RentPlus offers a suite of tools to help renters build credit and improve their finances. Viva Equity approached Uptech Studio to help RentPlus launch a new debit card and fintech experience catered to the unique needs of their customer base.
RentPlus wanted to build a custom experience on top of Viva’s existing banking core and services – not simply a basic white label experience on top of a BaaS provider or inflexible platform. They hoped to leverage their existing infrastructure while adding custom features and functionality, and have the flexibility to swap out providers as the product offerings evolved over time.
Before committing to a specific solution and diving into writing code, Uptech Studio worked closely with RentPlus to deeply understand its users – their attitudes, concerns, and goals as they relate to financial products. Uptech Studio performed a set of first-hand interviews with their target users and quickly turned that research into personas that helped guide the strategy, design, and implementation throughout the course of the project.
Having a solid understanding of the users gave the team a common understanding of the appropriate path to meet their needs and helped craft a vision for the product. At the same time, the development team mapped out an architecture and approach to building the experience that would make best use of the existing infrastructure while allowing a great deal of flexibility to integrate additional, new services that could combine to create a unique user experience.
Following an initial design sprint, the team built out the front-end experience of the fintech mobile app using Flutter in a series of agile development sprints. Flutter is an open-source mobile app development framework that allowed Uptech Studio to build and release the app rapidly for both iOS and Android platforms, and continues to facilitate rapid development and deployment of improvements over time.
Since the app needed to work on top of their existing physical bank, Uptech Studio created a middle layer with NestJS which integrates with FIS as a banking core provider and a number of other services to power the debit card experience, money movement, and all the core features that are needed to satisfy basic customer expectations and regulatory needs from a banking experience.
The team integrated a variety of other ancillary services to enhance that core banking experience, including:
These integrations and others have allowed the team to design and build a much richer user experience tailored to the specific needs and goals of their unique customers.
“Uptech Studio has been a fantastic partner in helping us bring RentPlus to market. Their combination of experience and dedication to building the right solution for our customers has been critical to our success.”
- Jim Simpson, Co-Founder Viva Equity
