How to use Lendsqr APIs to power your loan app

As a lender who’s built or building their loan app, of course, the most important thing is to ensure that you can lend money securely and at scale. Borrowers should be able to take loans without a hassle.

However, only the best (AKA most creditworthy) borrowers should scale through your risk control or risk acceptance criteria. Because having to spend all that money to build your loan app, you don’t plan on running a charity organization by running at a loss. 

Essentially, you want a smooth customer onboarding, a secure loan request process, and a swift repayment process. When you look closer at the journey through a typical loan app, three (3) key tenets are at the forefront: Onboarding, Decisioning, and Payment. These are some of the areas in which Lendsqr has significant expertise. 

But we know that not all lenders who come to us want to use our technology end-to-end. This may be because they’ve made previous investments in setting up their lending technology or integrated into some other third-party loan management software.

Now you ask, how then can Lendsqr help? Regardless of what technology a lender uses (ours or not), Lendsqr’s ultimate goal is to enable African lenders to extend credit access to all.

So, how do we come in? Through our Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Some of the APIs we use in making awesome software for our lenders are also available to other lenders as standalone tech stacks. Let’s circle back to your users’ journey and see how you can use our API to power your loan app.

Onboarding 

Customers are signing up to your web or mobile app at this junction. Let’s look at some Lendsqr APIs that can make your borrower onboarding seamless. 

You could use Lendsqr’s account verification API to verify the true owner of a customer’s account number. 

You could also call another one of our APIs to find out all the accounts linked to a customer’s bank verification number (BVN) and the authenticity of data provided, such as account statements and identification documents, among other things. Learn more about borrower identity verification.

Decisioning

This part of your loan app journey is one of the most critical, if not the most vital. This is where customers make loan requests, and you’re left to figure out if they’re creditworthy enough to merit a loan, if they’ve got squeaky-clean financial records or if they’ve made a mess with some other lender. This is where you separate the sheep from the wolves.

Our first and foremost decisioning API you should call on is the Lendsqr Karma API. With this API, you could check if a borrower has defaulted on a loan or is still a defaulter on the run. We have one of the largest private collections of blacklist data. Learn more about Karma. 

Another API available to you is the Lendsqr Ecosystem data, which is similar to the credit bureau data. Since we cater to over 3,500 lenders, we have quite a handful of lenders you could double-check with to ensure a prospective borrower applying for a loan with you has not defaulted, paid back their loan on time, or acted sketchy. That’s what the Ecosystem data API is all about.

You could also call on our Risk Assessment Criteria (RAC) API to design a risk control parameter/rule peculiar to your loan business. These rules govern the required criteria and to whom you decide to give a loan. When implementing these rules, the system scores each borrower and notifies you if they passed your stipulated RAC threshold or not. Learn more about borrowers’ risk assessment.

Payments 

While we are not a payment platform of any kind, when it comes to loan repayment, especially for lenders who, in one way or another, use the Lendsqr technology, at the minimum, we are the leaders in direct debit. With direct debit API, you can ensure that borrowers link their bank account, and you can double-check its authenticity with the account verification API we mentioned earlier. The direct debit API is best for automated loan collection as a means to collect smarter with technology. You can design your scheduler or use ours to help you manage automated loan repayment. Get started with our direct debit API. 

Empowering field agents with Lendsqr APIs

Not all lending happens behind a screen; many lenders rely on a network of field agents to reach borrowers in underserved or remote areas. Lendsqr’s APIs are perfectly suited to empower these on-the-ground teams, ensuring they have the same robust tools as any digital platform.

Field agents can use the Onboarding APIs to verify borrower identities and bank accounts instantly during face-to-face interactions. With the Karma and Ecosystem Data APIs, agents can perform real-time creditworthiness checks right on their mobile devices, separating reliable borrowers from high-risk individuals before a loan is even requested.

For agents managing collections, the Direct Debit API simplifies their work by automating repayment schedules, reducing the need for manual cash handling and increasing safety. By integrating Lendsqr’s standalone tech stack into their field tools, lending companies can scale their physical operations securely, ensuring that every agent is backed by the full power of Lendsqr’s decisioning and payment technology.

Embedment on third-party channels

If you offer Buy-Now-Pay-Later loan services, you can also use our embedment APIs to embed your loan app in other channels, such as E-commerce and ERPs. Find out more about our API for loan embedding. 

API for powerful lending

With these APIs, you can still keep your own technology and get the most out of ours. At Lendsqr, we don’t worry about which lender uses our loan management software as much as we care about bringing credit closer to Africans through as many lenders as we can. 

Wondering how to start? Feel free to reach out to our product specialists at [email protected] or learn more and get started with our API services now!