Soft pull and hard pull are not two settings
Treating inquiry type as a toggle hides the four things that actually differ between a qualification flow and an origination flow.
Notes on building credit, identity, and decisioning infrastructure — written for the risk, product, and engineering teams who have to operate it.
Treating inquiry type as a toggle hides the four things that actually differ between a qualification flow and an origination flow.
A consent checkbox proves someone clicked. A consent record proves what they were shown, when, and which inquiry it authorized.
A policy that only the model owner understands becomes a queue nobody can clear. Explainability is an operational requirement before it is a regulatory one.
Running identity checks after the credit pull inverts the cost of being wrong. The cheapest exception is the one caught before any downstream system has acted.
Four properties every webhook endpoint needs — verify, acknowledge fast, deduplicate, and tolerate reordering — with the failure each one prevents.
Most lending products are silent for the eleven months between applications. That silence is where the relationship is actually decided.
Happy-path sandbox testing certifies the least likely outcome. A short list of the states worth exercising before a production cutover.
Bring qualification, decisioning, and consumer engagement into one considered platform conversation.