Back to Work

CRM Automation & Data Infrastructure for a Mission-Driven Lender

Industry: Agriculture & Impact Finance
•
Year: 2024–2025

Streamlined loan operations, automated reporting, and scalable onboarding — freeing the team to focus on funding regenerative farmers instead of fighting spreadsheets

The Challenge

A mission-driven lending organization financing regenerative agriculture needed to modernize its technology infrastructure. Historic loan data was scattered across spreadsheets with inconsistent formatting. Client onboarding involved manual multi-step handoffs between credit, underwriting, and operations. Leadership lacked real-time visibility into portfolio health, and reporting required hours of manual compilation each month.

The team was small and non-technical. Any solution had to be maintainable by people who weren't engineers, and it had to integrate cleanly with the CRM they were already using rather than requiring an entirely new platform.

Our Approach

We embedded with the leadership, credit, and operations teams to map every process from initial borrower inquiry through loan closing, covenant tracking, and portfolio reporting. Rather than proposing a big-bang platform migration, we identified the highest-leverage automation opportunities within their existing CRM and built serverless extensions around it.

The approach was intentionally incremental: ship something useful in the first two weeks, gather feedback, iterate, repeat. Each automation was documented and designed so non-technical staff could operate and troubleshoot it without engineering support.

The Solution

We built a suite of serverless functions and automations that extended the existing CRM into a purpose-built lending operations platform:

  • CRM Workflow Automation: Serverless functions handling reporting triggers, data synchronization, deduplication, enrichment, and multi-step workflow orchestration — replacing manual CRM administration.
  • Loan Data Structuring: Migrated and normalized historic loan data into consistent, queryable formats. Implemented automations for covenant tracking, maturity dates, and portfolio-level aggregation.
  • Automated Reporting: PDF reporting packs generated automatically for leadership with portfolio summaries, borrower status, and financial metrics. Scheduled Slack digests for real-time operational visibility.
  • Borrower Onboarding: Codified intake sequences with automated document requests, status tracking, SLA monitoring, and handoff triggers between credit, underwriting, and closing teams.

Every system was documented with runbooks, and staff received hands-on training to operate workflows independently.

Results & Impact

Replaced hours of monthly manual reporting with automated PDF packs and Slack digests

Borrower onboarding time reduced significantly through codified intake sequences

Historic loan data normalized and made queryable for the first time

Manual CRM administration tasks automated with audit trails

Non-technical team trained to operate and maintain all systems independently

Mission impact: freed team capacity to focus on underwriting and farmer relationships

Technologies Used

PythonGoogle Cloud (Cloud Functions, Run, Scheduler, Storage)HubSpot APIsPDF GenerationSlack APIWebhooksData Modeling
Previous Project

Embedded Technology Leadership for a Scaling IT Sales Organization

Professional Services

Next Project

Data Strategy & Executive Analytics for a Regional Healthcare Provider

Healthcare