This digital product aims at serving different types of partners managing every possible interaction, digitising information exchange and offering extended functionality from an easy to use single user interface.
For Credimi, partners are those counterparts that distribute its financial products to companies. They are basically an alternative acquisition channel. Credit brokers and small business accountants are not the most digitalized User Persona that you can think of…
For years, Credimi fantasized about having a Partner’s portal, with no clear definition of what it should do. Partners where accounting at the time for almost 30% of Credimi’s origination volumes with zero acquisition cost on our side.
On the downside, these partners were putting enormous pressure on Credimi’s CRM and Business Development teams, mostly with requests that could be easily solved autonomously with the right disclosure of shared information.
I measured the opportunity and pitched the initiative internally.
I took the concession to assume technical feasibility; Credimi has a very solid back-end infrastructure, filled with relevant data. Business viability was secondary at this stage; savings from reducing CRM workload would overcome almost certanly any type of platform cost. My most pressing assumption was desirability.
"I decided to build a fully functional MVP using no-code and put this product in the hands of 20% of our partners to gain real feedback."
Data from CRM reports showed clear evidence behind calls motivations. A fast co-design session with the Business Development team allowed me to prioritise a few key features.
I have built no-code products using Bubble.io in the past to validate a desirably assumption (much simpler than this one), and knew that it would be the fastest possible way of gaining reliable feedback from end users.
I developed the first version of the MVP in three weeks. It was a platform where only “invited” users could log in and consult relevant information on their customers and get an overview of the partnership key metrics (such as originated volumes and approval rates).
This first version was released to only 20% of the total number of partners. That percentage didn’t last long…
Adoption was almost immediate. Partners were using the platform every 2 days. I spoke directly to some of them to gain feedback first-hand.
After two weeks, both CRM and Business Development team asked me to open the platform to the entire user base: they have experienced an evident decrease in contact calls, and those remaining fad become much more specific and valuable.
The initial MVP was so well recieved that I managed to create a team out of it. I created a product team from the ground up:
Credimi have a really good data infrastructure, accessible via API’s which allowed the newly constituted team to push the boundaries of what could be possible using low-code.
Bubble io has revealed to be a great platform on which to develop your product thanks to a good amount of available integrations, great performance and reliability, and a very large community of professionals sharing their know-how.
Today, the Partners Platform Team is able to leverage existing and “ad-hoc-developed” Credimi API’s in order to create features at a speeds 3 to 10 times faster than a more traditional product development team. This speed allow us to try more things, get faster feedback from customers, and of course, have more fun doing it.
