Canvas CU Mortgage Rate Web Application 

Role:    Technical Requirements, UX/UI Design

Tools: Pencil and paper, Figma, Microsoft Office Suite

Overview: With mortgage rates fluctuating with increasing frequency and magnitude since the onset of Covid-19, Canvas Credit Union's previous process for updating mortgage rates on the public website was no longer working with the frequency at which rates were changing nor supporting new processes used by the mortgage team in their work in determining custom rates offered at the credit union.

This project consisted of designing and developing a web application to support the addition and updates of mortgage rates to the credit union website. 

At Canvas Credit Union I was the sole designer and product owner working on client and business facing websites and applications. Among which are Web Applications (WebApps) that support different functions for various departments of the business. 

Project: Mortgage Rates WebApp

I designed a web application and wrote technical requirements to enable our mortgage team to manage and automate the posting of mortgage rates to the public facing website. 

With mortgage rates fluctuating with increasing frequency and magnitude since the onset of Covid-19, the previous process for updating mortgage rates on the public website was no longer working with the frequency at which rates were changing nor supporting new processes used by the mortgage team in their work in determining custom rates offered at the credit union. 

Goals & Needs:

• Create custom rates
  Enter details and calculation adjustments for federal rates
  Run federal rates through calculations to yield the rates offered to credit union members
  Automatically update rates daily to reflect changes to federal rates
  Post rates to public website through an in-house content management system 

The Mortgage Rate WebApp automatically updates input mortgage rates to the website from a daily FNMA updated rates sheet. Those rates are passed through a number of calculations to arrive at the rates Canvas CU offers their members. Along with the associated rates, APR values needed to be posted with their associated rate. 

Rate Entry and Creation

Canvas Credit Union offers mortgage rates based on federal rates as well as offers a custom product for 100% Homes, a unique product to Canvas. 

The mortgage team needed the ability to enter both federal rates and custom rates in the system. 

The calculations to arrive at the rate and APR incorporate values including: loan term, loan value, credit score, LLPA, lock period, and gain on sale adjustment (% the organization gains from the loan). 

Along with going through a number of calculations, rates also needed to go through a 2 person approval process and publishing to the website. 

These mortgage rates are entered and calculated in the Mortgage Rates WebApp, and a REACT component is used to add the rates to the website through a Canvas CU developed content management system. The component pulls the rate, APR, and display name onto the website, allows for rates to be updated to the site daily, and removes the rate from the site should any error occur in the calculation process. 

One objective of this system was for the posting of mortgage rates to the website to be autonomous and evergreen. As the mortgage team received little to no warning when federal mortgage rates and regulations change, we needed to design a system that allowed adjustments to rates calculations to be done on the the fly. This system allows the mortgage team to adjust every value that contributes to the calculation of the rate. 

In addition to posting rates, we also developed a record of rates posted to the site for any auditing the credit union could have. This produces an export of rates posted to the site, and maintains 2 years of history. 

Comments from AVP of mortgages. “You took a really complicated process, and distilled it into a tool that is intuitive and easy to use.”