, committed to leveraging the latest technologies so our clients can keep doing what they do best - providing smart, efficient, secure financing for their business customers.
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