How we built an award winning FinTech app that raised £275m
Hastee is an award-winning employee platform that enables contingent and salaried workers to take a portion of their earned pay, on-demand, without waiting for payday.
The Hastee Mission
It started with a mission to help workers avoid getting into debt caused by punitive interest rates charged by payday lenders. It wanted to provide an alternative way for workers to access funds when they needed them, a way that would not build up debt.
The Problem
Hastee had an ambitious vision for its platform but didn’t have the means to execute that vision. Hastee did not have the required technology expertise, so was faced with the choice of building a team from scratch, or working with a partner who could provide skilled people and lead Hastee through the process of designing and building theplatform.
Why did Hastee select Evolved-Ideas?
Hastee chose Evolved-Ideas as its software development partner for a number of reasons –
- Ability to contribute and add value from early-stage ideation right through to execution.
- Proven ability in cost-effectively sourcing highly skilled and effective software developers.
- Proven ability in supplementing the developers with other technology professionals.
- A track record of delivering software projects on time and budget.
- Knowledge of Fintech.
The Solution
Hastee were very clear about the service they wanted to provide, but needed help on what would be involved from a technology perspective to deliver it.
Evolve ran a series of workshops to help Hastee define the scope and define key aspects of the platform. This helped Hastee understand that the platform would have to be significantly more complex than the Hastee team had originally thought, involving mobile and web applications for workers and employers, with back-office functionality and integrations with timesheet and payroll applications.
The worker app would need to enable clocking in and clocking out and be able to give workers clear information about what funds they could access. Behind the scenes a very complex rules engine was required that could take into account holidays and sickness, any previous advances, and limits on advances to ensure workers didn’t put themselves into financial distress. It also had to handle different requirements for permanent and contingent workers, and all of this complexity needed to be hidden from workers – they needed simple, ATM-like functionality.
As the platform was handling very sensitive financial and personal information then it had to have robust privacy built into it, and as workers would be relying on it to access funds, it also had to be very resilient and highly available.
Hastee did not have any in-house technical capability at this point, so Evolved-Ideas led by Colette Wyatt, then CTO provided skilled professionals to fill roles, including CTO as a Service, Architecture and Tech Leads. The team built by Evolved-ideas carried out the architecture design, the application design including UX/UI, customer journey mapping, and built and tested the applications (including native Android and iOS apps) and integrations.
The team assembled and managed by Evolved-ideas was put in place with the objective that it would provide the core of Hastee’s development team as Hastee scaled, and once the platform had been launched then the team would be transferred to Hastee.
The Results
As a result of hiring Evolved-ideas, Hastee gained the following results, which then allowed them to significantly scale their software development team and speed up time to market while keeping costs low.
Hastee was able to hit its ambitious go to market plan
Using first a Managed Project Team, followed by an Extended Team, Hastee was able to secure investment on the basis of the pilot, raising £275m in the first two years. Employers were also impressed, and Hastee was able to win and onboard numerous clients, including London City Airport, Moy Park, IRIS Software, The Vurger Co, Brewhouse and Kitchen and over 100 care homes across the UK.
Hastee with the help of Evolved, effectively created the Early Wage Access platform category in the UK and won the prestigious Mobile Project of the Year award, Disruptor of the Year and Personal Finance Tech of the Year at the Fintech Awards.