How Outfund saved 960 hours of engineering time building integrations with Rutter
Learn how Outfund leverages Rutter’s Commerce API to implement nearly a dozen integrations without sacrificing their engineers’ bandwidth.
“It's been a very straightforward process to build one integration with Rutter and to then switch on and off the integrations that we need. It’s that easy.“
Like many early-stage startups, Outfund dedicated most of its limited resources to development. In order to evaluate applicants’ businesses and make appropriate financing offers, the platform relies on connecting to their customers' data on QuickBooks, Shopify, and other commerce platforms to access real-time financial and sales data.
However, those integrations are notoriously difficult to build and maintain — for three reasons:
- Custom builds aren’t scalable — Every Outfund customer and the platforms they use contains quirks and nuances. Outfund could create custom, native integrations to respond accordingly, but that wouldn’t be sustainable.
- Each build drains weeks of engineers’ time — Going through documentation and building integrations one by one was time-consuming. A single engineer would spend two weeks of full-time work building an integration — and Outfund needed dozens of them.
Maintenance distracts from core product — After initial development, engineers had to keep up with ever-evolving changes to APIs from third-party platforms. That created an additional strain and left little time to focus on the customer experience.
"Keeping track of 15 or so platforms that are continually evolving was a huge drain on our engineers’ focus. Building these integrations was a distraction. We wanted to focus on what our company does, which is digital underwriting and lending."
Rutter offers an API that’s built for business financing and underwriting
Outfund wanted integrations that would standardize their data streams and give customers a seamless experience — no matter what platforms they use for banking or payments. Any API solution would need to provide Outfund with:
- An overview of multiple financing offers in one unified, standardized schema
- Seamless integrations with banks and eComm platforms — without any heavy lifting from Outfund’s engineers
Luckily for Outfund, Rutter’s Commerce API supports business underwriting and was built for those exact purposes. In fact, Rutter’s expertise in these data sources was what appealed to Alan Lin, COO at Outfund, in the first place.
According to Alan, Rutter’s universal API entirely eliminated Outfund’s need for custom integrations with banking and commerce platforms — taking that engineering workload and maintenance off his team’s plate.
“Rutter is a great fit for early-stage startups because they allow you to really focus on your company’s goals without being constantly distracted by building new integrations and trying to maintain them.”
Rutter's Unified API allowed Outfund to launch over 10 new commerce integrations.
Outfund engineers saved over 960 hours of development time by partnering with Rutter.
Outfund launched commerce integrations with WooCommerce, Amazon, Magenta, and many more in months.
Rutter offers an API that’s built for business financing and underwriting Rutter helps Outfund optimize lending decisions by connecting more data sources
Outfund is excited to continue partnering with Rutter as both teams plan to expand into accounting platform integrations. Alan emphasizes how valuable that alignment and partnership with integration pros like Rutter is, especially since this is new territory for Outfund.
Looking forward, the Outfund team will continually optimize their lending decisions as Rutter helps them add more and more integrations and gain holistic, contextualized views of their customers.
“Rutter supplements our engineering efforts and takes this work off our guys so we can focus on delivering a great long-term experience for our customers.”
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