Lydian revs up automobile loan business with Web services

When John Studdard talks about auto loans he says he likes to think the "auto" stands for automated not automobile.

That's because Studdard, CTO for Lydian Trust, a financial services company in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., has created an automated car loan processing system called BizCap that uses Web services to turn an auto loan business losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year into one that's making a profit.

A year ago, Lydian deployed BizCap to pull auto loan applications off the Web and process them. BizCap includes a series of Web services that use XML to integrate data and perform duties such as fraud and credit checks needed to evaluate a loan applicant.

BizCap also has Web services that act as data integration points with partner systems. There also are Web services that connect BizCap with Lydian's manual workflow system for human tasks, such as evaluating special cases or mailing paper documents.

BizCap uses secure HTTP to post XML-based documents to specific URLs on its intranet that are actually Web services. From there, other systems pick up the documents, process the data and respond. In the future, the documents will be sent via Simple Object Access Protocol, which will allow for more sophisticated programmatic integration.

But for now BizCap, which took $250,000, three developers and a business analyst six months to develop and test, is eclipsing the previous system that required that a human evaluate all applications during the approval process.

Now only 30% of applications need human review, which has let Lydian increase the number of loan applications processed per day from 60 to 600 without adding any full-time employees. And with a forthcoming BizCap upgrade, Studdard expects that number to hit 2,000 without adding staff or changing network architecture.

Studdard also is plotting to reuse the BizCap model to supercharge Lydian's mortgage business, which generates $100 million per month in loan origination. And he is building a set of Web services called iCoreServices Interfaces that will sit in a directory and can be called on via a URL to perform duties such as user authentication for any of Lydian's future Web-based applications.

"Web services really commoditizes the services that we can offer without the complexity of the infrastructure getting in the way," Studdard says. "You can kick out a Web services .exe file, throw it in a directory, point a URL to it, and something can happen now."

He says Web services provide a loosely coupled architecture that spreads out processing duties and increases scalability. "In our case, Web services have really cleaned up a lot of monolithic stuff we were building," he says.

Lydian's previous auto loan approval process, which was a hodge-podge of automated SQL tasks and Windows NT service, made the database a workhorse that not only served up data but also processed it. The database was susceptible to crippling volume spikes, and there were often "train wrecks," in which a failed process would mean starting all over again, Studdard says.