Introduction
Many organizations, from start-ups to enterprises and cash flow forecasting apps to digital lenders, rely on gaining consented access to their customers’ data. Unfortunately, this often means sinking significant time, money, and resources into building and maintaining integrations, or worse, relying on your customers to share their financial information manually.
Codat’s API makes accessing consented business data from SMBs' banking, accounting, and commerce platforms easy. Build once to the API to aggregate data, underwrite credit risk, and automate accounting for your SMB customers.
Codat’s developer portal has come a long way in the past year, boasting a new design and a simpler experience than ever. The Codat Portal provides access to everything you need to enable, set up, and manage Codat products and connect SMB customers. It’s designed to enable developers to get started in seconds, with everything our community needs to build fast, innovative financial products on our API-first platform.
Once signed up, developers can start testing with our sandbox integrations, or get building with our ever-growing collection of standardized integrations - from accounting platforms like Xero, QuickBooks Online, MYOB, and commerce systems such as Stripe, Amazon, and PayPal. You can even access banking data using TrueLayer and Plaid.
With Codat’s white-labelable auth flow tool, it’s possible to start collecting SMB data without writing a line of code, and Codat even helps visualize the data in a highly digestible way through its Assess lending product and data views.
This developer portal experience is underpinned by Codat’s increasingly integrated and expansive documentation and API spec, taking users from core concepts through to launching their fintech solution, no matter how complex.
Why nominated?
Building a product to solve a specific, known problem is easy. Codat sees the developer portal as the approach to solving the problems of the future, that ties together our API and products into a language for solving SMB data problems we weren’t even aware of.
Fintech pioneers are using our API to create products that solve a wide array of challenges that small business owners face, from accessing finance to process automation and many more that we are yet to imagine. We don’t know what all the applications of our technology will look like – we simply know that information wants to be free.
Best visual design
The most immediately noticeable change in the Codat Portal over the past year is that as we’ve rebuilt our portal with faster front-ends technologies, we’ve also completely reimagined the visual experience.
- Everything is driven by our new beautiful but functional design system, the single source of the styles and patterns that Codat consists of. Given the disparate use-cases Codat serves, unifying disjointed previously experiences into something truly cohesive. Our design system puts legibility first, crucial given the variety of data we visually represent, and encourages strategic use of color.
- We’ve re-architectured the portal, organizing content and functionality based on person-driven research. Understanding users starts at listening; Codat is always proactively talking to customers, and has several channels for funneling feedback to our product & design teams from Codat clients and prospects. This understanding has helped us ensure each page serves which personas we’re serving on a given page, and the jobs-to-be-done, resulting in something extremely intuitive.
- Though currently mid-overhaul, our onboarding and product discovery has been particularly simplified by these design approaches. As born out by our detailed telemetry, the visual improvements in these areas have made getting started with Codat easier than ever.
Best accessible developer portal
Handling accessibility in the FinTech space can be challenging. Presenting complex data and products to the diversity of users the space serves is tough, but that makes it all the more important to meet high standards. Codat’s goal is always access for all.
- As part of our design system, we doubled down on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and we always aim for AA accessibility to make sure any developer can build with Codat. We audit our experience regularly using open-source tooling to ensure our visual experience is up to standard in terms of contrast, etc. and leverage manual testing to ensure tab-navigability.
- Our portal and documentation pages are structured appropriately, from correct text hierarchy to image alt tags. We’re even in the process of overhauling our documentation diagramming to get around the inaccessibility of images.
- Improvements have also focused on accessible copy - clear jargon-free language that actually makes sense and intuitive architecture, driven by our technical writing team.
Best Use of Monetization in a DevPortal
Complex fintech problems can take time to solve, and building these products is hard. We believe in pricing that reduces the anxiety around the potentially high upfront cost faced building, testing, and rolling out a solution.
- Codat offers a generous free experience which takes users from understanding how Codat works to their first consented access to their customers’ data.
- When rolling out a Codat solution in-earnest, our start-up plan is perfect. Now pay-as-you-go, there are no upfront monthly commitments and Codat clients only pay for what they use.
- As clients’ solutions mature, they can access our enterprise plan for more cost-effective unit pricing, as well as access to other premium resources.
