Gabriel Cordeiro
Establishing a financial solutions marketplace for companies and suppliers to facilitate advance payments on credit card receivables with enhanced flexibility, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness.
Problem to Solve
Many entrepreneurial businesses are burdened by restrictive contracts with credit card machine providers, resulting in high fees and delayed payments for receivables. This creates cash flow issues/delays and operational challenges for business owners.
Given these concerns, the question raised was:
How can entrepreneurial businesses overcome the challenges of restrictive contracts, cash flow issues, and operational efficiency?
This is where Spike comes in…
Spike is a financial solutions marketplace between companies and suppliers to execute advance payments on credit card receivables with more freedom, ease, and at a lower cost. With this tool, companies that make sales using credit cards can easily connect with multiple financial agents, thereby simplifying the negotiation and anticipation of receivables. This translates to reduced fees and greater flexibility in making decisions that benefit entrepreneurs' businesses, without being tied down by onerous contracts or excessive fees, as is currently the case.
Discovery Process & User Interviews
Spike was already an idea when I joined Monkey Exchange because small businesses were not being reached in this way. As a design team, our job was to gather insights on user needs, market trends, and challenges through research and analysis. This phase helped us to validate ideas and create a clear roadmap for product development. With all of these insights and having our assumptions validated we were able to structure conversations with users to understand their real needs.
If you click on the button below, you will see the story behind my design process. I'll guide you through the steps I took during user interviews and demonstrate how I used the insights gained and the feedback from users to shape and deliver the UI layouts.
Some of the ideas of the MVP
Landing Page (CMS)
When the firm required a method to publicize the advantages of becoming a member of Spike and how the operation functions - I was successful in aiding with the formation of the product's web page from the landing page.
Impact & Reflections
Spike was the main project I worked on at Monkey - a South American-based start-up that opened my eyes to the financial world and just how empowering it can be to work among a close-knit team.
While I did not get to fully see this project launch before leaving the company (due to my move to the US) we did however have over two thousand API requests in the first week after the product’s soft launch. Our expectation that was surpassed at launching was 1.6 billion USD of card receivables in 2021 and more than 50 investors.
Many businesses in Brazil are currently benefiting from this project and I am glad I got to be a part of it and value this as my most impactful job yet.