A lender recently summed up his experience with a custom-built system in one blunt sentence:

“The CRM we spent so much money building? It’s shit.”

It’s a story I’ve heard often, because for years the mantra in lending tech was straightforward: don’t build, buy. Building meant hiring engineers, managing roadmaps, and most times ending up with systems that collapsed the moment you tried to scale them. Buying SaaS was safer, faster, and usually cheaper.

So is the old wisdom outdated? Should lenders rush to build again? Not exactly.

The risks remain, and I’ve seen them up close. Lenders know their pain points better than anyone, they can tell you where reporting is broken, where compliance drags, and where operations are stuck in spreadsheets. But turning that knowledge into usable software, with the right user flows, architecture, and security controls, is a very different skill set. Being a great lender doesn’t automatically make you a great product team. That’s why so many custom builds end up underdelivering.

And there are the non-negotiables. Audit trails. SOC compliance. Data security. Production-grade stability. These things rarely come “for free” in a DIY stack, no matter how clever the prototype.