MAHLOAN
Customer: Vidyasri Ravi, Founder
Background:
After five fruitful years as VP Marketing at Lending Tree, the charismatic and visionary founder of
Mahloan, Vidyasri Ravi, grew dissatisfied with the company’s failure to adequately serve many smaller
borrowers who had creditworthy projects but no way to effectively and clearly present them on the
Lending Tree website. Thus, Vidyasri has made the decision to launch Mahloan, an online and mobile
peer-to-peer lending platform that enables borrowers to post videos, presentations, white papers, etc., of
their projects that need financing by soliciting loans from many lenders, each lending a small amount
(referred to as “crowd lending”). A venture capital firm and angel investors who were moved by
Vidyasri’s zeal and commitment to democratizing lending gave her $3 million in startup money. Investors
have been told that the Mahloan platform will “go live” in three months by Vidyasri.
The Project:
The platform must be created from scratch for Mahloan. Borrowers should be able to exhibit their projects
on the platform in any format they want (documents, photographs, videos, websites), and lenders should
be able to see the projects. The website ought to offer automatic credit scoring and interest rates
determined by an algorithm based on credit scores. The credit rating should use both current credit ratings
from independent lending bureaus and machine learning based on the online survey Mahloan suggests
using to create borrower profiles. The borrower should have the choice of accepting the interest rate and
listing the project on the website, or rejecting the interest rate and not paying it. Each project should be
published on the site’s home page, together with the goal amount the borrower requires and the interest
rate they have agreed to pay. The platform must provide a procedure for handling missed payments and
the associated fees, as well as loan defaults. Mahloan will need to work with an existing bank to oversee
transactions since it does not wish to register as a bank due to the strict constraints that US commercial
law lays on banks. It should be possible to keep money in escrow until the desired loan amount is reached
and then release them to the borrower using the website’s transaction processing system.Your team has
been chosen by Vidyasri to construct this peer-to-peer lending platform.
Your Task:
Background:
We will assume that at this point in your team project, you have finished the requirements study and
submitted your feasibility analysis to management and investors, who have authorized the funds you
asked to execute the project. In order to complete the third set of deliverables for your team project, your
team must choose the project management strategy you will employ to build and/or configure your
application. Next you will also make a burndown chart for your application, identify the Product Backlog
Items (PBIs), and establish a release strategy.
This stage of the project is when your group is getting ready to write and/or configure the application
code. The team may then begin building the application after this is finished.
Project Approach:
1) For your team project, create a table with the 14 Home Grounds characteristics, your team’s rating for
each of the characteristics (ratings range from 1 to 5, with 5 denoting “critical” and 1 denoting “not a
problem”), and a one-sentence reason for each team’s rating.
2) Develop a radar map based on the ratings you determined in 1a). Describe and explain in 150 words or
fewer if your project might benefit from BRUF, BDUF, both, or none.
3) Describe the management strategy you intend to adopt and provide justification in a narrative of 200
words or less.
