Singlify Simba (v11) release

What’s with the lion?

Since Singlify’s first launch in 2018, we have been naming our releases according to the main Salesforce releases (Spring, Summer, Winter). We realized that this is not very intuitive to our customers and employees on the southern hemisphere, and can be confusing in terms of timing.

So we embarked on a quest to find a new theme around our releases, looking for something fun, international, and reflecting our core values. And what is more fun, social and international than animals?

For our previous release, v10, the honour was given to the dolphin. And for this release, v11, we have chosen the lion! Lions are known for their fierce nature. However, the lion is the most social animal of all the wild felid species. Lions live in groups called prides. Females form the stable social unit in a pride and are all related. They support each other and their families and highly depend on teamwork when sourcing their food. After a successful hunt, all the lions in the pride share the meal. There’s a lot to relate to here, but the main thing that we can relate to here is working together (as a pride or as an industry) and, once successfull, share the benefits between all!

And what is new this release, is that we actually ‘Singlifize’ the release name a bit more by using the Swahili version of the animal name. This is to honour our product development and implementation teams in Kenya. Lion translates to the beautiful word Simba, hence the Simba (v11) release!

Release highlights

Loan Product Versioning

One of the key aspects of Singlify’s Loan Product vs Loan model is the guarantee that all Loans that are created off a Loan Product inherit the specifications of the Loan Product. However, this also means that Loan Products cannot be altered once loans have been created off of them.

In order to support the dynamic nature of the industry and to provide for better auditing and reporting possibilities, we are introducing Loan Product Versioning. Loan Product Versioning enables you to easily create a new version of your existing Loan Product, while ensuring that only one version of a Loan Product can be used at a time.

Flexible Fee Model

Our customers have expressed the need for more and different kinds of loan fees, like commitment fees, early repayment fees and manual fees. This has forced us to rethink our fee model to make it more flexible and efficient. So instead of having a predefined set of fees that customers can use on their loan products, we are moving towards a fully flexible model where fees of all types can be combined on a loan.

The Flexible Fee Model stores Fees in a different way that allows customers to create dynamic combinations of many different types of fees. This enables e.g. 2 different kinds of setup fees on 1 loan, or charging manual fees on an ad-hoc basis.

The move to this new model is not without risk, as it involves extensive testing of the new functionality and migrating customer data to the new model. Therefore we are taking a stepped approach, spanning 3 separate Singlify releases.

Commitment Fees

A commitment fee is a banking term used to describe a fee charged by a lender to a borrower to compensate the lender for its commitment to lend. Commitment fees typically are associated with unused credit lines or undisbursed loans.

Singlify supports Commitment Fees for the Line of Credit product type. Commitment Fees for scheduled loans are on the roadmap as well and will be pursued upon customer demand.

Manual Fees

Many of our customers have expressed the desire to enable the charging of ‘manual’ or ‘ad-hoc’ fees on loans. With the launch of our new Flexible Fee Model, we can now also support Manual Fees.

Main features:

• Each Manual Fee has its own label, which makes it easy to distinguish between different manual fees
• The possibility to charge Manual Fees on a loan needs to be enabled on the Loan Product
• Manual fees can be required (always charged on every loan) or optional (can be added to the loan at any time)
• Optional manual fees can be charged multiple times on 1 loan
• The fee amount for each manual fee can be specified on the Loan Product, or left open to fill in on loan level

Accounting Subledger – GA

After over a year of building, testing, refining, and testing again, we are finally ready to make our Accounting Subledger functionality Generally Available to all customers that are interested. We’ve even made this into a separate module, as it is not tied to loans specifically. Reach out to your Singlify representative if you want to start implementing this.