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Background
Onramp funds eCommerce entrepreneurs — helping online merchants turn ideas into scalable businesses with flexible working capital designed around inventory cycles. As Onramp expanded into the broker/ISO market, speed became mission-critical. The team needed a scalable, tech-first way to handle higher submission volumes without adding headcount or slowing down broker response times.
Before Heron
Prior to Heron, every deal submission landed in a shared inbox. Underwriters manually reviewed each bank statement, validated revenue, and confirmed whether the merchant fit Onramp’s eCommerce profile.
Reviewing each deal used to take 1–5 hours, with underwriters carefully handling every file by hand. It worked well in the early days, but as broker volume grew, the team saw an opportunity to speed things up and make the process more scalable through automation.
“We’d send a statement to underwriting and wait hours for a pre-qual amount — and we were restricted to business hours.”
Why Onramp Chose Heron
As Onramp started accepting applications from brokers, the team evaluated several automation tools but needed a partner that could own the entire document-to-decision workflow — from parsing to CRM delivery — while adapting to their specific credit box. That meant identifying eCommerce indicators, enforcing revenue thresholds, and applying state-based eligibility rules.
Heron stood out by delivering custom workflows built for each lender’s niche and credit model, not one-size-fits-all automation. Onramp was able to replicate its exact qualification process in software — and update it instantly as criteria evolved.
Just as critical, Heron integrated seamlessly with Salesforce, Onramp’s core operating system, ensuring every qualified deal, decline, and pre-qual flowed directly into their CRM. Heron offered not just automation, but a system purpose-built around how Onramp already worked, rather than forcing them to adapt to a rigid tool.
Heron’s Solution
Onramp implemented a combination of Heron’s product suite to fully automate pre-qualification and CRM ingestion:
- Heron Intake — Captures and routes broker submissions automatically.
- Heron Parsers — Extracts key metrics from statements and identifies eCommerce indicators.
- Heron Checks — Applies Onramp’s qualification logic, including minimum revenue thresholds, restricted states, and debt-to-revenue ratios.
- Heron Relay — Syncs all qualified deals, declines, and pre-qual numbers directly into Salesforce in real time.
Heron’s integration with Salesforce was seamless. All data now flows directly into Onramp’s CRM — no manual uploads, no API maintenance — keeping the team fully within their existing workflow. The result: a fully automated pre-qualification pipeline that runs in under three minutes, from email receipt to broker-ready offer.
Outcomes
1. Instant Decisions — 98% Faster Deal Qualification
Before Heron, every submission sat in a Slack queue waiting for an underwriter to review it — a process that took up to five hours and only happened during business hours.
Now, Heron runs the entire pre-qualification automatically in under three minutes. It detects whether a merchant is eCommerce, checks revenue thresholds, flags restricted states, and calculates a soft pre-qualification amount — all before anyone touches the file.
“Within about three minutes, we know if they’re eCommerce, above our revenue threshold, not in a restricted state, and have a soft pre-qual number ready.”
That speed transformed Onramp’s broker experience. Brokers now get near-instant answers, deals move forward the same hour they’re submitted, and what once took an afternoon now happens on autopilot.
2. Smarter Screening — Auto-Declines Eliminate Wasted Underwriting Time
Heron doesn’t just move faster — it moves smarter. The system now screens every submission as it comes in, applying Onramp’s lending rules in real time to separate fundable opportunities from those that don’t fit.
It automatically flags qualified deals, calculates debt-to-revenue ratios, and auto-declines submissions that fall below the minimum revenue threshold, come from restricted states, or sit outside the eCommerce vertical.
“It helps us validate what’s real and automate the declines — so our team isn’t wasting time on files we can’t fund.”
By filtering out unqualified deals upfront, Heron ensures underwriters only see viable submissions. The team no longer spends hours reviewing dead ends — they focus exclusively on high-value credit decisions and consistently move more deals through the funnel without adding headcount.
“The impact of getting that off their plate — not having that annoyance and just sticking to true underwriting — was huge.”
With auto-declines and routing logic built into the workflow, Onramp’s underwriting team operates at higher capacity, processes more deals per day, and scales efficiently — all without increasing headcount.
3. From Disconnected Data to Real-Time Visibility
Before Heron, deal data was scattered across inboxes, Slack threads, and spreadsheets, making it hard for Onramp to track submissions or measure how its credit criteria were performing.
Heron changed that by automatically structuring every submission, qualification, and decline — and pushing it into Salesforce in real time. The team now has a single, live view of their entire broker pipeline, from intake to decision, without relying on manual reporting or exports.
“The dashboards and visibility were surprising — structured, easy to work with, and sparked new ideas for underwriting.”
With all their data connected and up to date, Onramp can spot trends instantly, test new thresholds, and refine their underwriting logic on the fly. What started as automation has become a foundation for continuous improvement and faster, more confident decision-making.
Looking Ahead
Onramp now uses Heron as the backbone of its broker channel operations — automating pre-quals, improving partner experience, and paving the way for continued automation throughout their processes.
“Heron brings automation and speed outside of our core platform. It gives us the tech we’d never have time to build ourselves — and it just works. The more we automate, the more ideas we have for what’s next. It’s opened the door to a lot of possibilities.”
Heron continues to help Onramp achieve its mission of funding more eCommerce founders, faster — by automating manual underwriting work.
