NHB Compliance Alert: Why CDRIHL Is Moving from Excel to APIs

The Regulatory Shift Is Subtle — but Structural

For Housing Finance Companies (HFCs), regulatory reporting has always been operationally heavy.
But the latest advisory from the National Housing Bank (NHB) marks a deeper shift than it first appears.

The Centralized Data Repository for Individual Housing Loans (CDRIHL) is no longer designed for spreadsheet-driven workflows.

As portfolios scale, NHB has made it clear:
manual Excel uploads are becoming a risk vector — not a reporting mechanism.

This is not a format change.
It is an architectural one.

Why Excel Breaks at Scale

CDRIHL reporting is cumulative. Every submission re-sends historical data, not just incremental loans.

As loan books grow:

File sizes increase exponentially
Upload times stretch into hours
Validation errors become harder to isolate
Re-uploads become common

Excel-based workflows were never built for:

10,000+ active housing loans
Frequent revisions
Schema-level validations
Automated retries

At scale, they introduce operational fragility into a compliance-critical process.

The New NHB Direction: API-First Reporting

To address these issues, NHB is guiding Primary Lending Institutions (PLIs) toward JSON-based system integration, with explicit volume thresholds.

The Stated Thresholds

More than 10,000 accounts
→ Institutions are expected to migrate to JSON-based data dispatch
More than 100,000 accounts
→ Institutions must plan for Batch JSON uploads via APIs

The intent is clear:
compliance should be automated, not manually assembled.

The Real Challenge: Data Readiness, Not JSON

Most discussions stop at “Excel vs JSON.”
That misses the harder problem.

CDRIHL requires customer-level attributes that many legacy LMS platforms do not capture at all, including:

Gender
Occupation
Education level
Social category

In rigid systems, adding these fields means:

Database schema changes
Vendor change requests
Long deployment cycles

As a result, many HFCs maintain these attributes in offline spreadsheets, manually merging them during every reporting cycle — exactly what the regulator is trying to eliminate.

Encore Lend’s Approach: Compliance as a System Capability

At Encore, we treat regulatory reporting as a native system responsibility, not an export exercise.

Our CDRIHL support addresses both sides of the mandate: data capture and data dispatch.

1. Configurable Data Capture (Without Code)

Encore Lend supports Custom Attributes across customers, loans, and transactions.

New NHB-required fields can be added via configuration
No schema changes or engineering cycles required
Data becomes immediately available across UI, APIs, and reports

This ensures that regulatory attributes are captured at source, not reconstructed later.

2. Native JSON & Batch Generation

Encore’s reporting engine implements NHB’s published JSON schemas directly.

Automatic extraction of standard + custom attributes
Pre-generation validation against NHB code lists
Support for both single and batch JSON payloads

The output is a ready-to-submit, compliant payload, not a draft file requiring manual fixes.

3. Designed for Scale

As volumes grow:

Reporting time does not increase linearly
Failures are isolated and retryable
Historical consistency is preserved

This makes CDRIHL reporting a background operation — not a quarterly fire drill.

Conclusion: Compliance Is Becoming Programmatic

NHB’s direction is unambiguous.
As housing loan portfolios scale, manual compliance workflows will not hold.

HFCs that treat this as a one-time format change will struggle.
Those that treat it as a system design requirement will stay ahead.

Preparing now avoids operational debt later.

Planning for the API-based CDRIHL transition? Book a Demo Book a demo to see how Encore Lend enables compliant NHB reporting without Excel workarounds.