Challenge
At Constrafor, we're revolutionizing construction finance with innovative products that strengthen the relationships Subcontractors have with GCs. Achieving this goal requires sophisticated financial analysis and monitoring tools. In our early stages, with a smaller team, we faced a critical challenge: how to perform time-intensive financial assessments to determine creditworthiness without overwhelming our limited resources.
Our Credit Ops team needed a way to quickly analyze customer financials, parse through complicated bank records, and monitor post-funding activities. "Traditionally, we would have to manually review financial documents to build tables evaluating risk and the creditworthiness of subcontractors,” explains Director of Credit Operations Alay Mehta. This approach, however, is prone to error and very time-consuming.
To accurately investigate where the money is going and where it’s flowing, Constrafor needed a solution that could automate these processes, integrate seamlessly with our existing systems, and provide useful context for banking transactions.
Solution
With Heron Data, we can rapidly and securely analyze customer financials, review bank records, and monitor activity without diverting precious resources from our core operations. "Heron analyzes all of those historical records and evaluates fraud risk automatically within 5 seconds. Literally like 5 seconds," Alay noted. And with Heron, we can flag variables that matter most to us, giving us a way to personalize risk profiles that align with our underwriting processes.
Another major factor that led us to partner with Heron Data was their willingness to meet our specific needs. Despite having a use case that fell slightly outside of their typical scope, Alay noted that Heron Data was able to build a custom solution for Constrafor in less than two weeks. “We make a point of sitting alongside our customers,” shared Co-Founder and COO of Heron Data Jamie Parker speaking on their creative approach, “we want to understand their pain points back, and ensure that our solution is fully tailored to their requirements.”
Results
The impact of Heron Data on Constrafor's operations has been transformative. By partnering with Heron Data, we've significantly accelerated our financial analysis and monitoring processes while maintaining our focus on core product innovation. This time-saving translates to tangible benefits: we estimate that Heron Data has reduced our manual effort from "anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes depending on the customer, to literally sub 10 seconds." And from Heron’s side Jamie adds, “we are delighted to be working with a market-leading solution like Constrafor. At the end of the day we want to see our technology enable real-world impact like – in Constrafor’s case – fair and affordable credit for underserved industries like Construction."
Our Credit Ops team now operates with unprecedented efficiency, thanks to Heron Data's automated financial analysis and monitoring tools. These solutions have streamlined our underwriting processes, enhanced our ability to assess customer financial health, and simplified complex monitoring tasks. And with the flexibility of Heron Data, Constrafor has been able to quickly iterate on these processes as our business needs evolve. As Alay put it, "It's been a big component helping us tweak our underwriting model as we’ve matured."
This agility has been crucial in our fast-paced industry, allowing us to adapt quickly to market changes and customer needs while maintaining our competitive edge in construction finance technology.
