ReCasa Financial Group - Loan Tracking and Invoicing System

ReCasa Financial Group is a financial lending company that provides services to real estate investors. Their rehabilitation loans provide 100% financing for the purchase, improvements and closing costs for 1-4 family non-owner occupied properties. Arisen worked closely with President and Controller to design ASP.NET workflow system for loan initiation, funding, invoicing, and payoff of specialty financing for residential property rehabilitation market. The system reduced invoice generation from days to minutes and eliminated potential interest calculation errors. Within six months of deployment, ReCasa was processing three times the number of financed loans (something that would not have been feasible with the prior system).

The ReCasa Loan System (RLS) manages the ReCasa business processes including the:

• collection of information about potential borrowers and their prospective properties
• evaluating the risk for each potential loan
• underwriting process
• Loan Summary Authorization prior to a loan closing
• funding of loans
• incremental loan draws that occur during the house rehabilitation process
• handling of multiple base interest types (Prime, LIBOR, etc.)
• tracking variable interest rate changes
• invoicing for loans
• posting of received payments
• tracking of collateral for guarantors
• tracking of liens
• tracking of fees
• house inspection requirements
• loan payoff process
• reporting for business operations, risk management, and financial auditing
• synchronization of SalesForce.com for sales personnel in cities across the country

The RLS reduced the time to produce invoices from days to minutes, decreased time for payment processing, eliminated interest calculation errors, and eased reporting for end of month and end of year.

The tools used for project planning and tracking were:

• MS Excel – for task breakdowns, task estimates, task time tracking
• MS Word – for initial requirements, designs and traceability
• Gemini Issue tracking – for change request, issue tracking, and resource assignment

Project Size and Complexity:

• RLS has over 100 ASP.NET web form pages
• RLS has managed over $300 million in loan applications and $150 million in funded loans
• The RLS system requires rigorous financial auditing
• The RLS ledger, invoice generation, and payment tracking are very complex
• RLS has role-based security that can be configured by a system administrator
• RLS form fields are enabled/disabled based on user security privileges and loan status
• RLS communicated daily via XML to external entity
• RLS uses web services API to synchronize data with Salesforce.com every time a loan is added/modified, new parties are added/modified
• RLS uses a business layer written in C# in conjunction with a generated data access layer in C# to reduce the amount of business logic in the database