Nav
Nav — The #1 financial health platform for small businesses, with data-driven insights and financial options layed out in one simple web app.
Long story short
Nav is a fintech company assisting with business financing through personalized matches, rankings and more. We designed and built its banking web app, managing the deployment of a highly regulated product with bank-level security components.
Nav Highlights
— Raised $91.7 million in total funding (Goldman Sachs, Point72 Ventures)
— Among Inc. 5000 Fastest-growing Private US Companies (5-year streak)
— See Nav’s Clutch review of STRV (★5.0)
Services/Deliverables
— Product Management
— Product Design
— Frontend Engineering
— Backend Engineering
— QA
Elsewhere
About Nav
Over 350,000 businesses have turned to Nav for help, relying on the company’s proprietary tech to navigate the plethora of financing options and to have a 3.5x higher chance of getting approved.
Nav was built to “reduce the death rate of small business” — and it’s stayed true to its word. By providing personalized financing recommendations (filtered and ranked) from over 110 business credit cards, lines of credit, SBA loans and more, the platform has generated more than 150,000 approvals for small businesses. And with its banking app, new features just keep coming.
Challenge
The Nav team needed to launch its banking web app within a timeline they dubbed “absurdly compact.” Having worked with STRV before, they knew we could handle the interoperability of assorted third-party services and evolving landscape.
Nav was an established service with one crucial missing piece: offering all banking services themselves. Relying on our fintech expertise and product management skills, Nav gave us a two-month deadline for the MVP — which included figuring out a wide variety of providers (by analyzing the pros and cons of all possible options), creating a new styled components library, security checks and building custom features for flawless account management.
Solution
In just several months post-launch, the Nav banking app had more than 5,000 accounts and was managing hundreds of thousands of dollars. STRV has since implemented advanced features like multi-accounts — hitting every tight deadline with ease.
Working with Nav’s existing design system as a foundation while adding our flair to new layouts, we designed an on-brand, clean app. We then took it one step further by lending our expertise to the virtual and physical look of Nav’s new debit card.
To avoid delays all too common with third-party-reliant fintech projects, we applied a phased approach to conduct all necessary compliance and information security deliverables in a carefully organized manner, which allowed us to iterate on product features in parallel.
On top of that, we had a massive amount of information to track, especially with the many types of Nav users and user accounts — all of which come with their own operations and logic. Our engineers’ experience with eagle-eyed documentation and foresight kept things in check.
As the number of Nav’s stakeholders increased, we adapted our processes and iterated on suggested enhancements while remaining right on schedule. Our friends at Nav have called our approach “communicative, responsive and collaborative” and our product manager a “thought partner.” We’d like to add that it’s always a two-way street. Been a great ride.
