Capstone Bank Tech partnered with FortyAU, a member of the Anthropic Claude Partner Network, to modernize their core lending platform using Claude, compressing a year-plus development timeline into months and laying the groundwork for continued AI-accelerated improvements.
Background
Capstone Bank Tech helps community banks offer accounts receivable financing to small businesses. Their platform, Capital Express, lets banks originate and manage these loans directly, but Capstone doesn’t stop at software. They partner with banks on business development, risk review, and day-to-day portfolio management, acting as an extension of each bank’s own team.
For years, Capstone didn’t own the code behind Capital Express. A third party built and maintained it under a licensing arrangement. Capstone only took full ownership of its own codebase in 2025, inheriting a platform that worked but hadn’t been modernized in years.
The Problem
Two pressures converged at once.
First, Capstone’s banking clients were growing increasingly cautious about offshore vendors touching their code and data, a concern that carries real regulatory weight in banking.
Second, once Capstone took ownership of their software, they discovered just how much catching up it needed: still running on .NET 4, with browser compatibility issues and years of technical debt that a prior, distant vendor relationship had never addressed.
As their Director of Operations, Mark Anundson put it, taking ownership of the code felt like buying a classic car: it ran, but it needed real work under the hood. And Capstone’s team, as a sales-and-service organization, had no in-house technical staff to do that work themselves, so they needed to find a company that could.
Implementation
Capstone turned to FortyAU, a partner they already trusted through an existing relationship. FortyAU’s team used Claude to modernize Capital Express, upgrading the platform from .NET 4 to .NET 10, eliminating unsupported legacy processes, and making the software browser-agnostic.
The impact on the timeline was immediate. Mark estimated that the same scope of work would have taken 12 to 16 months with a traditional development approach just a few years ago. With the FortyAU team using Claude throughout the process, the core conversion took about three months.
Claude is already part of how Capstone works. Their team uses it internally to shape content strategy and draft articles, and now they’re seeing it drive results on a much bigger stage: powering the modernization of the platform their entire business runs on.
That combination has changed how Capstone thinks about what’s possible: their upcoming feature roadmap is being planned with the same Claude-accelerated approach, with FortyAU and Capstone working side by side to bring it to life. For Capstone, Claude has shifted from a content tool to a driving force behind the future of their platform.
Outcome
Capstone is already seeing concrete results:
- A 12–16-month project delivered in roughly 3 months, thanks to Claude-accelerated development.
- Noticeably faster platform performance, including a fix for a long-standing data-processing slowdown.
- An estimated 80 hours per month in internal time savings projected from upcoming software upgrades.
- Automated reporting on the way, saving an additional 10–12 hours per month of manual work.
- A shift away from manual Excel reporting toward automated, in-platform alerts — including a planned feature, modeled on tools like Rocket Money, that will proactively flag at-risk invoices to banks in real time instead of relying on monthly manual reviews.
Looking ahead, Capstone has a roadmap of additional features planned, all built the same way: using Claude to accelerate development.
“I couldn’t sleep at night because our software could break and it might not be fixable for a while — now I don’t have to think about that anymore. They just killed it and did a fantastic job.”
— Mark Anundson, Director of Operations, Capstone Bank Tech
Stack
.NET 10 · Claude