MBC Financial Portal

Objective: Replace email and spreadsheets with a system built for lending decisions

Michigan Business Connection is a credit union service organization based in Ann Arbor. Since 2004 it has underwritten and serviced commercial loans for financial institutions across Michigan, and it is owned and governed by the credit unions it serves. Through MBC, a network of more than 40 local, community-based credit unions participates in commercial real estate loans, equipment financing, and lines of credit for Michigan businesses, sharing opportunities and risk across the network. MBC now manages more than $2.5 billion in business loans.

Every one of those loans involves a decision by multiple lenders. Opportunities, renewals, modifications, and portfolio maintenance items went out by email, responses came back by email, and the status of any given deal lived in a spreadsheet. As the network and the portfolio grew, that couldn’t hold. About ten years ago, MBC asked Web Ascender to build an application that would let lenders give digital feedback on potential loans and manage each loan from start to finish. The platform has evolved through multiple engagements since, and its latest generation is a ground-up rebuild: a central, secure portal where staff publish deals and partner lenders review them and record their decisions, with the controls a financial institution expects.

What Web Ascender Did

Web Ascender designed and built the MBC Financial Portal, a secure web-based commercial loan participation platform shared by MBC staff and its network of partner lenders.

Deals and decisions

• A loan opportunity marketplace - staff publish new opportunities, renewals, modifications, and portfolio maintenance items with full deal terms, collateral, industry, and status tracking from draft through allocation and close
• A structured lender decision workflow - partner lenders review deals and respond with an approval and commitment amount, a decline with reasons, or a still-reviewing status, with threaded comments on every response
• Targeted distribution - deals go to individual lenders or reusable lender groups, and every change is versioned with a full audit history
• Automated reminders - business-day-aware background jobs nudge lenders with pending responses and alert staff to approaching decision deadlines
• Bulk operations - filter-driven updates across many loans at once, with a safety check and a per-record audit trail

Documents and data collection

• A secure document library - monthly, quarterly, annual review, due diligence, and board-level documents scoped to specific loans, lenders, groups, or users, with automatic expiration of stale files
• Public document collection - tokenized, login-free upload links let borrowers and partners fulfill document requests, with progress tracking and completion notifications
• Online ACH authorization - a public form for payment authorizations with encrypted storage of bank account details and staff notification

Communication and reporting

• Templated email campaigns - merge-field templates for deal, lender, and contact data, with syntax validation and delivery tracking
• Reporting and exports - deal statistics dashboards, searchable and filterable lists on every resource, and Excel export of loan and response data
• Integrations - scheduled sync of loan, customer, and staff records from Microsoft Lists through the Microsoft Graph API, transactional email with suppression management, and single sign-on into a hosted knowledge base

Security built for financial data

• Role-based access control - superusers, administrators, staff, decision-making lenders, review-only lenders, board members, and report-only users, with fine-grained permissions on every record
• Hardened authentication - two-factor authentication with backup codes, invitation-only accounts, account lockout, session timeouts, password rotation and history, login activity logging, and a daily security report
• Admin tooling - user impersonation for support, feature flags for staged rollouts, a background job console, and health-check endpoints

The portal runs on Ruby on Rails 8 with Hotwire, Turbo Streams, and Stimulus, backed by MySQL and Solid Queue, and ships as a Docker container deployed with Kamal to staging and production.

The Outcome

MBC’s participation network now runs through one system. Staff post a deal once and know exactly where every lender stands on it. Lenders see everything they need to decide, respond in a structured way, and get reminded before a deadline slips. Documents live where they belong with the right people able to see them, borrowers deliver paperwork through a link instead of an inbox, and every action is auditable.

For an organization managing billions in loans on behalf of the credit unions that own it, that’s not a convenience. In MBC’s own words, it’s a vital part of the business, and ten years on, Web Ascender is still the team building it.