Data-driven digital operations

Founded in 2021, Sunstone Credit has pioneered how businesses adopt renewable energy through accessible solar financing. Its proprietary technology platform enables customers to easily access simple, affordable, and easy-to-understand solar loan products with flexible terms and a streamlined application process.

Like many other financial organizations, Sunstone’s business model relies heavily on reliable data and analytics. Processes such as loan operations, financial operations, underwriting, and account management strategy depend on accurate and fresh data.

Solving for painful reports and limited access

The Strategy team at Sunstone Credit quickly found that as the business grew, keeping track of high-volume information in Microsoft Excel wasn’t simple. Creating recurring and on-request metrics for analysis or marketing required multiple days of manual processing, leaving reports highly prone to inaccuracies and errors.

Jack Barnett, Strategy Manager, and his team quickly realized that if the business was to manage the data needed to keep decision-makers from Financial Operations to Loan Operations up-to-date with the latest loan information, it required a single source of truth for reports.

“Our company was facing difficulties related to data and reporting on a number of fronts. The biggest issue was a lack of a single source of truth to drive company-wide analysis off of that was both easily refreshable and distributable to the broader company. In addition, we had key daily loan servicing data sitting in Excel files with no way automated way to pull the data and create related reporting. It also provides better controls for data permissions, which is a key concern given the many compliance issues inherent to a financing business.”

The team needed a single source of truth to help ensure that loan, finance, and operational data were accurate, up-to-date, and accessible across the organization. To comply with SOC 2 compliance, security permission controls needed to be enforced to restrict access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

Mapping complex loan workflows

Given the business’s complex loan application workflow, the Sunstone Credit team needed support from specialized data tools. Every checkpoint of the loan workflow needs to be a trackable metric. 

Capturing every historic data point required Sunstone to manually export all of its data into various sheets in Excel. The team would then add a layer of complex calculations and functions to create its metrics. Altering the logic required updating the calculations on all impacted fields, which was time-consuming.

Fortunately, Velocity Sense significantly assisted the team in managing this complexity. Designing a modular data architecture reduced masses of complex loan application logic into more manageable, maintainable layers. By breaking down intricate processes and data flows into simpler components, the team no longer needed to maintain data in Excel and relied solely on its data warehouse.

A new modern data analytics stack

We rethought how Sunstone used its data to create a modern data analytics stack that solved reporting needs across 6 divisions. Introducing a modern data analytics stack sped up the team’s reporting needs, enabled conversations with AI to produce reports, and provided a single source of truth to power all of its reports.

“Updating our data infrastructure to a scalable solution has provided an immediate, substantial impact across the business. Operating employees and management alike have accurate visibility into the data that matters to them, reducing reporting friction and saving time across the company on a daily basis.”