Glossary
Home-improvement lending glossary
A plain-English glossary of the terms used in home-improvement lending and loan origination, from point-of-sale financing and multi-lender routing to soft credit pulls, adverse action notices, and the Truth in Lending Act. Each entry is defined simply so it is clear whether a term describes a product, a process, a legal role, or a piece of software. OneApp Finance is software for originating these loans, not a lender, broker, or marketplace.
- Loan origination system (LOS)
- A loan origination system is the software that runs a loan from application through approval and funding: it captures the application, pulls credit, applies credit policy, generates disclosures, and hands the funded loan off to a servicer. It does not service the loan or hold the loan ledger. OneApp Finance is an LOS built for home-improvement lending that operators license and run under their own brand.
- Point-of-sale (POS) financing
- Point-of-sale financing lets a borrower apply for and accept a loan at the moment of purchase, such as while a contractor is quoting a home-improvement project, rather than going to a bank separately beforehand. The financing is presented inside the buying flow so the borrower can see a monthly payment and decide on the spot.
- Home-improvement financing
- Home-improvement financing is consumer credit used to pay for renovation, repair, or upgrade work on a home, such as roofing, HVAC, windows, or solar. It is usually an unsecured installment loan offered through the contractor or channel at the point of sale, and it often funds in stages as the work is completed rather than all at once.
- White-label lending
- White-label lending is when a lender or channel runs a financing program under its own brand using software built by a separate technology provider. Every borrower-facing screen, email, and document carries the operator's brand, and the borrower never sees the underlying vendor. OneApp Finance is white-label software: the operator brings the capital and the brand, and the platform is the engine underneath.
- Multi-lender routing
- Multi-lender routing is sending one borrower application to several lenders so the borrower can compare real offers and pick one, instead of applying to each lender separately. It can run as parallel offers or as a waterfall. OneApp Finance routes a single application across the lenders an operator chooses, on one soft credit pull, without becoming the lender or the broker.
- Waterfall financing
- Waterfall financing offers one application to a panel of lenders in a set priority order, one at a time, until a lender approves it. It honors first-look and tiered lender agreements, so a preferred lender sees the application first and lower-priority lenders only see it if higher ones decline. See also parallel offers, the alternative approach.
- Parallel offers
- Parallel offers send one application to every lender on a panel at the same time and collect their decisions together, so the borrower sees multiple approvals side by side and chooses the best one. It is the fastest path to an offer and gives the borrower the most choice. See also waterfall financing, which works through lenders in sequence instead.
- Soft credit pull
- A soft credit pull is a review of a borrower's credit that does not affect their credit score and is not visible to other lenders as an inquiry. It is used for prequalification and shopping, so a borrower can see likely offers, including across multiple lenders, without a penalty for looking. Compare with a hard credit pull.
- Hard credit pull
- A hard credit pull is a full credit inquiry that the borrower authorizes when they formally apply for or accept credit. It is recorded on the credit report and can lower the score slightly. It is designed to happen once, at the chosen lender, after the borrower selects an offer, rather than once per lender shopped. Compare with a soft credit pull.
- Adverse action notice
- An adverse action notice is the written explanation a lender must give a borrower when it denies credit, or makes a counteroffer (such as approving less than requested or on worse terms) that the applicant does not accept, including the main reasons for the decision. It is required under federal law, and in a multi-lender flow each declining lender carries its own obligation to provide one. Handling these correctly is part of the compliance floor.
- Truth in Lending Act (TILA)
- The Truth in Lending Act is a federal law that requires lenders to disclose the cost of credit to consumers in a standard way, including the annual percentage rate (APR), the finance charge, and the total of payments, so borrowers can compare offers. Generating accurate, timely TILA disclosures is a core job of a loan origination system.
- Single-tenant vs multi-tenant
- Single-tenant and multi-tenant describe how software isolates one customer's data from another's. In a multi-tenant system, customers share one database separated by a tenant identifier; in a single-tenant system, each customer gets its own isolated install and database. OneApp Finance is single-tenant by deployment, so the deployment itself is the hard isolation boundary, optionally running in the operator's own cloud.
- Staged draw and holdback
- A staged draw releases loan funds in installments as a home-improvement project reaches agreed milestones, rather than paying the contractor the full amount upfront. A holdback keeps a portion of the funds back until the work is verified complete, protecting the borrower if the job is unfinished or substandard. Both are checked against contractor good-standing at the moment of each draw in dealer management.
- Lender of record vs creditor of record
- These terms name who holds the loan. The lender of record is the party that funds and is named on the loan; the creditor of record is the party to whom the debt is owed. In a direct program the operator is both; in a routing program the chosen panel lender is the creditor of record. OneApp Finance is never either one: it is the software, and the operator or the chosen lender holds these roles, named per application.
- Embedded lending
- Embedded lending is offering credit inside another company's product or workflow, such as financing presented within a contractor's sales tool or a channel's platform, rather than through a standalone lender's website. It is closely related to point-of-sale financing and is typically delivered through APIs and components that let a partner embed only the pieces they need.