Collaborative Ecosystem

Drawing on Alfa’s large catalogue of REST APIs, efficiently designed SPIs, and leading-edge data transfer technology, you can easily integrate new software and services into the core Alfa Systems platform. By working with our architects and accredited partners, you can achieve powerful integrations with leading-edge technology and build your own customised platform - and help drive innovation within your organisation. 

Alfa’s network of consultants and technical experts collaborate to build up a rich knowledgebase of integration case studies and solutions, helping customers to refine their choices and understand best practices.

Alfa’s partnership ecosystem goes beyond software collaborations; our delivery partnerships offer customers access to local resources fully trained on Alfa Systems configuration and processes, enhanced by Alfa’s AI assistant, AskThea.

Supporting integration use cases that cover the end-to-end lifecycle of an asset finance contract, Alfa Systems’ powerful workflow, webhooks and business rules enable you to orchestrate your entire ecosystem. Easily implement and manage integrations directly from Alfa Systems through configuration, eliminating the need for vendor development.

Data Pipeline provides change data capture (CDC) event streams for rapid, real-time data transfer. Using Apache Kafka, the industry standard for real-time streaming data pipelines, CDC enables efficient connectivity of Alfa Systems' rich operational reporting data to downstream data and BI platforms.

Benefit from state-of-the-art technology tools, such as those used to build Alfa’s AI assistant, AskThea. Securely integrate these tools into your ecosystem to drive innovation and efficiency.

Alfa Systems offers a robust suite of web services with over 200 granular endpoints, exposing its rich functionality to external systems, facilitating seamless integration, and enabling applications to leverage Alfa Systems as a comprehensive financial and portfolio administration engine.

• Extensive endpoint coverage: With over 200 endpoints available across every business process, there are no limitations on call volume, ensuring scalability and flexibility in integration scenarios.
• Functional parity: The functionality exposed through web services maintains parity with the features available in the user interface, providing consistency and enabling a smooth transition between UI-based and automated processes.
• Granularity: The granularity of the web service endpoints allows for precise control and fine-grained access to specific functionalities, enhancing flexibility and customisation options.
• Versioning and backwards-compatibility: Web services in Alfa Systems are designed with versioning and backwards compatibility at the forefront, ensuring smooth transitions during system upgrades or changes.
• Supportability: Web services include built-in functionality to facilitate application support, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and maintain system stability.
• Documentation standards: Alfa Systems provides comprehensive documentation for its web services, including OpenAPI specifications, WSDLs and Swagger-based documentation. This documentation ensures clarity, ease of integration, and streamlined development processes for external systems.
• Protocol flexibility: Alfa Systems supports both REST/JSON and SOAP/XML protocols, catering to diverse integration requirements and allowing developers to choose the most suitable approach for their applications.

Alfa Systems offers a range of synchronous integrations with external systems, which can be triggered directly from within the platform, functioning as Service Provider Integrations (SPIs). These SPIs facilitate seamless connections, allowing efficient and real-time data exchange between Alfa Systems and external platforms. Below are a few of the many standard SPIs currently in use with our customers:

• Document management. Integrates with a document store to upload and retrieve documents.
• Customer search. Integrates with enterprise systems, such as a CRM, for retrieval of customer information.
• Bank account validation. Validates bank account details such as account and routing numbers.
• Credit decisioning. Requests credit decisioning metrics from an external system for automated credit decisioning.

This flexible integration pattern allows you to connect Alfa Systems seamlessly with the vendor solution of your choice, eliminating the need for custom development.

At Alfa we fully recognise that our customers use Alfa Systems as one component of a wider technology landscape. Accordingly, in addition to real-time data APIs, in-app reporting and the Operational Data Store (ODS) - supplied as part of the core feature set of Alfa Systems - Alfa has built an event streaming service providing change data capture (CDC), powered by Apache Kafka.

This service delivers a continuous stream of real-time reporting data events, enabling customers to combine their real-time Alfa Systems reporting data easily with that from other systems into a central repository or data warehouse, lake or lakehouse. From there, they can leverage enterprise-wide BI tools for deeper insights and operational reporting.

AI's rapid evolution has ushered in a wave of new technological tools, transforming how businesses operate and innovate. Positioned within the AWS ecosystem, Alfa Cloud - Alfa’s standardised, single-tenant, cloud-native SaaS solution - places the latest advancements at your fingertips. This ongoing access is crucial as the technology landscape is continually evolving, offering fresh opportunities to boost efficiency and effectiveness.

Alfa Cloud is designed for customers looking to scale their offering efficiently, both dynamically and on demand.

Leading-edge technologies and automated services empower customers to roll out innovative solutions to the market, ensuring optimal performance - not only for daily operations, but also during high-demand periods with resource-intensive processes.

Choosing Alfa Systems gives you access to a wide and ever-expanding range of AWS services and tools, within a fully integrated environment, already connected within the cloud. Regardless of where your other technology resides, using Alfa Cloud eliminates the need to navigate internal network boundaries, allowing for a smoother adaptation to changing technological demands and keeping your systems at the forefront of innovation.

These rapidly evolving toolsets enable the combination of innovation and prototyping to produce breakthrough solutions. This allows Alfa to deliver up-to-the-minute technical and functional solutions, without starting from scratch.

In recent years, several AI-driven solutions have emerged, designed to automate the originations business process. A recent proof of concept enabled Alfa to take advantage of these advancements, along with key AWS services, to automate the majority of the funding journey.

Workflow in Alfa Systems orchestrates the entire end-to-end process, allowing customers to configure and adapt it to their specific requirements. Crucially, the solution isn't tied to specific providers, offering extensibility and the flexibility to plug in new and improved services as they emerge in the market.

Key highlights:

• Once the quote is captured, customer data is sent to KYC, Fraud and Affordability solutions for verification. Workflow triggers additional manual verification automatically when pertinent information is flagged, using Alfa Systems’ business rules to automate the decisioning.
• Customer correspondence and CRM updates are handled by the group solution, with metadata forwarded from Alfa Systems at a specific step in the workflow. Automation is further enhanced through integrated e-signing capabilities.
• Processing and classification of documents within the contract pack - such as supplier invoices and identification - is prime automation territory. Our proof of concept used AWS services and AI via advanced large language models to automate the classification and validation of such documents, ensuring dynamically that they align with the contract stored in Alfa Systems.