Rebuilding a lending platform around a single source of truth
A twelve-year-old underwriting stack replaced in eight months, without a day of downtime for the 400-strong operations team.
- Client
- Meridian Credit
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Strategy · Design · Engineering
- Result
- Decision time down 61%
The problem
Meridian’s underwriters were working across four systems that disagreed with each other. Every application touched a spreadsheet at some point, and nobody could say with confidence how long a decision actually took.
What we did
We spent three weeks mapping the real workflow rather than the documented one, then rebuilt the decisioning layer around one canonical application record. Design and engineering ran together from week four, shipping into a live shadow environment the underwriting team used daily.
- Unified data model across origination, underwriting and servicing
- New underwriter workspace, designed with the team that uses it
- Phased cutover with a four-week dual-running period
Outcome
Median time to decision fell from 4.1 days to 1.6. The operations team retired three internal tools and a spreadsheet that had quietly become business-critical.
