ArchOver cuts out the middleman, providing loan funding directly from individuals, family offices and institutions to businesses. Technology built by Gislen Software over the past six years sits at the core of ArchOver’s business. Together, ArchOver and Gislen Software are part of the worldwide FinTech revolution.
ArchOver is a member of the 300-year-old Hampden Group, a leading provider of specialist insurance, investment and financial support services.
ArchOver is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under number 723755 in the UK.
What ArchOver does and how Gislen Software helps
ArchOver is primarily a peer-to-peer business lending service, focusing on connecting businesses requiring finance that can’t obtain that finance from banks and other mainstream lenders with lenders seeking a secure and favourable return. So far, ArchOver has facilitated over £110 million, which grows daily, in funding for UK businesses and delivered lender returns of up to 10% pa. The connection between borrowers and lenders is made over the ArchOver specified, and Gislen built the ArchOver Platform.
How it all started
In the early 2000s, ArchOver’s Group founder, Angus Dent, was CFO of a client of Gislen Software. When ArchOver decided to outsource their development, it came naturally to him to ask Gislen Software since his past experience with us had been good. While Gislen Software had previously worked with development for hedge funds, P2P was a new vertical. Angus visited us in India and spent a week discussing the requirements with two of our local analysts. This provided the initial input for the first phase. Since then, the ArchOver team has been strengthened, and for most of the period we’ve been involved, our primary contact has been Ted Hurlock.
Requirement and Design
The analysis involved extensive discussions and an ongoing dialogue via email. Detailed working notes were compiled, and these and a product backlog were entered into JIRA (subject and project tracking software). The screen design used simple wireframes. We designed classes and relationships and developed high-level documentation of the entire platform.
Development Process
It was agreed that we should use an Agile Methodology for software development—a combination of Scrum and Extreme Programming. This development process consists of several sprints, each a short iteration involving a self-managed team striving to build thoroughly tested product increments. After each iteration, empirical feedback ensures very high quality. We also conducted an interesting experiment combining our ISO 9000 internal audits with Scrum Retrospectives, creating a continuously documented improvement cycle.
For this web application, we used a Model-View-Controller (MVC) development pattern, a software architectural pattern for implementing user interfaces.
Since we used an iterative development process, unit tests were used to test the business layer, and automated test scripts checked the UI. This process is maintained consistently to ensure high quality.
Web Application Security
At Gislen Software, we ensure that all our web applications adhere to the guidelines in OWASP-10. This is vital in a financial application, and we implement the guidelines through code review. For testing at different levels, we have used test-driven development, automatic tests, developer tests, and independent testers. ArchOver’s staff has also tested the application to ensure it meets the highest possible standards.
The Solution
The ArchOver.com platform is a complete solution. It provides a holistic but easy-to-use interface for lenders, borrowers and administrators, considering that some participants may be novices. The platform follows all regulatory guidelines laid down by the relevant authorities. Statutory documents like NDAs and collateral documents can be directly uploaded to the website. Approval and project status changes are intimated to stakeholders through automatically generated emails. The application also has an in-depth audit log where every event or change in status is logged.
The application is hosted at Microsoft Azure, and data is secured in another location. The deployment solution provides high availability and scalability. Gislen Software and ArchOver have collaborated to ensure the solution complies with the GDPR.
Conclusion
This solution has been very successful. A responsible product owner, a well-defined governance process, and clear-cut role distribution between ArchOver and Gislen have all been critical to this success. Gislen Software has met every milestone that ArchOver has set, resulting in an application that all stakeholders are pleased with.
The first loan was completed in 2014, and ArchOver has since advanced to more than £110M!
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