Currency Capital

One of Currency's primary missions is to provide fast and easy access to heavy equipment financing for small businesses across the country. They accomplish this by pairing thousands of different equipment sellers and marketplaces with different lenders and financial institutions through an automated data collection and underwriting process. The end result is a business owner can apply and be approved for financing in a matter of minutes, allowing them to purchase the equipment they need to continue running their business.

Given the different requirements of different lenders and equipment sellers, building out a single static form for each use case was not a feasible or scalable strategy -- we had to think outside the box, and create a flexible system that freed up business managers to focus on higher level problems.

Over the course of several years, we prototyped, developed, and maintained the lead-capture application that made this possible on the front-end side. "Express Simple" is a data-driven lead capture form that Currency can configure on the fly to ask the appropriate questions of an applicant depending on the type of loan they are seeking, the lending partner, the equipment seller, and more. It serves custom configured forms to thousands of applicants every day, and has been integral in providing hundreds of millions of dollars of loans to small businesses.

The complexity of the Express Simple application we developed for Currency posed a unique problem for analyzing user behavior and optimizing the application UX, namely: how do you aggregate data about a user's path through a complex form when the form itself can vary drastically from session to session?

We took on the challenge, and were able to make sense of user behavior by dynamically reporting custom events based on the particular question or branch of the form that a user is interacting with. Taken together this data helped us to identify friction points in the user's journey, and empowered the marketing and UX teams to develop creative solutions to keep users moving through the form.

We also implemented a Conversion Rate Optimization testing program in conjunction with Currency's UX staff, allowing us to run experiments aimed at improving the form's performance. Given the complexity and configurability of the application this required writing custom testing logic that randomly distributed users between variations, persisted a user's assignment across sessions, and flagged each session so that we could break down the Analytics data according to which variation a user visited.

This provided quantifiable data to back up the design and marketing department's hypotheses, allowed us to communicate progress to business stakeholders, and lead directly to more leads and more business.

As Currency's developer organization grew beyond a handful of engineers, new infrastructure challenges began to manifest. A particular pain-point rose up around inefficient and time-intensive manual build processes - developers had to spend sometimes hours a day dealing with manually building and deploying new features, as well as troubleshooting (frequent) build issues and inconsistencies between environments.

It was quickly apparent that this was unsustainable in the long term, and an better process was needed. We consulted with Currency's head DevOps engineer to design and execute a fully automated build and deployment workflow, integrated with end-to-end testing and reporting suite.

This new process immediately paid off. Developers could immediately trigger builds and deploys to any of our testing or production environments, and were free to again focus on building new features rather than spinning their wheels fighting build issues. We helped to make Currency's infrastructure a benefit rather than a hindrance to the organization.