Manage Rate Changes with Integrated Finance

As the U.S. Federal Reserve raises interest rates, our Finance Partners are adjusting their loan products with new interest rates and dealer fees as a response. In order to ensure that your customers have access to the latest rates (and your customer has not yet applied for the loan), you can update all your projects in one go, using the new Refresh feature on your Payment Options page.

Check out this video to see how the Refresh feature works:

With each new rate increase from the Fed, solar lenders are forced to adjust dealer fees and sometimes suspend certain products (e.g. the 30 year 0.99% loan…).  At OpenSolar, we make these product changes as seamless as possible for you and your team.

Strategies for products with a rate change

If you have a proposal on OpenSolar that includes a loan product that is being suspended, OpenSolar will automatically swap it out for another product so the customer will have a seamless application experience.  There are three available strategies and the first one will be applied by default:

1. Closest Interest Rate With Same Term:  This is the default option where OpenSolar will automatically replace each suspended loan product with a product from the same lender with the same term that has the closest interest rate available
2. Closest Dealer Fee With Same Term: With this option, OpenSolar will replace each suspended loan product with a product from the same lender with the same term that has the closest dealer fee available
3. Minimize Dealer Fee Change:  With this option, OpenSolar will replace each suspended loan product with a product from the same lender that has the closest dealer fee available irrespective of the loan term

Note: On your payment options page, hitting "Refresh [Lender Name] Products" applies Strategy 1 by default.  

If you’d like to opt into strategy 2 or 3 you can do so by clicking the Manage [Lender Name] Rate Changes link, right under the “Refresh [Lender Name] Products” button.  Then just pick one of the three choices above.

Finally, if you want to be more granular in your approach, you can manually map individual loan products using the “Bulk Update Projects (Beta)” button at the top of Payment Options page.  This will allow you to set your payment options project-by-project.

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Choosing a preferred loan product to replace with 

If you'd like to replace you loan product that is no longer available with a specific product, you can do so with the following steps:

1. Navigate to your archived  rates by clicking "show archived"
2. Find the applicable rate and select the pencil edit icon
3. Toggle on "Advanced Settings" and find "Payment Option Replacement" 
4. Choose a new loan to replace this product with 

This will now be applied to the projects that previously had the specific loan product. Please see the image below for how this appears in an account. 

As a reminder, the only thing you NEED to do is hit “Refresh [Finco Name] Products” on your Payment Options page - everything else is optional.  

If you have any questions, or if there’s anything that we can do to help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team