SPARK 7.9.2 Release Notes and Webinar

The SPARK 7.9.2 release is planned for Saturday, April 8th. This update includes a new user experience for Referral Partners and enhanced authorized user management.

Please join us for a release webinar on Thursday, April 6th at 11:00 CT, where you can see a demonstration and ask questions about the content of this release. You can view a recording of the webinar at this link.

What's New

Enhanced Referral Partner Experience

After several months of research, design, and development we are excited to release an Enhanced Referral Partner Experience in SPARK!

With this new functionality, we aim to address the following concerns we've heard from customers:

1. Referral Partners (also referred to as Brokers) want visibility into the status of their referred deals.

2. Document collection workflows vary by Referral Partner user.

3. Referral Partners need a way to quickly identify outstanding documentation and information that is needed from the Applicant to keep each deal moving forward.

We are introducing a new Referral Partner user type that allows referral partners to start the referral process without lender intervention, monitor the status of all of their deals in progress, and provide at-a-glance access to assigned Information Requests.

Enhanced Lender Experience for Managing Referral Partners

We have also enhanced the lender experience for creating and managing referral partners. There are distinct permissions to manage all referral partners or manage only referral partners assigned to a specific lender.

Users can drill into referral partner statistics by company and by referral partner contact. They can also invite new and existing referral partners to the Enhanced Referral Partner Experience.

Document Placeholders for DocuSign Certificates of Completion

We have added support for a new document placeholder called 'Electronic Signature Certificate of Completion.' For customers who have integrated DocuSign with SPARK, this will allow a Certificate of Completion placeholder to be generated and populated when each DocuSign envelope is completed. Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you are interested in adding this new placeholder to your SPARK configuration.

Package Source field for Package Lists

We have added a Package Source field to SPARK that can be pulled into Package List to indicate whether a package was created by the Lender, via a Lead Form, or by a Referral Partner.

What's Changed

Authorized User Management

We have separated referral partners from other External Users and Individuals on the Authorized Users page. This will enable package owners to invite Referral Partners to the Enhanced Referral Partner Experience or as an Authorized User for that package.

Deprecation of SPARK v1 API

Going forward, we are no longer supporting v1 of our API. Affected customers have been previously notified.

Information Request Reminder Notifications on Complete Packages

Information Request Reminders were previously disabled on Complete packages. There are certain scenarios where our customers want borrowers to be notified about open Information Requests on complete packages (e.g. Annual Reviews). We have updated these notifications to be sent on complete packages as long as the Information Request due date is not more than 30 days old.

Accessibility Improvements in Applicant Experience

We have started working with a third party to audit and improve the digital accessibility of the SPARK Applicant Portal. This release includes accessibility updates to the applicant login screen and dashboard.

Sensitive Business Documents in Applicant Experience

This update improves the security of business documents in the Applicant Portal to restrict sensitive document access to individuals who are owners of that business.

Required PFS details in Applicant Experience

To prevent the submission of incomplete Personal Financial Statements (PFS), required fields on the Applicant PFS data entry have been updated to enforce the same requirements as the PFS for internal users.

Enhanced Snippets User Experience across SPARK

Several months ago, we updated the user experience for Snippets in Guarantor Analysis. We have updated the other Snippet interactions throughout SPARK to use this enhanced functionality.

Lead Form Updates

We made the following updates to the lead forms released in SPARK 7.9:

• If the owner of a custom lead form link is inactive, any leads submitted via that link will be assigned to the lead form's default owner.

• There is now a warning as part of the lead form configuration to alert administrators when the owner of a custom lead form link is inactive.

• We now will check for a valid date of formation that aligns with businesses that are new or existing.

What's Been Fixed

• An issue was resolved related to ordering multiple personal credit reports when an individual was missing an address. This was included in a hotfix.

• An issue was fixed related to new lead forms where the DBA question was answered 'Yes' but the DBA name could be left blank. This was included in a hotfix.

• The sort order of document types in SPARK's task data management area was changed to order by the document name.

• We resolved several issues in a hotfix related to our Single Sign On (SSO) beta.

• We resolved an issue in personal cashflow where tabbing in and out of a cell would intermittently clear the previously entered value. This was included in a hotfix.

• We resolved an issue with the loan accounting statement that was causing unnecessary blank pages to be generated. This was included in a hotfix.

• An issue was resolved where the Terms page was not loading if no primary financing source existed on the package and the product had a prepayment penalty. This was included in a hotfix.

• We added additional validation to our Create Package API endpoint to ensure that a package name is provided.

• We fixed an issue with LexisNexis sending back an invalid date of birth for an individual. This was included in a hotfix.

• We added an additional constraint to ensure that SPARK can't create multiple debt schedules for a single entity.

• We removed invalid characters from the franchise names in our franchise list.

• We resolved an issue impacting the package summary page when both credit reporting and LexisNexis are enabled. This was included in a hotfix.

• We updated our logic related to sending environmental requirements to the SBA when the question isn't applicable to the loan. This was included in a hotfix.

• We fixed an issue on our bulk document upload page where the bulk uploaded document was missing a hyperlink and couldn't be viewed after it was uploaded.

• We updated our late payments calculation logic to stop reducing the 30-60-90 totals by the number of public records due for MeridianLink credit reports. This is due to differences in how MeridianLink and FICO personal credit return credit report data. This was included in a hotfix.

• An issue was resolved that caused SBA loans documented on a debt schedule to be improperly classified which impacted the Refinance Existing SBA Debt question in SPARK's credit memo. This was included in a hotfix.

• We fixed a display issue in our document listing when viewing documents grouped by business and individual where the spouse of a guarantor was showing up as a guarantor. This was included in a hotfix.

• We were notified of an issue where debt schedule entries for individuals were inadvertently getting deleted. We have been unable to replicate this issue internally and haven't identified the root cause; however, we made a change in our auto-save logic in an attempt to resolve the issue. This change was included in a hotfix.

• We updated our Personal Financial Statement to accept negative numbers for regular salary income, investment income from stocks and bonds, real estate income from investment properties, and other income not previously included.

• When a user has unsubscribed from all notifications, they will still receive two-factor authentication tokens and password reset emails.

Find Out More

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If you have any feedback or questions about this release, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email us at support@lendwithspark.com. Your feedback will help us make SPARK the best loan origination software in the market!