This guide walks through building a simple loan decision process to demonstrate how all of the Rules can be linked together to solve a practical problem. If you haven’t already, we recommend you first read our “Basics of Building a Ruleset” guide.

Overall View

This is what the Loan Decision process will look like after it’s built.

Let’s begin building!

Start Rule: Receive Loan Application

The loan process typically starts with an application, often a form a potential borrower fills out on a website or mobile app form.

Here we list a simplified version of common data points used in loan applications.

• First Name: As a shorter version of the full personal information you may require such as a government ID like SSN.
• State: The applicant’s address state in the United States. This is a shorthand in this example for the full address and is used for looking up data later in the process.
• Term Length: This is how many months the borrower would like to repay their loan over.
• Monthly Net Income and Monthly Debt: Some lenders will ask for the customer to provide their income and debt information if that lender isn’t getting this information from other third parties. To keep our example workflow here simpler, we have added them as inputs into our Start Rule.

Data Rule: Get Credit Report

After receiving the loan application, a common next step would be to get additional data from a credit report, either from a credit bureau directly or through a data aggregator.

The Data Rule requires that a Data Source or Data Set has been set up.

Getting a credit report would generally be through an API Data Source. We provide a dedicated guide to setting up API Data Sources and using the Data Rule.

For this tutorial, we’re using a simplified example of a credit report which provides the sample data below.

{

"status": "completed",

"identifier": "Individual Report 1",

"customerReferenceNumber": "2C800002-DOR7",

"ficoScore": 700,

"fraudFlag": "F"

}