Fortiva

HYPOTHESIS

Atlanticus Services Company, a holding company invested primarily in financial services companies (NASDAQ: ATLC), offers consumer financial products via Fortiva, the leader in second-look financing. Fortiva provides financial solutions to those with less than perfect credit and contacted Digital Scientists to create a state-of-the-art account management tool for their credit consumers – including a new banking portal and mobile apps with modern banking features.

For credit customers at Fortiva, the process of account management for one or multiple accounts online can be cumbersome. By allowing customers to view multiple accounts from a single dashboard, the effort required to view and manage accounts and preferences will be greatly reduced.

Additionally, the new solution improves accessibility from mobile and desktop devices, promotes good credit habits through real-time information, notifications & smart defaults, and creates opportunities for deeper engagement with existing customers.

EXPERIMENT

Fortiva’s financial offerings include personal credit, retail credit, and personal loans. The primary consumer for Fortiva credit tools are buyers with less-than-prime credit.  Given the social complexities associated with limited access to credit, it was imperative that our approaches would serve the consumer’s best interest – by not hiding balance details or credit terms – and ensure that the interface is straightforward for important actions like making a payment, setting up autopay, and requesting help.

Customer Experience Strategy – Listening to Fortiva customers

The single most important part of the product development journey is customer experience strategy. Our team is experienced with all of the aspects of launching a successful digital product – from market and competitive research and customer journey mapping to usability testing and strategic concepting, and all the way through to development. Working with Fortiva, we heard many pain points from current customers:

• I’m required to create an account again after signing up for credit
• It’s too hard to set up autopay across all my accounts
• I need help with smart decisions on when, how much to pay
• I don’t know if I am improving my credit score or not
• It’s too hard to sign up for additional offers

With these concerns in mind, we set out to design and build a consumer banking solution that would address those issues and more, while also increasing trust in Fortiva and the Atlanticus brands, as well as their retail partners. The consumers needed a streamlined approach to help plan their spending, set goals, improve payment consistency and ultimately, improve their credit score.

ANALYSIS

Our design and engineering teams worked together with Fortiva product leadership to create an entirely new and unified customer interface for a variety of their credit offerings. This included designing new customer workflows for account setup, and new application views for an expanded feature set,  including auto-payment and managing payments. The re-envisioned Fortiva interfaces were very well received by customer leadership and with customers in the app stores.

Additionally, we provided assistance for definition and documentation of the backend APIs, validation of customer security and authorization workflows, and coordination with the marketing team around product branding.

TECHNOLOGY STACK