Modernizing the Platform at the Heart of PACE Equity
How Novelty combined six years of domain knowledge, trusted technology partnership and AI-accelerated engineering to modernize PACE Equity’s business-critical platform in 90 days.
PACE Equity operates a complex C-PACE financing business in which projects can span decades and involve different municipalities, payment schedules, underwriting requirements, servicing processes and reporting obligations.
When PACE first began working with Novelty, much of that complexity lived across spreadsheets, Word documents, databases and other manual processes. A single project could involve roughly 25 separate working documents. At 20 active projects, that meant managing information across hundreds of files.
PACE needed a way to scale without multiplying that administrative burden along with the business. Novelty helped translate those processes and financial models into RAMP, a custom software platform that initially focused on servicing and expanded over time into sales, underwriting, reporting and other operational workflows.
Over roughly six years, RAMP became the operating backbone of PACE Equity. It connects with systems including Salesforce and the company’s accounting environment, and virtually everyone at PACE interacts with it as part of their daily work.
That made the platform’s reliability, maintainability and ability to evolve business-critical.
Knowing when a working platform needs to change
By 2026, RAMP had reached an important point in its software lifecycle. The application continued to support PACE’s operation, but its Angular Material 4/5 frontend was aging and approaching the limits of the technical foundation on which PACE intended to keep building.
As PACE’s long-term technology partner, Novelty recommended a substantial modernization from Angular Material 4/5 to React, along with architectural changes designed to improve maintainability and prepare the platform for continued development.
Angular Material 4/5
React
The case was one of preventive maintenance rather than emergency repair.
PACE could continue operating on the existing platform, but Novelty could see the longer-term implications of building additional functionality on aging technology. The team laid out why the modernization should happen while PACE could control the timing, rather than waiting for supportability or performance issues to dictate it later.
The work also could not reasonably be accomplished through indefinite incremental maintenance. It required a coordinated migration of the frontend, consolidation of distributed business logic into backend services, elimination of duplicated validation and rules, performance optimization and comprehensive testing while preserving the workflows PACE already relied upon.
Domain expertise, accelerated by AI
The technical challenge extended beyond moving from one frontend framework to another. RAMP contains years of accumulated business logic for a specialized financial domain, where different projects and jurisdictions can introduce their own rules, calculations and exceptions.
Novelty already understood that complexity because it had spent years building and evolving the platform alongside PACE. That domain knowledge became particularly valuable when combined with AI-assisted development.
Novelty used AI throughout the modernization to accelerate interface development, coding, documentation and the creation of testing scenarios. The project team estimates that completing a modernization of this scope within the 90-day timeline would have been substantially more difficult using its previous development process alone.
AI accelerated the work, but it did not replace the engineering judgment behind it. Novelty’s engineers remained responsible for architecture and business logic, while quality assurance professionals executed and validated testing scenarios and focused on the edge cases that require an understanding of how PACE actually operates.
For Novelty, the project demonstrated the practical value of Enterprise AI Software Acceleration: combining the speed of AI-enabled development with people who know the software, understand the domain and remain accountable for the outcome.
The technical challenge extended beyond moving from one frontend framework to another. RAMP contains years of accumulated business logic for a specialized financial domain, where different projects and jurisdictions can introduce their own rules, calculations and exceptions.
Novelty already understood that complexity because it had spent years building and evolving the platform alongside PACE. That domain knowledge became particularly valuable when combined with AI-assisted development.
Novelty used AI throughout the modernization to accelerate interface development, coding, documentation and the creation of testing scenarios. The project team estimates that completing a modernization of this scope within the 90-day timeline would have been substantially more difficult using its previous development process alone.
AI accelerated the work, but it did not replace the engineering judgment behind it. Novelty’s engineers remained responsible for architecture and business logic, while quality assurance professionals executed and validated testing scenarios and focused on the edge cases that require an understanding of how PACE actually operates.
For Novelty, the project demonstrated the practical value of Enterprise AI Software Acceleration: combining the speed of AI-enabled development with people who know the software, understand the domain and remain accountable for the outcome.
Changing the foundation without disrupting the business
Novelty developed the modernized platform in parallel with the existing production environment.
PACE received regular progress updates, and users reviewed sections of the new platform as they became available. That allowed testing and feedback to happen throughout the project rather than concentrating everything at the end.
Existing RAMP environment
In production throughout the project
Modernized platform
Built in parallel, reviewed as sections became available
Monday morning — the same system, the same data, now running on a modernized platform.
The transition itself became one of the clearest measures of success.
PACE employees finished one week using the existing RAMP environment. On Monday morning, they logged into the same system and continued working with the same underlying data and familiar business processes, now running on a modernized platform with an updated interface and improved performance.
There was no operational discontinuity.
“They stuck to the timeline. I mean, it was delivered right on time.”
Novelty completed the modernization on time and on budget. Ryan described the transition as “very seamless and smooth.” Minor issues surfaced after launch, but they were addressed quickly and did not interrupt PACE’s operation.
For a platform used throughout the company, the fact that such a significant technical change could occur without becoming a significant business disruption was central to the result.
A stronger platform for the next generation of PACE
PACE did not establish formal performance benchmarks before the modernization, so the outcome is not being reduced to a manufactured ROI percentage. The improvements were nevertheless apparent to the people using the system.
Ryan reports that RAMP became significantly faster and more user-friendly. He has also seen a meaningful improvement in the speed with which Novelty can respond to ongoing fixes and enhancement requests.
That matters because RAMP continues to evolve with PACE.
The two teams are now beginning to use AI in their collaboration as well. PACE employees can increasingly use AI-assisted tools to express requirements and prototype ideas before handing them to Novelty. Novelty’s engineers can then apply their technical and domain expertise to refine the concept, address dependencies and edge cases, and turn it into production software.
The modernization therefore did more than extend the technical life of RAMP. It gave PACE and Novelty a stronger foundation for continuing to develop the platform as the business changes.
That continuity is the larger story behind the 90-day project. Novelty has worked with PACE from early product ideation through years of development, integration, support and now major modernization. The technology has evolved, but the responsibility has remained the same: understand the business well enough to recognize what the software needs next, then deliver it reliably.
PACE did not establish formal performance benchmarks before the modernization, so the outcome is not being reduced to a manufactured ROI percentage. The improvements were nevertheless apparent to the people using the system.
Ryan reports that RAMP became significantly faster and more user-friendly. He has also seen a meaningful improvement in the speed with which Novelty can respond to ongoing fixes and enhancement requests.
That matters because RAMP continues to evolve with PACE.
The two teams are now beginning to use AI in their collaboration as well. PACE employees can increasingly use AI-assisted tools to express requirements and prototype ideas before handing them to Novelty. Novelty’s engineers can then apply their technical and domain expertise to refine the concept, address dependencies and edge cases, and turn it into production software.
The modernization therefore did more than extend the technical life of RAMP. It gave PACE and Novelty a stronger foundation for continuing to develop the platform as the business changes.
That continuity is the larger story behind the 90-day project. Novelty has worked with PACE from early product ideation through years of development, integration, support and now major modernization. The technology has evolved, but the responsibility has remained the same: understand the business well enough to recognize what the software needs next, then deliver it reliably.
“Our relationship with Novelty has been a big part of our growth. We probably wouldn’t have been able to grow as quickly without Novelty’s partnership and the RAMP technology.”
Ryan, PACE Equity
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