Canopy Fundamentals

Goals

The ultimate goal of our Fundamentals section is to get you comfortable enough working with Canopy's API to be able to coordinate, plan, orchestrate and launch (or migrate) your lending or credit program operations on Canopy. In order to do so, you will need to:

Understand the fundamental usage patterns for our API
Understand how to reason about key configurations and their downstream implications
Contextualize the vision of your lending program's user and operational flows into touchpoints with Canopy's API
Build or strengthen your domain understanding of lending and credit, and apply that understanding on a technical level to our API

Key Paradigms Core To Canopy

Event-based Architecture

Accounts created in Canopy have multiple events occur over the account lifecycle.

Scheduled Events
Statement cuts, due dates, promotional windows, etc.

Account Activity
Account edits, transactions, payments, etc.

Canopy's events engine enforces that the system responds to all of these events per configured rules, and thus can also serve as the reliable source of truth for information around these events from external systems. For example -- based on a configured promotional period for an account, Canopy will automatically end promotional policies on a date that was configured when the account was created.

Immutability and Retroactive Events

By maintaining an immutable ledger, Canopy allows you to track and audit the full history of activity on your account. This has a few key advantages.

Historical insight
As changes are made to an account over time, you can still reliably get a full view of account balances, statuses, and state at any point in time.

Hypothetical future insight
You can also gain insight into what an account will look like in the future, or would look like in the future under different conditions. For example, if a customer were to double their monthly payments.

Retroactive event processing
Fully waterfall changes to an account when events are processed retroactively. Disputed transactions, payment reversals, or even payments or transactions that may have failed to be processed correctly by the time they reached Canopy and need to be processed retroactively.

Line-item Level Accounting

Reporting Granularity
See exactly how each payment poured across which fees, principal value for different transactions, interest for different transactions, loans, and other line items.

Line-item-level Policies
Expand the level of creativity and flexibility of your loan programs. Charge different interest rates by merchant type, waive fees from late payments made in the offseason, and more. Create flexible programs that make sense for your business model.