Simple.pl - Business Finance App

Simple.pl is an application created by a group of professionals with over 20 years of experience in the field of finance and financial intermediation. Its main goal is to enable entrepreneurs to quickly and accurately determine the creditworthiness of their company.

The client can find out in a few minutes what kind of financing he can get thanks to a sophisticated form, combined with an advanced solution based on machine learning and external databases.

The solution analyzes six different factors, assesses the chances of a loan and provides the exact amount the company can receive. Each parameter is supplemented with individual recommendations, and the client also has access to a system-level credit analyst.

From the very beginning, Simple.pl was designed as a system integrated with many external solutions and databases. This assumption was based on the need to accurately analyze a client's creditworthiness.

In order for the client to receive the report within two minutes, it was crucial to design the integration in such a way that the data would be properly secured, and the response time would be short.

Working closely with the client and other companies involved, we held a series of meetings to discuss the assumptions and functional scope. 

We developed an implementation plan, divided the work into sprints, and created a detailed Gantt chart that allowed us to track the progress of both our team and the client's work. This approach resulted in a successful and timely implementation of the solution.

Work on the project was divided into sprints according to the Scrum methodology. Individual modules of the system were implemented in such a way that they interacted with the client's second back-office system, to which data is exported from the applications. During the implementation of the programming work, special attention was paid to the security of the system and the protection of sensitive user data.

The client asked us to do the following work:

1. Detail the vision of the application presented to us and clarify the business objectives (preparation of the BRD).
2. Together with the client, convert the described vision into application functionalities (preparation of the FRD).
3. Preparation of technical documentation of the project needed to start programming and integration with other solutions (preparation of TRD).
4. Helping a third party company to prepare a proposal for application visualization based on the FRD document.
5. Assistance in preparing the target graphic design of the application.
6. Execution of programming work according to the SCRUM methodology.
7. Production implementation and integration with the client's external and internal systems.

During the course of the work, we encountered numerous challenges that arise in such complex fintech projects. In the initial phase (so-called discovery), it was particularly important to organize the vision presented to us. In our experience, this is the most significant phase in the implementation of the project, as it has a decisive impact on its proper execution. During a series of workshops, we defined the final functionality in response to the client's pre-defined business needs. Most importantly, we made sure that they were understandable to all project stakeholders, so that both we and the client knew what we were getting in the end.

Another essential element was the look and feel of the application. There are many competing solutions on the market that look great. We wanted the design of the application to balance look and functionality so that customers would not get lost in the application as they filled out the various steps of the form. This is especially critical when we consider the customer's purchase path with such a specific service as loans. Each of its stages has different characteristics, and we should speak to the customer differently. Presenting individual messages to the buyer must be thoughtful and presented in a way that creates trust and a sense of security. We knew that the moment when we got the report and moved on to the offers was just as important, so we worked with the third-party company to design the final screens so that the user would be most likely to finish the transaction and use one of the solutions presented.

During the workshops with the client and the third company, we managed to create a design for a web application that met all these requirements and at the same time fit perfectly into the established visual identity.

Another influential element was the application environment. The client had many internal systems (including another one developed by our company) that were integrated with external solutions, such as BIK, KRD, Kontomatik, or Infomonitor. The entire process of registering a user in the system and collecting data from the user form had to be integrated. Another challenge was to transfer data between systems in order to generate a report for the client in less than 2 minutes. We were particularly concerned with interfacing with the machine learning system to make the process of analysing the client's data as fast and stable as possible.

The client expected a quick implementation, and the short implementation time was determined by the planned launch of the solution's advertising campaign. Knowing this, we ensured the efficiency of the team's work and constant communication with the client's product owner, which allowed us to implement the solution on time. The project also involved the simultaneous analysis of a large amount of data and multiple integrations, which we had to consider during the programming work. Thanks to a careful division of tasks, designing the links between the various functionalities and data, our team managed to complete the project without problems and according to the initial assumptions.

All the work carried out can be divided into three phases:

1. Workshops: Before starting the project, we conducted a workshop in which we created a list of functional requirements (FRD) in response to the business requirements (BRD). In this phase, we also defined the scope of the system architecture (TRD). In this way, we aligned the scope of requirements with the customer's needs. We better understood the goals and found a way to achieve them.
2. Development phase: We worked with an external company to refine the UX design and the underlying graphic design of the application to match the client's corporate identity. We ensured the readability of the content in the application. During development, we focused on a 1:1 mapping of the client's expectations for each screen.
3. Implementation and integration with the client's systems: Thanks to the analysis during the workshop, we learned the details of the systems used by the client. The detailed description of the application's architecture helped us to smoothly implement and integrate it with systems outside the product.

The project involved a team of 6 people, including a project manager, backend and frontend developers, and a tester. Due to the sensitive data that customers provide when going through the application, we relied on many functional, automated and security tests.

We implemented the project in

• PHP
• Laravel
• React (TypeScript)
• NextJs (JavaScript)

Simple.co.uk, according to the client's expectations, enables automatic verification of a company's creditworthiness. We fulfilled the main business requirement of the client, which was to provide the user with a financial status report in less than 5 minutes. As part of the client's business needs, the application realizes several of them, namely

• The ability to present the company's loan offers,
• Continuous communication with clients via e-mail and system messages,
• the possibility of presenting the offer of external entities.