Cleo is a personalised financial assistant aimed at helping Gen Z improve their financial health and wellbeing. I joined them as they were preparing for their Series C funding round. Over the course of 18 months I helped them increase key metrics including converting more users to paid subscriptions and increasing both the amount and frequency of funds being added to the Cleo card.

Initially I spent around ten months within a cross-functional squad providing back-end support to enable rapid experimentation around the subscription onboarding experience. The experiments varied in size and complexity ranging from smaller changes such as variations in copy or layout to larger changes such as offering subscription discounts or changing the way we perform KYC (know your customer) checks.

Later I moved over to a squad tasked with the implementation of a feature that allows users to deposit funds directly from their employer’s payroll provider to their Cleo card. With this Cleo are able to offer users a number of advantages including increased salary advance amounts and reduced subscription pricing. As a significant contributor to this project, in addition to delivery I also provided technical guidance, support and mentorship to other members within the squad.

Building out this feature involved integrations with numerous third parties to provide access to payroll providers and bank accounts. Internally this feature integrated tightly with existing core Cleo features such as salary advances and card top ups. The main challenges of this project were around the “correctness” of the system. We are dealing with the movement of a user’s pay check and as such it was critical to ensure that we got this right, every time. The specifics of this extend beyond the scope of this summary but involved carefully planned application of techniques such as concurrency control, idempotency and eventual consistency.