SelectFI - MVP Development

SelectFI is a web application for car dealerships and their customers. The client approached Forcoda with the idea of automating and streamlining the financing process for car dealerships and their customers. The client deeply understood the automotive industry and common pitfalls of the vehicle financing process, which was slow and lacked buyer transparency.

The current process for getting financing quotes based on the customer’s credit history and lender’s guidelines is time-consuming. It requires a significant amount of manual paperwork, often frustrating the customers and the dealership staff.

The client had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve, and he was confident that Forcoda could help bring his vision to life.

For the generation of vehicle details, MSRP, sales price, tax rates, and customer credit history reports, Forcoda leveraged integrations with 3rd party APIs.

Despite the lack of documentation and guidance from the API providers, which slowed the development speed, it didn’t impact the quality of the final product. 

Forcoda developers created a complex and fast algorithm that leveraged data from APIs to generate the best matching financing options for customers in seconds. Based on the customer’s credit profile and lender’s guidelines, financing options were pulled from all lenders available to the dealership. 

The app was required to support an integration with DealerTrack, a credit application platform used by most car dealerships. By sending  all lenders’ guidelines result from SelectFi back to DealerTrack using a pre-populated credit application, dealership sales reps were able to get instant response on the application approval.

When SelectFI web app development began, it started as an MVP product that eventually grew into a fully functional product that is ready to meet the market. As the client needed fast and fully-working results that couldn’t be achieved using custom coding from scratch, WordPress CMS was chosen for the development of the SelectFI web app. WordPress had a ready-to-start base that helped accelerate the development process and launch the first functional version of the MVP in less than a year.

The development process involved various tasks such as creating custom post types to handle different elements of the app, connecting them, and implementing custom coding for generating lender’s guidelines results. Specific user settings were also implemented to accommodate different user roles within the app.

One of the main advantages of using WordPress CMS was the availability of a wide range of plugins and themes that could be customized to meet the specific needs of the SelectFI project. This allowed the development team to leverage existing functionalities and components, saving time and effort in the development process.

Custom post types were created to handle different elements of the app, such as vehicle details, financing estimates, and customer profiles. This provided a structured and organized approach to managing the content within the web app.

Custom coding parts of the app helped to ensure seamless integration and communication between different app elements. This involved developing APIs to retrieve up-to-date data on vehicle details and costs, as well as customer credit profiles using a soft credit pull. 

The custom coding also included the implementation of a highly-complex algorithm that estimates financing from multiple dealership lenders simultaneously, based on a number of important criteria that now is one of the key features of SelectFI app. This not only saves dealership’s time and effort by simplifying the financing process, but also ensures customers get the best financing rates available and allows dealerships to improve backend.

Specific user settings were implemented to cater to different user roles within the app. This allowed for controlled access and permissions, ensuring that dealership staff and customers had the appropriate level of access and functionality within the web app.

The development process was iterative and involved multiple rounds of testing and refinement. The development team worked closely with the client to ensure that the web app met their requirements and expectations.