LendingTree spurs financial innovations by empowering employees with a transformative, cloud-first workplace

Continuing to simplify financial decisions for over 120 million customers as the nation’s leading online financial marketplace led LendingTree to empower employees with productive, engaging workspaces. By constructing a new, cloud-first, collaboration-centric headquarters, Lending Tree is infusing operations with digital, AI, and IoT technologies using HPE Aruba Networking.

Facilitating life’s meaningful moments

Putting the power to finance a car, home, or business in the hands of individuals lies at the heart of LendingTree’s mission. By filling out one simple form, LendingTree customers receive their best offers on loans, credit cards, insurance, and other financial services products. Through its network of over 600 partners, the company has helped over 120 million customers with over $260 billion dollars in loan funding, as well as credit repair and debt relief.

“As the nation’s leading online financial marketplace, our goal is to help simplify financial decisions for life's meaningful moments through choice, education, and support,” explains Paul Jenkins, Senior Director of Operations for LendingTree.

Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, LendingTree maintains offices in 12 cities spread across the U.S. and one international location. The company continuously evolves its platform, via organic and M&A growth, in service of over 10,000 customers daily.

Digital-first HQ accommodates myriad workstyles

To reflect a corporate culture that values collaboration, fun, wellness, innovation, and diversity, LendingTree embarked on an initiative to create a unique new 176,000-square-foot corporate headquarters location in Charlotte’s vibrant and historical South End.

“We envisioned a facility with a warm residential vibe that is intentional in accommodating most workstyles,” says Robin Bellefuil, Vice President of Real Estate and Workplace Solutions at LendingTree. “We wanted an iconic, amazing space that encouraged people to move throughout the building and work collaboratively or independently.”

The resulting state-of-the-art, award-winning, 11-story headquarters offers flowing, open spaces that emphasize natural lighting and multiple types of comfortable furnishings to create a residential atmosphere. It includes modernized signage, integrated digital-first capabilities, such as smart meeting rooms, and IoT-enabled amenities.

LendingTree also incorporated mixed use areas not commonly found in corporate environments. These include a library, music room, game rooms, yoga studio, social centers, outdoor patios, and bar areas where employees can socialize after hours.

AI-powered, cloud-first networking infrastructure

Naturally, mobilizing workers with high-performance Wi-Fi, supported by a robust wired network, was critical to realizing LendingTree’s collaborative and seamless workplace vision. Further, the company was keen to adopt a future-proof, cloud-enabled networking solution that would also make branch deployments faster and more efficient.

Working with trusted advisor and implementation provider e+ Partners, LendingTree identified the essential characteristics it required in modern infrastructure. “We wanted wired and wireless networks that performed equally well in our video-intensive environment, with intelligence features that would warn us about issues ahead of time,” says Brannen Taylor, Network Manager for LendingTree.

As a financial services firm, protecting the private information for millions of customers is a top priority at LendingTree. This made robust and streamlined network security capabilities another crucial decision-making factor.

After evaluating the options, LendingTree selected and edge-to-core ESP solution by HPE Aruba Networking. “With ESP, we gained a best-in-class solution that is secure, resilient, always-on, and seamless for our users as they move around our building,” Taylor says.

Delivering on its promise

Once the new headquarters was completed and workers returned to the office post-pandemic, LendingTree’s infrastructure began delivering on its promise. “Our Aruba Wi-Fi 6 provides people with the flexibility to work in any space, which increases productivity because it allows people to relax and enjoy their business day,” Jenkins says.

LendingTree is also realizing multiple wired networking rewards. “By adopting Aruba CX Switching we’re able to leverage Smart Rate,” says Taylor. “This enables delivering significant bandwidth to our users now, as well as efficiently increasing capacity using simple upgrades―no complex and expensive refreshes will be required.”

The redundancy and intelligence features engineered into the CX Switching line is also improving business resilience by providing users with always-on access to the network and their applications. Network uptime is boosted by NetEdit, which automates and coordinates network switch configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

AIOps capabilities enable proactive management

Other key technologies include HPE Aruba Networking Central, for AI-powered, cloud-based network management, and ClearPass, for policy-based network access control and built-in zero trust and secure access service edge (SASE) cybersecurity. Both Central and ClearPass are accessed from a single, intuitive dashboard that enables unifying wired, wireless, and branch networks.

“As a cloud-first company, Central aligns with our business model for adopting technologies that reduce IT complexity, simplify management, and infuse intelligence,” says Mike Musselwhite, CISM, CISSP and Senior Network Engineer. “Central’s AIOps capabilities are particularly beneficial as they enable us to proactively manage our wired and wireless network.”

Central also improves LendingTree’s enterprise agility by providing advanced analytics that create insights from the data generated by the network. “Central and AIOps allow us to maximize network capabilities while minimizing costs to the business,” Musselwhite adds.

Rapid branch deployments without travel costs

LendingTree is also leveraging Central to speed branch office deployments while reducing travel and other overhead costs.

“Using Aruba Central, we’re able to modernize our branch offices from our headquarters location,” Taylor says.

“This has eliminated traveling around the country because we can leverage local partners to install hardware,” he adds. “Then, Central takes over to complete the rest.”

A new wave of digital-first innovation

It’s a similar streamlining and simplifying story for securing LendingTree’s network. The company uses ClearPass in combination with its networking infrastructure and HPE Aruba Networking’s Dynamic Segmentation capability.

The setup enables assigning every connected device to the proper switch port on-the-fly, while ensuring each device is granted network and application access based on the appropriate policy-based security level.

“ClearPass makes the complexity behind network authentication seamless to our end users,” Taylor says. “In IT, it gives us the flexibility to identify users based on certain attributes and then provide them the appropriate access to the resources that they need within our network.”

Partnership network adds security, visitor access benefits

LendingTree also appreciates the tight integrations between wired and wireless solutions and complementary offerings within HPE Aruba Networking’s considerable partnership network. This includes enhancing security by integrating with Palo Alto Networks for Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW). “With Aruba’s open API interfaces we can easily develop various customizations,” says Musselwhite.

Another plus is creating advanced, seamless guest Wi-Fi connectivity by adopting Envoy and adding it to the ClearPass deployment. This strategy permits giving visitors secure access to LendingTree’s internal networking and application resources. “When a visitor enters any of our facilities, we can quickly onboard them with Envoy and provide credentials for accessing appropriate resources using the intelligence built into ClearPass,” says Taylor.

“This method keeps visitor traffic secure and segregated while ensuring a visitor’s device is recognized every time they come into our buildings,” he adds. “Using ClearPass and Envoy provides visitors with smooth transitions for effective interactions with our internal employees.”

Empowering platform developers to do more

Overall, LendingTree’s new infrastructure is boosting business productivity in multiple ways, such as reducing friction for platform developers when they’re conducting user experience testing. That’s because ClearPass enables company-provided devices to also act as if they are an external customer using the LendingTree platform.

“As an internet company, it’s vital that we test our products from a user’s perspective,” Taylor said. “In the past, we struggled with making it easy for our developers to use company-issued devices as if they were one of our customers. With ClearPass, we’re able to configure our developers' devices to have secure internal and external access.”

Network fuels M&A growth and innovation

Moving forward, LendingTree is planning to continue innovating its spaces as the company expands its financial product offerings. This includes adding immersive options and working with the company’s facilities maintenance team to integrate additional building automation systems to connect more IoT devices to its ESP network, such as door locks and strikes.

“Although standardizing on Aruba has answered our immediate needs, we’re also excited about the capabilities we have yet to leverage that will help us move our business confidently into the future,” Taylor says.

Among the benefits will be enabling the company’s aggressive M&A strategy, which requires integrating newly-acquired organizations quickly, efficiently, and uniformly.

“The flexibility our Aruba network provides will assist us with maintaining our acquired companies’ policies and procedures throughout the onboarding process, while also ensuring regulatory and other compliance needs are met,” says Taylor.

Empowering workers with transformative experiences

Today, LendingTree is delivering transformative employee experiences by empowering workers to cultivate their own unique workstyles, using networking technology as an enabler.

Whether web conferencing with colleagues in a smart meeting room, streaming music during a social gathering on the 11th floor outdoor terrace, or improving wellbeing by visiting a provider in the company’s onsite healthcare clinic, LendingTree’s employees are free to roam smoothly wherever their next endeavor takes them.

“With Aruba ESP, most people at LendingTree don’t even think about our network anymore,” Jenkins says. “They just walk in the door and they’re automatically connected. It’s like a utility―it just works.