For Max Rothstein, Head of Solutions and Integrations at Upstart, the stakes of his job are baked into the company mission.
Upstart is an AI lending marketplace connecting banks and credit union partners to consumers who need access to affordable credit. Max is responsible for making sure that when a borrower is approved, the following chain of events executes without a hitch, every time – if they don’t, real people feel the impact.
But as Upstart’s partner network grew, so did the complexity of keeping that promise at scale. The company’s prior lender onboarding process was quietly becoming a bottleneck, but with support from API People to effectively embed Workato, Upstart cleared it.
Here’s how they built a three-way partnership with scalable infrastructure to meet Upstart’s ambitions and the needs of more borrowers.
Upstart’s growth outpaced their integration model
Upstart sits at the center of a complex B2B2C ecosystem. On one side, there are consumers seeking credit, and on the other, over 100 lending partners managing their own core banking systems, IT roadmaps, and capacity allocation. Upstart serves as the connective tissue between them: bringing in the borrower, making a credit decision, matching qualified borrowers to the right lending partner, and ensuring data flows seamlessly from Upstart to the appropriate lending partner.
Previously, every implementation was unique. Upstart relied on SFTP file transfers and custom scripting, which meant every lending partner had to write and maintain their own code to receive Upstart’s data. Since every new lending partner onboarding required a formal change order and
code deployment, even routine customizations couldn’t happen without the lender’s IT involvement. Most banks and credit unions run on tight IT roadmaps with limited capacity, and for a company whose growth depends on onboarding partners quickly, Upstart was looking for a more scalable, timely and consistent way to implement new lending partners.
Two things were changing at once. Upstart’s lending partner network was growing fast, and the diversity of institutions – with different core banking systems and IT capacity – made bespoke integrations increasingly difficult to sustain. At the same time, Upstart was no longer a single-product company, they’d expanded from personal lending into auto and heloc offered by Upstart Home lending. Every new asset class was another custom IT request of their partner’s already-crowded roadmap.
The business needed one set of pipes, not a new build every time. Upstart searched for a platform that could deliver, without pulling their engineering team off core product work.
“We needed something that could facilitate that depth of connectivity and be supported by solutions architects, instead of hiring a team of developers who we’d rather have building our product.”
– Max Rothstein, Head of Solutions and Integrations, Upstart
Combining Workato’s infrastructure and API People’s expertise to build for scale
Upstart’s platform criteria were clear:
- Flexible enough to handle legacy banking integrations
- Light enough that it wouldn’t pull developers off product work
- Did not require support from lender’s in-house integration team
- Native connector support to banking cores
For Upstart, embedding Workato was the clear choice. While the breadth of connectors was a clear advantage, what tipped the scales was the platform’s flexibility in building custom integrations for banking systems that don’t follow standard patterns.
That’s where API People came in – the third, crucial player in this partnership. As Upstart’s implementation partner, API People brought decades of experience integrating with the exact systems Upstart and its lending partners needed, combined with deep Workato expertise.
API People builds and maintains a set of Workato core banking connectors to major banking cores such as Fiserv Premier and DNA, Jack Henry SilverLake and Symitar, FIS IBS and Horizon, and other core processors. Using Workato’s connector SDK, API People built connectors for these core banking systems, turning inflexible, notoriously hard-to-connect legacy technology into straightforward integrations across any modern stack.
Their workstreams had clear lanes: Workato provided the infrastructure, API People owned the build and connector architecture, and Upstart managed lending partnership relationships and day-to-day account management.
“API People have a dedication to building things that work and a reluctance to deliver something that’s subpar. That degree of craftsmanship, in the way they think about architecting solutions and building code, shows the level of expertise they bring to the table. I wish everyone operated that way.”
– Max Rothstein
Built to scale, built for banking
What they built together was designed for both consistency and flexibility. API People established a reusable foundation that Upstart’s team could deploy to many lending partners and customize at the edges without rebuilding from the ground up. With Workato, Upstart owns the customer interface and can manage mappings themselves, without touching code. Max describes it as “80% rinse and repeat, 20% customizable” – enough uniformity to scale, enough flexibility to serve each partner’s specific needs.
In a heavily regulated space, the compliance architecture was equally non-negotiable. Upstart operates across state- and nationally-regulated institutions, each subject to different oversight. Every integration had to meet SOX controls, with fully segregated environments per partner and robust logging for auditability. With Workato, spinning up isolated environments was straightforward, and that stood out. “We would not have been able to make this program work without that functionality,” Max adds.
Now, when a borrower is approved through Upstart, a precise chain of automated events fires across the lending partner’s core banking system. Member records open, share accounts are created, loan objects are built, and NACHA files are generated for Fed funding, all flowing through Workato, across partners running Jack Henry Symitar core. No manual intervention, custom scripting, or waiting.
“By building out the architecture blueprint on Workato, we were able to deliver a solution that Upstart can own, scale, and manage. Workato gives us a secure and scalable environment to expose modern REST APIs to legacy banking platforms, turning systems that were never designed to connect into first-class participants in a modern fintech stack.”
– Steve Skripek, Principal, Workato Practice Director at API People
Onboarding lending partners in weeks, not months
It’s still early days for this partnership, but initial results have landed where it counts: speed.
Before Workato, onboarding a new lending partner meant entering their IT prioritization queue, which could sit for months before a single line of code was written. Today that process takes four weeks, but Upstart aims to cut that down to two weeks by the end of year.
- 4 weeks to onboard a new lending partner, down from three to six months
- 50% reduction – their target timeline by end of 2026
- Zero IT involvement for existing partners expanding to new asset classes
Because the architecture is already in place, expanding a partner to a new asset class no longer requires a new IT project or any waiting. Upstart just opens the pipes.
The strength of the partnership defines the outcome
Max has a word for what made this partnership work: trust.
“Trust in this industry is everything,” he says. “It’s hard to build and very easy to lose.”
That standard shaped every decision, from choosing Workato’s infrastructure to partnering with API People on the builds. And for an AI-native company already scoping for future agentic capabilities, that standard matters more as the stakes get higher.
“It’s very important to look for partners – both the developers you’re working with, like those at API People, and the platform – who have a commitment to delivering stable, high-quality products,” Max explains. “You see the difference in the results delivered for your clients.”
For Upstart, the combination of Workato’s infrastructure, API People’s craftsmanship, and a team willing to own the outcome made the difference between hitting a ceiling and building a foundation for growth.