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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 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 product team leader, I want to take you through the process of conceiving and developing one of our most exciting features.
What is Alloy's Journeys feature?
Journeys is the infrastructure that allows you to orchestrate your application processing workflows into a single configuration and API endpoint within the Alloy platform. With Journeys, multiple decisioning workflows become more manageable, culminating in a single, final decision for a given applicant.
Why we built Journeys
We first launched Journeys in February 2022. The origin of Journeys can be traced back to a Miro board where we mapped out how our credit clients were using Alloy. A majority of them bundled both onboarding and credit underwriting together into one credit origination flow for new customers.
This scenario was a common use case: A prospective customer would apply for a credit card and get sent through an onboarding workflow and a credit underwriting workflow. Once the applicant hit “submit” on a new credit card application, the financial institution or fintech would make an API request to run that customer through their onboarding workflow. If the outcome was approved, the organization would then send another request to their credit underwriting workflow to assess creditworthiness. And if that outcome was approved, then the applicant would also be approved, and a new customer account would be opened.
To think that was just the happy path! You can only imagine how complex this process became when you added manual reviews and document verification to the process.
Before Journeys, Alloy clients made separate API calls in each workflow and managed the state internally. Multi-workflow use cases, when an applicant moves from one workflow to the next, would cause the review queue to break down. Entities are reviewed per workflow, which made it difficult for clients to assess entities applying for multiple products with the same credit underwriting workflow.
Our early credit clients wanted to join these workflows into a single configuration, and for Alloy to help 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, our Journeys feature was born.
Journeys 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.
Journeys led to the creation of another product feature called “Applications.” 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 makes home rentals more 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.
Today, these actions pause a customer’s journey between workflows. Alloy sends a webhook to the client requesting a response, and upon receiving that response, the journey resumes. Coupled with Alloy’s Journeys feature, Pending Actions enables financial institutions and fintechs to extend offers to pre-qualified applicants and continue the onboarding journey when they accept or decline the offer — often initiating a hard credit pull upon acceptance.
Benefits of using Journeys
Since its initial launch supporting origination and credit use cases, Alloy’s Journeys feature has become central to managing fraud, credit, and compliance decisioning. It allows 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 use 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) after 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 the final underwriting workflow, including 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.
We’ve seen Journeys become a critical part of our customers’ holistic fraud prevention strategy, where speed is of the essence. This is because Journeys adapts quickly to evolving fraud patterns, facilitating nimble testing and strategic improvements without the constant need for updates to the integration.
Journeys unlocks access to the Alloy SDK, which enables clients to easily add dynamic step-up authentication for additional KYC and ongoing fraud prevention. This serves a dual purpose: Protecting your organization from fraud and tailoring the experience to your customers’ level of risk. The result is less needless friction for your ‘good’ customers.
How to approve more good customers
We built Journeys to empower our financial services clients with more flexibility in the present and better adaptability for the future. Journeys is now at the heart of the Alloy platform, providing the automation, agility, and sequential know-how that’s critical to modern fraud prevention and compliance management.