Building in the Open: Banclo's First Open Source Contribution
Every mortgage application, every buy now pay later agreement, every loan request starts the same way — someone fills out a form. For years, building those forms meant writing thousands of lines of configuration by hand, hoping the validation logic was right, and praying nothing broke when the product team asked for "one small change." We decided to fix that. And then we decided to give it away.
Today, we're announcing Banclo's first open source contribution: @banclo/jsonforms-core, @banclo/jsonforms-ui, and @banclo/jsonforms-preview — the Vue 3 libraries that power the visual form building experience behind Banclo's mortgage origination and lending platform. You can try them right now in our interactive playground.
This isn't a side project. These are the same tools our engineering team uses every day to ship the forms that banks, lenders, and financial institutions rely on to process real applications from real people. We're releasing them because we believe the infrastructure for digitising financial services should be shared, not siloed.
The Problem We Kept Running Into
Banclo exists to digitise the lending journey — from the moment someone explores a mortgage or buy now pay later option, through application, analysis, approval, and closing. That journey is, at its core, a series of structured data exchanges between borrowers, lenders, and regulators. And the interface for those exchanges? Forms.
Not simple forms. We're talking about multi-step applications with conditional logic, dynamic validation, regulatory constraints, nested financial disclosures, and fields that change based on the product type, jurisdiction, and lender requirements. A single mortgage application in Malta can involve dozens of document uploads, income calculations, affordability assessments, and compliance checks — all of which need to be captured accurately, validated in real time, and presented in a way that doesn't overwhelm the applicant.
The JSON Forms specification gave us a strong foundation — a declarative way to define forms using JSON Schema. But building those JSON definitions by hand was slow, error-prone, and required deep technical knowledge. Every time a bank wanted to adjust an application flow or a regulator introduced a new disclosure requirement, our team was writing and debugging raw JSON. For a platform that serves multiple lenders across multiple products, that approach doesn't scale.
We needed a way to design complex forms visually — drag and drop components, configure validation rules, preview the result in real time — and have the tool generate correct, specification-compliant JSON Forms output automatically.
So we built one.
What We're Releasing
@banclo/jsonforms-core is the engine. It handles schema generation, validation logic, rule composition, and the data model that translates visual design decisions into compliant JSON Forms and JSON Schema output. It covers the full specification — layouts, controls, rules, categorisation, and advanced features like conditional visibility and dynamic enumerations.
@banclo/jsonforms-ui is the interface. Built on Vue 3 with shadcn-vue, Tailwind CSS, and Reka UI, it provides a drag-and-drop form builder that renders in real time.
@banclo/jsonforms-preview is the live preview panel. It renders JSON Forms schemas in real time using pluggable adapters, supporting both @jsonforms/vue-vanilla and @jsonforms/vue-vuetify — so teams can preview forms exactly as their end users will see them, whether that's a clean minimal UI or a Material Design experience.
The JSON Form Builder playground lets you experience it directly. Drag components onto a canvas, configure properties, add validation rules, and watch the form render live. Every component defines its own property editor using JSON Forms — it's JSON Forms all the way down. The builder supports custom component registration through manifests, full TypeScript definitions, and extensibility patterns that let teams plug in their own domain-specific controls.
This is the same tool our product and engineering teams use internally to build and iterate on the forms that power Banclo's platform. When a bank needs a new field on their mortgage application or a buy now pay later provider wants to adjust their affordability questionnaire, this is how it gets done — visually, quickly, and without touching raw JSON.
Why Open Source, and Why Now
The decision to open source these libraries wasn't altruistic abstraction. It came from a conviction that's central to how we think about Banclo's mission.
The biggest barrier to digitising financial services isn't technology — it's fragmentation. Every lender builds their own form infrastructure. Every fintech reinvents the same validation logic. Every mortgage platform writes its own schema generators. The result is an industry where the tooling layer — the part that should be commoditised — is instead replicated hundreds of times, each implementation slightly different, each carrying its own bugs and limitations.
We've written about how Malta's property market loses months to paper-based processes and how pre-approved loans could transform the buying experience. But digitising those journeys requires forms that can adapt to every lender's requirements, every regulatory framework, and every product type. The form layer is foundational infrastructure. It should be open.
By releasing these tools, we're making a bet: that a shared, high-quality form building infrastructure will accelerate the digitisation of lending — not just for Banclo, but across the industry. When a startup in Lisbon can build a buy now pay later application flow in hours instead of weeks, or a credit union in Dublin can configure a mortgage pre-approval form without a dedicated frontend team, the entire ecosystem moves faster.
The Bigger Picture: Digitising Lending, End to End
Buy now pay later and mortgage origination might seem like different worlds, but they share a structural challenge. Both involve collecting sensitive personal and financial data, validating it against complex and evolving rules, presenting it to multiple stakeholders for review, and generating compliant documentation at the end. The forms are different. The underlying problem is identical.
At Banclo, we're building the infrastructure to handle that problem across the full spectrum of lending products. Our platform already serves mortgage origination — connecting borrowers with lenders, streamlining application workflows, enabling bank-side analysis and bid comparison, and generating regulatory documents like the European Standardised Information Sheet (ESIS). We're expanding into buy now pay later, consumer credit, and broader financial product origination because the same digital-first approach that makes mortgages faster and more transparent applies everywhere money is lent.
Open-sourcing our form infrastructure is a statement about where we believe the leverage is. The competitive advantage in lending technology isn't in how you render a text input or validate an email field. It's in the workflows, the integrations, the regulatory intelligence, and the trust relationships with financial institutions. The form layer should be a solved problem. We want to help solve it.
This Is Just the Beginning
Our engineering team is committed to doing more in the open. The JSON Form Builder is our first contribution, not our last. We're actively exploring which other components of our stack can be extracted, documented, and released — particularly around financial form validation patterns, regulatory schema templates, and lending workflow primitives.
We believe that the companies building the future of financial services should also be building the shared infrastructure that makes that future possible. Not because it's fashionable, but because the problems we're solving — making lending faster, fairer, and more transparent — are too important and too universal to solve alone.
If you're building in the lending, mortgage, or buy now pay later space, we'd love for you to try our tools, break them, and tell us what's missing. If you're an engineer who shares our belief that financial services deserve better tooling, we'd love to hear from you.
Try the builder: banclo.github.io/json-form-builder
Install the packages:
npm install @banclo/jsonforms-core @banclo/jsonforms-ui @banclo/jsonforms-previewStar the repo, open an issue, submit a PR. This is open source in the truest sense — we're building this together.
Banclo is Malta's digital mortgage origination platform, streamlining the lending journey from application to closing. Learn more at www.banclo.com.