Case study · Finance
Serious money,in the hands of a small team.
Westwood lend against property, quickly and for amounts that matter. That used to run across several separate systems and a lot of careful typing. It runs on one now.
- Client
- Westwood Capital Finance
- Where
- Beverley, East Yorkshire
- Sector
- Finance
- Built with
- Laravel, Livewire, MySQL
The client
A lenderwith investors behind it.
Westwood Capital Finance write short-term loans secured on property. The money behind those loans is not theirs alone - it comes from private investors who hold capital with Westwood and take economic exposure to the loans, which means every payment that arrives has to be split correctly between several people who are each watching their own return.
It is a small team doing something a much larger institution would need a department for. Darren Peacock, the director, reconciles the accounts to the penny every single day, and that is the standard everything here was built to.
The decision
The book first,and the portal after it.
The obvious build was the investor-facing one: a portal where the people funding the loans could see their positions. It is the visible half, and it is what most lenders would have bought first.
Darren went the other way. Before anything got shown to an investor, the loan book itself had to become the place the numbers lived.
So the order was: build the system of record, prove it against the accounts to the penny, then let the investor views read from it.
How it went
Reconciled daily,so we tested it that way.
Darren checks the numbers every morning, which meant every import had somewhere to be wrong by the following day.
Darren gave us the time and the scrutiny. Every import was checked against his own sheets before it was accepted, and the standard was the penny rather than the pound. When we mapped the rest of the business, six of his people spent a day walking us through a loan from first enquiry to completion - twelve stages, thirty-two separate pieces of work, most of which had never been written down anywhere.
01
The book before the portal
Loans, investors, transactions and distributions in one place, with every movement split per investor and the ledger accounting for it.
02
Proved against his own numbers
Not sampled. Reconciled loan by loan against the sheets he had been keeping, until the system total and his total were the same figure.
03
Investor reporting that reads from the book
Portfolios, positions, transactions and documents, all of it derived rather than maintained, so there is no second version to keep in step.
What we built
The systemthe business runs on.
One loan, the four investors behind it, what each of them is owed this month, and the schedule that generates when it is saved. This is the screen the whole engagement is about.
What we found
What it actually takes to write one loan.
12stages, enquiry to completion
From the first message asking whether Westwood could fund something, to the money leaving. Nobody had ever drawn the whole sequence before, so nobody had ever seen where it stalls.
32separate pieces of work
Inside those twelve stages, thirty-two things that somebody has to do, chase or check. Most of them lived in one person's head or in an email thread.
6people, one day, one wall
Six of Darren's team walked us through a loan from beginning to end. That map is now the build programme, which is a better use of a day than any specification we could have written.
From our very first meeting, their expertise, professionalism, and genuine commitment to understanding the nuances of the finance industry were clear.
They didn't just build us a tool; they took the time to understand our workflows, pain points, and long-term goals, delivering a sleek, robust, and intuitive software solution that has radically improved our operational efficiency.
Darren Peacock
Director, Westwood Capital Finance
Still going
The halfthat happens first.
Everything from completion onwards is built and running. What is being built now is everything before it - the enquiry that arrives as a WhatsApp message, the quote, the terms, the valuation, the credit paper - so that a deal becomes a loan record rather than somebody copying it across.
More of the work
No pitch, no deck
Tell us what isactually happening.
Describe the mess in your own words. We will say what we think is going on underneath it, and whether there is anything we could usefully do about it.
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