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Comment by temuze | Hacker News Reader

Cool idea! I wish you guys existed a few years ago.

What loan management systems do you integrate with? They can all be so wildly different that normalizing over all of them is a great accomplishment.

Being a marketplace for lenders to credit warehouses could be neat. You can get data from the LMS, normalize it, show a bunch of credit warehouses at the same time, and see who offers the best deal. That's a cool vision because it means you could scale with your companies.

It's also WILDLY different from Pipe because lending is so damn specialized.

That said, I would be afraid of getting cut out at scale. Not sure how to protect against that. You can't really anonymize what company it came from because high performing companies would get punished and bail out.

Hope you kick ass! Great idea.

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You know the space well and it seems like you get the vision.

We've found little overlap between customers in terms of LMS. Most use spreadsheets or build something in house. I imagine this will change in the coming year or two.

BTW, if anyone wants to build a universal LMS or a Plaid for LMS I think it's the right moment.

We've had investors ask why Pipe doesn't just do this and we respond with, because it's a just a different beast. We currently have a fairly broad funnel but we'll be specializing more during this next growth stage.

Retaining companies as they scale will be an issue, particularly at first. Once the software and marketplace are robust, we'll be able to go much further with our customers.

We're trying to avoid lock-in mechanisms like ROFRs and warrants. The product is either efficient and founder friendly, or it is not.

For LMS, we use LoanPro: https://loanpro.simnang.com/

Canopy is a recent new entrant: https://canopyservicing.com/

Using a vendor for LMS added some complexity (integration is a pain, idempotency is a concern, etc), but it helped us focus on things that differentiate our business. We certainly wouldn't have launched five months after founding without one.

I've talked to some startups that built an in-house LMS. The moment a payment reverses or someone backdates a payment or they backdate a loan change or modify a due date... they have big problems.

> We've had investors ask why Pipe doesn't just do this and we respond with, because it's a just a different beast.

Next time they ask, ask them why Google's VC branch doesn't just take their deals :)

It's astonishing to see how some investors don't realize how deep of a field lending is.

> We're trying to avoid lock-in mechanisms like ROFRs and warrants. The product is either efficient and founder friendly, or it is not.

Nice. Godspeed!

Do you think Loanpro or Canopy cater for below issues? I've worked with teams who built in house and smashed into those issues. Very complex. Ncino seems to possibly be viable, but is too generic and broad.

> I've talked to some startups that built an in-house LMS. The moment a payment reverses or someone backdates a payment or they backdate a loan change or modify a due date... they have big problems.

Edit: do you think Loanpro or Canopy are viable for larger longer term loans? +$1m +3yr type cashflow lending?

They're probably viable for that.

Peach Finance is another option that came out recently: https://www.peachfinance.com/

Wanted to ask this, but saw this thread on LMS:

How standardised are the loan management systems that you can track loan performance in real time? Seeing that you mention spreadsheets. Is that viable for you? In the UK most companies track using spreadsheets, which is a mess. Agree on a decent LMS being an opportunity.

Is this targeted primarily at smaller lenders? I suppose most likely smaller ticket cash flow lending?

Very interesting!

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