Webhooks or polling: how loan statuses reach your platform

The decision does not arrive straight away

When a platform sends a loan application, the lender usually confirms right away only that the application was received. The decision itself — approved, declined or more information needed — can arrive minutes later, or even later than that. The platform has to catch that moment, because that is when the customer needs to see an offer.

There are two basic ways to do it.

Polling

Every so often the platform asks: "What is the status of this application?"

• Pros: simple to build, and the platform controls the pace.
• Cons: most requests are wasted because nothing has changed. The status is learned with a delay, and with many lenders and applications the number of requests grows quickly.

Webhooks

The platform provides an address, and the system sends a notification to it as soon as the status changes.

• Pros: the status arrives immediately, with no wasted requests.
• Cons: the platform needs a publicly reachable endpoint, has to verify where notifications come from and must expect the same notification to arrive more than once.

Why you usually need both

In practice the best setup is webhooks as the main channel and polling as a fallback. If the platform was briefly unavailable or a notification failed to process, the state of the application can always be checked separately.

How Apifly handles it

Apifly supports both:

• it sends a webhook in one format for every lender status change — regardless of how that particular lender reports changes;
• every notification carries a stable event_id, so a repeated notification can be safely ignored;
• if you set a verification token in the client portal, it is attached to every notification, so you can confirm where it came from;
• the current state of any application and the status from each lender can also be fetched with a separate API request.

More about the API and the notification format on the developers page.