Building Pulse

Problem: DirectAxis wanted to provide South Africans with a product that allows them to access their credit rating monthly and for free, as well as information needed to improve their credit rating if necessary.

Solution: Build a platform on the DirectAxis corporate website where South Africans can register and visit monthly for an up-to-date credit rating with corresponding explanations and advice about their credit score.

Project Overview

We designed a secure tool for DirectAxis which aimed to provide users with easy access to information about their credit. Pulse is free and allows users to gain a better understanding of their standing in the credit bureau. Users can also track their monthly credit commitments and receive insight into which products they qualify for based on their current credit profile.

Pulse was built on top of DirectAxis’s existing Sitecore implementation, which NML also developed.

Feature highlights:

• Industry-leading security, requiring users to be logged in/registered with their identities verified in order to access Pulse
• A fast and responsive user experience that renders beautifully on mobile devices
• Adaptive rendering of the Pulse views that are wrapped and used by the DirectAxis Pulse Android and IOS mobile apps

Functionality

Pulse is fully integrated with DirectAxis’s existing enterprise API layer, with all requests to DirectAxis’s API layer happening server-side behind their secure firewall. Several APIs exist allowing Pulse’s UI the following functionality:

• Logging in/registering
• Verification of identity either via credit bureau security questions, or cell phone OTP verification
• Access to user’s Pulse dashboard

Users need to be registered for Pulse and authenticated in order to access their Pulse score. During the registration process, DirectAxis customers are asked to verify their identity by either confirming an OTP that is sent to their cell phone, or by answering five security questions supplied by the credit bureau.

Technology Used

• Sitecore 8.2 Experience Platform
• SQL Server
• MongoDB
• ASP.NET MVC

We chose to incorporate Pulse into part of the existing Sitecore implementation rather than developing a separate application. This gained us the following advantages:

• Getting to market quickly as page designs, styles and assets could be reused on the pulse front-end
• Seamless customer journey between the corporate website, Pulse, and the self-service portal
• Sitecore’s built-in analytics capabilities can be used to track behaviour with their self-service dashboard, and this behaviour can then be seamlessly used elsewhere on the corporate website to personalise and adapt user experience
• Integration with DirectAxis’s API layer was extremely simple as Sitecore is built on .NET and was an excellent fit for our .NET expertise

Pulse’s UI is already fully responsive and mobile-friendly, however IOS and Android mobile apps exist in their respective app stores. The apps are hybrid web/native, which means they are built through a combination HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript web standards and then run inside a native container which allows them to be installed on a phone.

Utilizing Sitecore’s ability to render variations to the UI depending on the context and device that is being used allowed us to adaptively render views specifically for the mobile applications. This enabled us to leverage off the existing functionality, security and business logic and not have to redevelop it for the mobile apps. As a result, we could deliver with speed and efficiency while also refreshing the UI to be more appropriate for a mobile experience.