How EPAM Helped Launch a New Digital-First Credit Card
From Concept to Market in Six Months
At a glance
CLIENT
North American Financial Services Company
STRATEGIC PARTNER
- AWS
SERVICES
- CX+
- Strategy
- Engineering
INDUSTRY
- Financial Services
An established financial services company wanted to launch its first ever credit card aimed at customers seeking to build their credit rating from the ground up. EPAM provided strategic consulting, best-in-class design capabilities and engineering excellence. Together, we successfully and securely launched the new cloud-enabled product; stood up an engaging mobile app and web/search experience; and built a foundational data lake to support internal and external reporting, fraud reporting, risk modeling and marketing campaigns. All of this was accomplished in six months.
Creating a ‘Phygital’ Product
EPAM and the financial services company worked side by side to develop the product, commencing with ideation through the delivery of a digital-first credit card product to customers. Leveraging our deep agile expertise, we built and managed cross-functional teams to deliver iOS and Android mobile apps and the web portal, along with the underlying data lake and required integration with third-party vendors to issue the cards. From requirement gathering through solution design, user experience and engineering, we partnered in all phases of both the business and technical work required to make the product real — both physically and digitally.
The company chose EPAM for our cards and payments expertise and our well-defined consulting, engineering, product, digital and delivery capabilities. We consulted with the company during the selection of the credit card platform provider and assisted in the technical product discovery, including the definition of target state architecture for the credit card ecosystem. Our engineers collaborated with the business team and contributed to the definition of the product design, in adherence with intuitive design principles. Our work spanned:
Marketing, offers and acquisition
Prequalified offers data for direct mail, email and print campaigns
Applications
Applicant fraud check and integration with credit bureaus
Onboarding, transactions and rewards
Onboarding, card activation, ACH pay account setup, statements, transactions and secure document upload
Payments and account management
Account status, delinquencies, fraud, opt-ins and opt-outs
We leveraged Amazon Web Services (AWS), the chosen cloud service provider, for its high availability, scalability, automation and speed. Services included AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon S3. With the chosen card platform provider, we integrated its APIs to enable the functionality of credit card management, account management, transactions history, payments, statements and documents. For the API integration, we utilized Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Cognito.
We partnered in all phases of both the business and technical work.
END-TO-END SERVICES
Delivering Results Quickly, Seamlessly, Securely
Since launch, the financial services company has issued an average of more than 100,000 cards per quarter. Because customers are interacting through digital channels —as evidenced by the fact that cardholders are making more than 85% of their payments via the app— the company benefits from lower costs for both customer acquisition and customer service. Further showcasing the success of this digital service, the app has an excellent customer rating. Meanwhile, the company’s strong network of branches is successfully supporting cross-selling and upselling for the new product.
The financial services company wanted a secure, seamless customer experience from customer acquisition and application through onboarding, transactions processing, payments and rewards, and we enabled that. Our teams worked together to fulfill all the traditional requirements for a new credit card (Know Your Customer, underwriting, terms and conditions), while also supporting the customer journey via the new mobile app and web page.
We built the data lake that underpins both the new product as well as other company products. The company can use the data to drive analytics to track and categorize customer spending, as well as to provide personalized outreach and financial guidance. As the company strives to integrate its offerings, including financial wellness products, the data will drive insights into the customer journey. Leveraging the data lake, the company can intuitively plan the right capabilities for its customers as it continually improves its products and features.
OTHER PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:
Creation of the implementation strategy and rollout plans
Implementation of real-time monitoring solutions and automated testing, which helped minimize any risks to integration with external services
Development of unified APIs to support mobile and web front-end applications
AGILE DATA
Fast Forward to the Future
EPAM built the financial service company’s modern technology platform to support multiple products and to achieve speed to market. By leveraging our agile methodology, we delivered the product in just six months, while also setting a foundation for the company to transform how they execute going forward. The company will now be able to deliver future cloud-enabled applications and launch new products much more quickly.
Thanks to the new data lake, the company will also have built-in flexibility as it continues to innovate, using data analytics to better understand consumer behavior and inform new products and services. This data will drive a deeper understanding of customers, enabling the company to successfully deliver its goal of financial wellness.
Results
100,000+
Cards issued per quarter since launch
85%
Share of payments made via digital app
Lower costs
for customer acquisition and customer service
PARTNER WITH US
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