Challenge:
Our client is a FinTech startup that provides banking and other financial services for senior citizens in the United States, many of whom do not feel financially prepared for retirement or generally do not have a bank that caters to their specific life stage. The client’s product offering grants seniors faster access to Social Security income, interest earnings on the account, and frictionless discounts and savings. The company raised a seed round of funding and had its first public launch in May 2023.
The startup’s plan after the initial launch was to build out more of its banking capabilities, grow its customer base, and build towards a broader set of features that would help fight financial fraud and scam risks for the underserved senior community when it comes to modern digital banking. Much of the broader set of fraud protection features would be entirely new in the space and needed to be invented. The company had to balance building and launching these new features while also ensuring that the startup could meet customer and investor expectations for the core banking product in the near-term.
Solution:
The startup aimed to balance customer acquisition and new product feature development ahead of an ambitiously timed Series A round and broader launch with a public press release. In order to help set up the client for success along all of these work streams, our team quickly ramped up — effectively doubling the startup’s software engineering capacity and providing additional Product Management support for the ambitious new roadmap.
First, our Product Managers defined a longer-term roadmap for the team, which included both existing open projects related to core functionality, as well as capturing detailed requirements and prioritization for the new suite of fraud protection features. APrime’s full-stack team of engineers worked on multiple initiatives in parallel to ensure that the client was set up for success ahead of their fundraising and launch goals:
- We performed vendor evaluation, proposed architectural design, and completed the implementation for deeper integrations with providers in the FinTech ecosystem, including an integration with Plaid’s Enrich APIs to provide more meaningful transaction data for making transaction decisions and displaying human-readable purchase information for customers.
- We rewrote the frontend User Interfaces for the banking app, including creating a responsive experience across desktop and mobile and integrating identity management and login flows with the Auth0 identity platform.
- We implemented a suite of new fraud protection features for the startup’s clients. Most of the features — including fine-tuned customer controls over what transactions should be allowed on a card — have not been offered by consumer banking platforms in the past. There were no “out-of-the-box” solutions for this unique new offering, so implementing these features required the APrime team to deeply understand the client’s internal architecture and backend integration with the Galileo financial technology platform.
Transformation:
Within six months, the APrime team worked closely with the client to define, implement, test, and release new features that would have the greatest impact on customer acquisition and provide unparalleled financial peace of mind for the startup’s senior customers.
Throughout the engagement, the continuous releases of new features and launch of product milestones helped the company significantly increase its customer base across all 50 US states. APrime efforts also laid the groundwork necessary for faster feature development and infrastructure iteration in the future.
Our client was also able to leverage the continued product development momentum and new feature launches to significantly increase customer growth, to secure a full Series A round of fundraising, and to successfully roll out a broader public launch of the new set of banking features.
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