How a consumer lender cut form change cycles from three weeks to under two days with a zero-code webforms platform

Summary

A US-based financial services provider with more than 6,000 employees offers personal and auto loans to customers across the US and Mexico. Its business depends on more than 300 customer forms, including loan applications, contracts, insurance documents, and customer notices. Those forms were coded in PowerBuilder, a legacy platform that could not support modern digital channels or rapid updates.

Working with Marlabs, the lender replaced that ecosystem with a zero-code webforms platform that business users own. Form change cycles dropped from more than three weeks to less than two days, legal teams now publish updates within an hour, and the platform generates more than 400,000 forms every month across web, mobile, tablet, and digital signature channels.

Challenge

Every one of the lender's customer forms was hard-coded in PowerBuilder. Even a minor legal or policy update required a developer to change the code, followed by quality assurance (QA) and a formal release. Each update took more than three weeks, which slowed time to market for new products and made regulatory changes costly to absorb.

The legacy forms also could not support web, mobile, or tablet experiences. As the lender expanded its digital channels and needed to close loans remotely, the forms became a bottleneck on growth. Reviewing each form for accuracy took two to three days of manual effort.

The lender needed a way for business teams to update forms quickly and safely, with modern digital channels and remote transactions supported from the start.

Solution

Marlabs delivered a digital forms platform built for speed, scale, and business ownership. The platform decoupled form management from legacy systems and delivered forms securely through application programming interfaces (APIs) to every customer-facing channel. The work ran in four phases.

Assessment and Architecture Design

The team assessed the lender's existing PowerBuilder forms landscape to understand how each form was built, used, and maintained. From that analysis, Marlabs designed a future-state architecture focused on portability, security, performance, and user experience. Security and performance principles were set at the outset so that every later phase built on the same foundation.

RTF Template Enablement and Conversion

The team converted more than 300 PowerBuilder forms into editable rich text format (RTF) templates. Each converted template preserved the exact print fidelity of the original, which mattered for legally binding documents such as contracts and loan applications. The team validated print formats and standardized templates so that forms could be managed consistently going forward.

Platform and Web Services Development

Marlabs built a web-based platform where business users manage templates directly and version control tracks every change. The team also developed an API framework that serves forms to all digital channels, including web portals, mobile apps, tablets, and digital signature tools. Together, these components moved ownership of form content from developers to the business.

Automation and Intelligent Quality Assurance

To speed up conversion and review, the team used the Marlabs mAdvisor text extractor to automate form validation. Intelligent issue detection flagged discrepancies for reviewers to resolve instead of relying on line-by-line manual checks. This automation improved conversion accuracy and cut the review effort for each form from two to three days to under half a day.

Results

The lender now manages and delivers customer forms on a scalable, zero-code platform. Form change cycles fell from more than three weeks to less than two days. Legal teams modify and publish customer forms within an hour without technical help, which lets the lender respond to regulatory and policy changes as they happen.

The platform generates more than 400,000 forms every month across web portals, mobile apps, tablets, and digital signature channels. Intelligent automation reduced form review effort from two to three days per form to under half a day. The platform also made remote loan closures possible as part of the lender's post-COVID digitization initiative, and it now serves as a reusable foundation for future digital work.

Impact

The lender moved form ownership from IT to the business and opened every digital channel:

• Form change cycles fell from more than three weeks to less than two days.

• More than 400,000 forms are generated every month across digital channels.

• Legal teams publish form updates within an hour without technical help.

• Form review effort dropped from two to three days per form to under half a day.

• More than 300 legacy forms were converted with exact print fidelity.

• Remote loan closures became possible as part of the post-COVID digitization initiative.