Unjumbling money with Nomey
As software developers, YouDo specialise in taking ideal designs and turning them into practical cohesive service offerings. Our method and approach embraces our customers as equal partners in the delivery process, and Happy Prime’s new platform, Nomey, gave us another chance to put this into practice.
The Happy Prime team have a goal to empower Kiwis in their financial choices
Personal finance decisions can be confusing, but the Happy Prime team knew they didn’t need to be. They could see that with a little bit of help, every Kiwi could unjumble their money, and so the idea for Nomey was born. Launched earlier this month, Nomey now gives the power back to the consumer.
Meurig, James and Rob, the trio behind Nomey, have all had careers in banking, and could see that the big words and industry jargon made things more complicated than they needed to be. After experiencing platforms in the UK that empower and inform individuals, they knew Kiwis should have access to the same.
Their vision was to demystify the jargon, take away the fear factor and make it easy for people to access the right creditors. Rather than just providing a billboard view of financial products, Nomey would identify the ones with the features that best fit their customers’ personal situations, with unbiased tips and advice. It would capture the deep industry knowledge of the Happy Prime team to educate New Zealanders about their own financial well being and put the power back in their hands.
Using risk rules to match customers with creditors.
Having worked as risk consultants, the Nomey team understood the mechanisms and risk factors involved in lending, and saw an opportunity to help make creditors' jobs easier, too. They would match the personal information and credit scores (that their customers were happy to share) with various creditors’ risk requirements, providing lenders with qualified leads.
This meant they could lower the time and cost for creditors, while still being a champion for consumers. The Nomey platform would connect its customers with credit lenders who were likely to say yes to them, and encourage those lenders to offer a sharper price.
First, though, they needed some help.
Happy Prime recruit YouDo to help make Nomey a reality
As British expats wanting to reach New Zealanders with their service, the Nomey team were looking for a local technology partner with Kiwi style. More importantly, though, they needed a team with experience in the finance sector who could deliver a specialist bespoke product. According to Nomey’s newly appointed CEO James, YouDo was the perfect choice to construct the platform.
“YouDo have prior experience with assisting other unique start-up projects and working with one-of-a-kind type site builds. Plus, they culturally fitted. Whilst they’ve been around a while they’re relatively lean and agile. They’re easy to get along with, and they were committed to the project from day one.”
James, CEO
From Ideation to Design and Build.
“The Nomey team are seasoned professionals who came to us with a clear purpose and goal,” says Tim Packer, YouDo Business and Software Development Manager. “As bespoke developers who specialise in the finance sector, we could quickly relate to the Nomey concept from a business and technology requirements perspective.”
YouDo started with ideation workshops to develop high level designs and estimates, then continued to refine those concepts with the Nomey team to develop a more detailed statement of work. As part of that process YouDo engaged with Nomey’s other partner providers, around design, cloud and security, to manage and streamline the end to end delivery of a robust secure solution.
Facilitated by iterative sprints and regular reviews, the YouDo team were able to manage the process of creating a fully custom product while mitigating the risks and avoiding surprises that can potentially come with these types of projects.
“We haven’t had to compromise on design at all. I’m sure it caused many sleepless nights for the YouDo team, but they made it work and did it with a smile on their face.”
James, CEO
Crafting the Nomey advantage.
Crafting the Nomey advantage into a consumer friendly tool required the development of a search rules engine that would correlate consumer and credit information with creditor preferences to facilitate a matching process.
To capture these requirements and convert them into code, YouDo invested a good amount of time understanding the details and providing constructive feedback on the implementation of those tools to ensure a good fit for purpose.
In many ways, YouDo has become the technology partner for Nomey -
“The YouDo team felt like an extension of Nomey and Happy Prime as opposed to a separate company. That was really what we were looking for - to collaborate with like-minded organisations in NZ. They’re an external who feels like an internal, and we felt we could work closely with them.”
James CEO
The results.
The Nomey platform is a really simple intuitive site, served by its complexity under the hood. By bringing together the application components and all the web elements into a cohesive user experience, we achieved what we set out to: a cohesive user experience. In other words, a platform that makes money simple.
So what’s next? Well, as James from Nomey puts it, ‘YouDo are a good bunch and we look forward to furthering our relationship with them moving forward.’
From YouDo, the feeling is entirely mutual! So watch this space.
