Journeys are the future: Alloy’s Journeys enables multi-step application flows

Product spotlight: A closer look at one of Alloy's most impactful features

What started out as a new feature for our Credit Underwriting product has quickly become a critical part of how we configure multi-step application flows for origination and ongoing identity decisioning. As a leader on our product team, I wanted to take you through the thought process and development of one of our most exciting features.

Why we built Journeys

We first launched Journeys in February 2022. The origin story of Journeys can be traced back to a Miro board where we mapped out how our credit clients were using Alloy. The majority of them bundled both Onboarding and Credit Underwriting together into one credit origination flow. This scenario was a common use case as applicants would apply for a credit card and need to go through an Onboarding Workflow and a Credit Underwriting Workflow. Before Journeys, Alloy clients would have to make separate API calls to each Workflow and manage the state internally for when an applicant would move from one Workflow to the next.

Once an applicant hits submit on a new credit card application on a client’s website, the client would begin by making an API request to run them through their Onboarding Workflow. If the outcome was approved, the client would then make another request to their Credit Underwriting Workflow to assess creditworthiness. If that outcome was approved, they would finally approve that applicant and open their account. But that’s just the happy path! One can only imagine how complex this process becomes when manual reviews are conducted and if clients want to run document verification.

The Review Queue also broke down for these multi-workflow use cases. Entities are reviewed per Workflow, making it difficult for clients to review entities applying for multiple products with the same Credit Underwriting Workflow.

Our early credit clients wanted to tie these Workflows together into a single configuration and for Alloy to move applicants from one Workflow to another. They also wanted the ability to review multiple applications per entity with all relevant Workflows consolidated into a single application view. And thus, Journeys and Applications were born.

Journeys is the underlying infrastructure that allows clients to link multiple Workflows and pending states into a single configuration and API endpoint. Alloy automatically moves applicants from one state to another based on client-defined Workflow outcomes and rules. Webhooks can be triggered at every state change, updating clients along the way.

An Application is created every time a client runs an entity through a Journey. Applications consolidate all evaluations and decisions that have occurred for an applicant at a given state, contextualizing all relevant information during a review. The Application Queue allows clients to review individual applications for the same entity, assuming they are applying for multiple products.

Before we launched this feature in 2022, Jetty, a financial services platform that helps make renting a home more affordable and accessible, managed the state between their Onboarding and Credit Underwriting Workflows. When we previewed Journeys with them, they couldn’t be more excited to start managing the entire process within Alloy. “This is exactly what we were envisioning to manage the complete credit underwriting process in Alloy. We’re very excited to set up our first Journey!” said Junaid Warwani, Director of Engineering at Jetty.

Our first iteration of Journeys enabled Workflow linking to accommodate our client’s most common use case around credit origination. Ongoing credit remarketing and pre-qualification were additional use cases for our credit clients that we can now easily support with Pending Actions. These actions pause a Journey in between Workflows. Alloy sends a webhook to the client requesting a response, and upon receiving that response, the Journey then resumes. This feature enables offer extensions to pre-qualified applicants and continues the Journey when they accept or decline the offer, often resulting in a hard credit pull upon acceptance.

Benefits of using Journeys

Since its initial launch supporting origination and credit use cases, Journeys at Alloy has evolved to become a central component for managing fraud, credit, and compliance decisioning. They allow for more effective design and execution of strategic and automated decision-making. Our clients use Journeys as a central design tool to sequence functional verifications (AML, Fraud, KYC) with risk protection (step-up authentications only for the riskiest applicants), and credit decisions with specificity at the country and product level.

Here are a few ways we’ve seen clients utilize Journeys to unlock business opportunities and cost efficiencies while staying ahead of fraud and compliance risk:

• Consumer onboarding and multi-entity applicants: Run automated KYC checks on consumers, declared Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs) and Principal Officer(s), and KYB checks on businesses.
• OnboardingPlus: Upon detection of high-risk activity (such as a contact detail change) following onboarding, automatically trigger step up verification using the Alloy SDK.
• Embedded finance: Sponsor banks, BaaS providers, and EMIs can build and enforce policy changes at scale by defining and passing rules onto select (or all) programs with one click using Journeys.
• Ongoing credit remarking: To extend your borrowers an offer for a new credit product, Journeys can facilitate the state management of the pre-qualification checks, the outcome of the offer extension, and final underwriting workflow, which includes a hard credit pull upon acceptance of the offer.
• Global identity verification: Depending on the applicant’s country of origin, Alloy can route them to the appropriate verification waterfalls specific to each region.

In particular, we’ve seen Journeys form a critical part of our customers’ holistic fraud prevention strategy, where speed is of the essence. This is because Journeys are built to adapt quickly to evolving fraud patterns, facilitating nimble testing and strategic improvements without the constant need for updates to the integration. Furthermore, Journeys unlocks access to the Alloy SDK which enables clients to easily add dynamic step-up authentication for additional KYC and ongoing fraud prevention into a Journey. This serves a dual purpose: in addition to protecting your organization from fraud, you can tailor the experience for your customers based on their level of risk, eliminating needless friction for your ‘good’ customers.

We built Journeys to empower our customers with more flexibility in the present and increased adaptability for the future. Journeys now are at the heart of the Alloy platform, providing the automation, flexibility and know-how that are core to modern fraud prevention and compliance management.