Give clients a read-only view of exactly where their application sits, so they stop ringing to ask.
The ‘any update?’ call is the tax on this business. It arrives at the worst moment, it takes ten minutes, and the answer is almost always that nothing has changed since yesterday.
Clients get a link showing exactly which stage their application has reached and what happens next. Nothing on that view is editable, and internal notes stay internal. When a stage changes, the client is told without anyone drafting a message.
The strict boundary is that stages are advanced by your team, not by a lender feed. There is no aggregator or lender integration in this build, and there cannot be one inside a one-week build – lender systems do not offer the access that would require. That constraint is what makes the delivery timeline honest.