Batch Re-Processing of Failed Credit (financial) Applications

A failed credit application effectively amounted to lost business for the client. Financial credit applications (to apply for new credit cards) required intensive background checks and automated processing via credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion). Large amounts of data are exchanged between the client application and the credit bureau.

The Challenge

With large amounts of data being exchanged between the client application and the credit bureau - the chances of a particular application not going through (failing) are fairly high. The reason for the failure could be one of many - including server downtimes at any one of the intermediate hops.

The Solution

• A processing using SOAP and XML was designed to effectively re-submit failed credit applications.
• A custom SOAP message was created from the failed credit application.
• This SOAP message was then re-sent to the node where failure occured (after determining the current status of the node).
• If the re-submitted credit application failed again - a better diagnostic capability (returned as a SOAP exception) was able to inform the client application about what pieces may be missing in the original credit application.
• Unit tests were written to submit sample credit applications with pre-configured data.
• The end result was a process that allowed for re-processing of failed credit applications - allowing a large number of new credit accounts (and increased revenue) for the customer.