Opportunity

“Grow your business fearlessly” is our Client’s mantra. An Atlanta-based FinTech start-up, our Client aims to help small companies get paid faster. Similar to a credit card, the company’s existing services allow businesses to receive payments as soon as one day after providing goods or services to another company. Once a business invoices their client and uploads that invoice to their account, our Client charges a one-time service fee and pays the business the amount of the invoice.

Our Client knows it can do even more to help businesses grow fearlessly! It developed the working concept of a multi-sided marketplace that helps small businesses connect with corporate partners for key product and service delivery opportunities. The network exists today as a manually facilitated process. Our Client partnered with APG Emerging Tech to help imagine a digital solution for the network that facilitates AI-driven matchmaking and recommendations.

Approach

APG Emerging Tech met with our Client’s senior leadership team to collaboratively define the concept of the network beginning with the critical understanding of who the marketplace will serve. We created personas for multiple key user roles that will leverage the network, which informed every subsequent decision regarding process flows, information architecture, and user interface design.

We also rapidly prototyped the network’s user interface. This enabled stakeholders to click through a realistic depiction that looks, feels, and behaves like the “real” network. Additionally, the prototype enabled senior leadership to socialize the vision for the network with key corporate partners.

Outcomes

In just 7 weeks, APG Emerging Tech transformed the network from a vision statement into a functional, clickable prototype! The prototype enabled our Client’s stakeholders to flesh out its requirements for the future platform, gain critical early feedback from partners, and enabled software engineers to accurately estimate the build effort in terms of time and cost.

APG Emerging Tech produced artifacts useful for the duration of the network build effort:

• Clickable Axure prototype consisting of dozens of user interface pages

• User Stories with Acceptance Criteria for each feature of the network

• Process models of key user flows

• User Personas describing each user role of the network