Online vehicle purchase and finance journey over an existing core platform
A customer-facing web application delivering the full online vehicle purchase and finance journey — pre-qualification, staged credit application, identity and bank verification, trade-in and payment setup — built as a presentation layer over the client's existing core dealer and finance platform rather than a replacement for it.
Vehicle finance is one of the longest, most abandonment-prone journeys in retail: a credit application, identity verification, bank verification and mandatory regulatory disclosures, historically completed in person because no other channel could handle the complexity. The core system holding inventory, customer, credit and payment records could not be replaced or destabilised, so the new channel had to work entirely through it rather than around it — with every operation a remote call that could fail, time out, or return something unexpected.
Built the application as a genuine backend-for-frontend: it holds almost no data of its own, and every core-platform operation — customer validation, profile updates, co-buyer management, pre-approval, the staged application steps — is isolated in one integration layer, so a change to the core's contract touches a single file rather than every controller and template. Added a separate pre-qualification path so customers see indicative finance terms before committing to a full credit application, and captured a partial customer record early in the journey so an abandoned application becomes a follow-up opportunity instead of a lost lead.
Content Security Policy, CSRF protection with token refresh, cache prevention on authenticated pages, cookie encryption and boundary validation of passwords, phone numbers and dates were built into the presentation layer itself, since a page collecting identity and bank data can't rely on the system behind it for protection. The view layer was kept separate from the integration and journey logic so the storefront could be redesigned repeatedly without disturbing the finance flow underneath, and the current generation ships as a container with assets compiled at image build time.
The complete purchase and finance journey — browsing, pre-qualification, a staged and resumable credit application with co-borrower support, identity and bank verification, disclosures, trade-in, down payment, appointment scheduling and post-sale payment management — runs online instead of requiring a dealership visit. The core platform was never modified, and the storefront can be redesigned on its own schedule without touching the finance journey underneath it.
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