Open Arsenal

Built Around the Life Behind the Loan.

BalanceForward is an open source deterministic financing specification designed to help businesses build debt-refinancing systems around the financial reality of the borrower. Built Around the Life Behind the Loan, BalanceForward moves beyond conventional lending models that focus primarily on credit scores, income, or available collateral. Its framework evaluates whether a proposed payment is realistically sustainable after accounting for taxes, geographic cost of living, household circumstances, existing obligations, and qualifying debt.

The specification uses Qualifying Repayment Income (QRI) as a foundational component. BalanceForward allocates 33% of verified gross income toward tax liabilities, producing QRI equal to 67% of verified gross income before additional affordability deductions. Its Cost of Living Feasibility Module then incorporates area-based living costs and borrower-specific expenses to determine realistic repayment capacity. This creates a structured affordability analysis designed to prevent available collateral from becoming the sole determinant of how much a borrower can receive.

BalanceForward establishes deterministic financing parameters, including a 5% fixed interest rate, a 50% maximum advance rate against qualifying collateral, and a 20-year maximum loan term. Its modular architecture separates income verification, cost-of-living analysis, debt verification, collateral valuation, repayment capacity, loan parameter calculation, servicing, and recovery. Solvra operates as the loan-mechanics module, providing the underlying amortization, interest, payment, balance, and payoff calculations while remaining independent from the broader BalanceForward specification.

The specification also supports optional plugin modules for capabilities such as alternative income analysis, geographic data providers, inflation adjustment, financial asset classification, custodian integration, credit reporting, payment processing, direct creditor payoff, financial counseling, risk analytics, compliance auditing, and reporting. This allows businesses to implement the core BalanceForward framework while extending it for their particular infrastructure and operating requirements without creating vendor lock-in.

BalanceForward is designed as business-facing financial infrastructure rather than a single consumer lending application. Its deterministic approach is intended to make financing decisions transparent, reproducible, and auditable, while its modular architecture allows financial institutions, fintech companies, credit unions, lenders, and other qualified organizations to build their own implementations.

This specification is released under the AGPL-3.0+ license and is free to use with required attribution. Attribution-free deployments may obtain a Specification Branding License, with fees based on usage, deployment scope, and environment size.