A lending CRM built around how you already work

Contents

What this document covers

Commercial terms — timeline, pricing and payment schedule — are provided separately.

Section 1

Executive Summary

Your lending process today runs across spreadsheets, email threads and individual staff files. This proposal covers Phase 1 of a CRM that brings the whole of it into one system — from the moment a case is opened to the moment the loan is disbursed.

The system is designed around your existing workflow rather than a generic sales pipeline. The pre-assessment checklist your team already uses becomes a working form; your approval thresholds become routing rules; your reporting structure becomes the access model. Nothing about how you assess a borrower changes. What changes is that the process stops living in files that have to be emailed around.

What Phase 1 delivers

• One record per caseCompany details, contacts, directors, guarantors, documents, site visit notes, credit figures and every call logged against a single case, visible to whoever picks it up next.
• The pre-assessment as a working formSubtotals and averages calculated by the system, currencies kept separate, credit bureau figures stored as data rather than filed as attachments.
• Approval routing that follows your rulesCases reach the right approver automatically based on the amount requested and whether the directors have given personal guarantees — and the approver is told why.
• Access that follows your reporting lineEach person sees the cases within their own team and no further. The same rule governs search, reports and data exports.
• Reporting you cannot produce todayApproval rates, disbursed value, performance by salesperson, pipeline value, response times and reasons for lost cases — each exportable to Excel.
• A complete audit trailEvery status change, amount change, document upload and data export recorded with who did it and when.

Section 2

Understanding Your Current Situation

A salesperson collects documents, visits the borrower's premises, completes the pre-assessment checklist in Excel and emails it to their manager for a decision. Once approved, the case passes to Operations for the contract, signing and disbursement.

That process works, and the assessment discipline behind it is sound. The difficulty is not with the method — it is that spreadsheets and email were built for individual calculation and correspondence, not for a multi-party approval workflow handling money and personal data. Seven consequences follow from that, and each of them shapes something in the proposed system.

None of these is a matter of how carefully the files are maintained. They are the boundaries of the tool. A spreadsheet is an excellent calculator for one person; it was never designed to be the system of record for a regulated approval process involving several people, documents from third parties, and personal data belonging to guarantors.

Section 3

Solution Overview

A single web application used by your sales team, your approvers, your operations staff and your administrator. Each case moves through one defined path, and the system knows at every point who is responsible for it.

The path a case takes

Steps 1 to 4 are the salesperson's own work and may happen in any order. Step 5 is the only point at which the case branches — it may be approved, returned for further work, rejected, or dropped if the customer withdraws.

Who does what

The six states a case can be in

Rejected and Dropped are deliberately separate. Rejected means your team declined the application; Dropped means the customer withdrew — including where they declined the terms offered. Each asks for a reason from a short list, which is what makes it possible to report on why business is lost rather than simply how much.

Section 4

Key Features

Nine areas of functionality make up Phase 1. Each is described in terms of what it does and the problem it removes.

Section 5

Interface Preview

Four screens showing how the day-to-day work would look. Layout, wording and styling are for discussion — the purpose here is to show the shape of the system, not to fix its final appearance.

Section 6

Technology & Architecture

The system is a web application hosted on Amazon Web Services in their Singapore region. Your staff reach it through an ordinary web browser — there is nothing to install, and no server for your office to maintain.

Everything belonging to your business — the application, the database, the uploaded documents and the backups — sits in a dedicated environment used by no other client. All of it is located in Singapore.

Two environments

A staging environment for testing and training, and a production environment for live use. New work is proven on staging before it reaches the data your team relies on.

Running costs

The Amazon Web Services charges for a system of this size are expected to be in the region of USD 150–300 per month, varying with storage as documents accumulate. These charges are billed by Amazon directly to your own AWS account and are separate from any development or support fees. We would recommend the account be opened in your company's name so that ownership of the environment and the data within it is unambiguous from the outset.

Section 7

Why This Approach

Five characteristics of a dedicated, purpose-built system that a shared subscription platform cannot offer.

• A dedicated environmentYour database, your document storage and your application run in an environment used by no other client. This is separation at the level of the infrastructure, not a setting within shared software.
• Data held in SingaporeAll processing and storage takes place in Amazon's Singapore region. As a licensed moneylender handling personal data belonging to guarantors and contacts, where that data physically resides is a question you may need to answer, and the answer here is a simple one.
• Built to your process, with no platform lock-inThe system is developed around how your business actually works, rather than configured within the limits of packaged software. The source code and the data belong to you: you are free to maintain it in-house, or hand it to another team, at any point. Subsequent changes and new features are quoted as separate pieces of work.
• Access control and audit built into the structurePermissions are enforced by the server on every request, so what a user cannot see, they also cannot search, report on or export. Status changes, amount changes, document deletions and data exports are all recorded against the person who performed them.
• Designed with the next phase in mindThe data structures needed for a customer portal, a referrer portal and the wider customer view are established in Phase 1. When you choose to add them, they build on what already exists rather than requiring the database to be rebuilt.

Section 8

Out of Scope for Phase 1

The following are deliberately excluded from this phase. Several appeared in your original outline; they are addressed in Section 11 rather than dropped.

Section 9

What We Need From You

Five things are required from your side. The first is the one most likely to hold up a launch, so it is worth starting early.

Section 10

Assumptions & Disclaimers

This proposal is written on the following basis. Where any of it does not reflect your position, please let us know, as it may affect the scope.

• You have confirmed there are no regulatory or compliance requirements to be built into this phase. The system therefore performs no compliance checking of any kind — it does not validate interest rate caps, fee caps, or any other statutory limit.
• Licensed moneylenders in Singapore operate under the Moneylenders Act and the oversight of the Ministry of Law.
• Information about borrowing companies is not personal data. Contact persons and individual guarantors are natural persons, and their names, contact details and NRIC/FIN numbers fall under the PDPA. The system is designed on that basis, including retention and access rules.
• Records are retained for five years and then anonymised. This should be confirmed against your own record-keeping obligations before go-live.
• Responsibility for regulatory compliance rests with your company. The system records the information your staff enter; it does not assess whether that information or the resulting loan meets any legal requirement.

Section 11

Future Phases

What Phase 1 makes possible. Each of these is a separate piece of work, and each depends on something Phase 1 puts in place.

The sequencing is not arbitrary. Nearly everything on this list depends on there being a single, reliable record of what happens to a case — which is what Phase 1 creates.