Challenges
The idea of Miren was born in 2020 when Gabriela Campoverde, the founder, learned about the gap in access to financing for minority small business owners in underdeveloped communities in the United States. After a year of research, interviews, and pivots, she decided to create a platform helping banks to invest in low-to-moderate-income communities, monitor those investments and, ultimately, increase the flow of funding to small businesses.
The goal of Sommo was to develop MVP for Miren - software for loan origination and servicing aimed at microlenders, helping evaluate applications and track loans. We had to create a loan application portal for small businesses where banks could create their accounts and application links, receive the application submissions, review them, evaluate, and make decisions regarding giving the loan or not.
Gabriella's idea was so successful and in demand that at the beginning of 2023, the Sommo team continued to work on the new versions of the Miren platform, expanding its functionality. Below we share some project details to inspire you for creation your fintech projects with a no-code approach.
Process
Discovery
We are very fortunate as Gabriella has done in-depth market, audience, and regulation research. For instance, she talked to Latino immigrant small business owners about how they’d obtained startup capital to get a better understanding of how they were accessing affordable capital and the lack of resources available to them.
Therefore, it was pretty easy for us to develop the user stories and software requirements specification (SRS).
Design
We developed wireframes for all flows for all users - banks, loan officers, and clients (applicants).
In the design, we used corporate colors, strict tabular forms, and the ability to reveal/hide additional information.
No-code development
The main focus of no-code development was the backend, database integration, and security (protection of personal data). To select the optimal options, we conducted a separate study and shared its results in the article No-code backends to use in your app.
Results
Since the beginning of our work, we have already released several versions of the platform and continue to work.
Started as an accessible loan application portal for small businesses (MVP), the Miren team consistently embodies the expertise in working with financial institutions, big and small.
Miren allows users aggregate and streamline data on loans, community development projects, and deposits with the Miren API (application programming interface) or Miren Loan Origination Software (LOS). The platform is compatible with all major core banking, LOS (Loan Origination System) and CRM (customer relationship management) services.
Now Miren provides community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and non-profit small business foundations with software that helps them engage with communities and mission-driven startups to distribute beneficial capital to some of the nation’s most underserved neighborhoods.
For this purpose the team has raised around $250,000 from competitions, much from the AWS Impact Accelerator.
Summary
We are proud to participate in Miren not only because it is a high-tech financial product. Gabriella and the team successed to embody the ideas of social responsibility and sustainable development. Projects like this make the world a better place.
If you have an idea to create a complex fintech project, challenge us to develop it with no-code!
