Shipping the loan-origination system a federal bank runs in every branch

This is the system CapitalFlow Bank's branch officers open every time someone walks in for a loan. I designed it at FIS, where I build lending software that banks deploy across their branch networks — and this one went out to a federal bank's entire office network.

One officer drives it from the first question to a signed contract: capture the applicant, run them past underwriting, configure an offer, and disburse. It's a power tool for someone who lives in it all day — and it has to survive whatever walks through the branch door.

The first screen looks like a form. In practice it's a catalogue of edge cases, because everything unusual eventually walks up to a branch desk.

The passport scanner mis-reads a hyphenated name — so there's an OCR-failed state with a one-tap switch to manual entry. The applicant changed their passport or surname — so a previous-passport section unfolds on a checkbox. They're registered at a private house — so an address warning appears. And because a loan officer has to size up who's in front of them, there's a visual-assessment block: whether the client is in an altered state, whether they came accompanied. None of it is invented; every state traces back to something that actually happens at intake.

When underwriting comes back, the officer doesn't pick from a static list — they configure. Product type, amount and term, insurance riders, document package, express versus full underwriting: every lever sits on one screen, with the affordability math — payment breakdown, disposable income — live beside it.

Refinancing is its own path: fold existing loans in, compare the bank's payment estimate against the credit-bureau figure, and see the new schedule before committing. Cross-sell products surface here too, so a package gets built in the same motion instead of starting over.

Real income is rarely one clean salary. The employment step lets the officer add a primary job, a second job, and separate income sources — a pension, say — each as its own block, added and removed inline. The structure matches how applicants actually describe their money, which is what keeps the underwriting input honest.

Around the single application sits the pipeline the officer works all day: search a client by name, passport, or phone; see their existing agreements and the special offers they're pre-approved for; and track every application by status, channel, and originating office. That surrounding layer is what makes it a daily working tool rather than a demo of one flow.

This wasn't a solo mockup. The work ran for months as dated, versioned milestones — the core layouts, then the offer configurator, then the product catalog — each carried to an approved sign-off with the client bank. Their own design team floated competing variants along the way, and part of my job was reconciling those with the platform's patterns so the result read as one product, not a committee. Every approved screen shipped with developer specs attached, so what got built matched what was drawn.

A separate, more experimental case reimagines this system's decision moment for the client sitting on the other side of the desk — the two-views redesign.

• 12 months from kickoff to production.
• 170+ branch offices running it — the bank's full network.
• 5 stages per application — intake, employment, processing, offers, signature.
• 3 product families — consumer loan, credit card, refinancing — plus insurance and cross-sell, all configured on one screen.
• Every approved layout delivered with developer specs.