Project results
- Reduces the costs of unrecognized charges by 30 percent by reducing call center interactions, emails, and chats.
- Improves profitability by 70 percent compared with traditional banks.
- Enables rapid deployment of new financial services for people in regions with insufficient access to banking services.
- Increases user confidence through greater transparency in financial transactions.
- Reduces DevOps maintenance and administration time and resources through prebuilt APIs.
- Accelerates credit card approvals for new customers.
As more communities use digital services to shop online and access everyday services, expectations for highly reliable, simple, and secure experiences are growing. In financial services, companies face even greater pressure given the need to balance high-quality interactive experiences with protecting their customers' confidential information as part of more complex transactions.
Rappi, launched in 2015 as a delivery service for electronics, food, groceries, household items, and more, recognized the lack of digital payment options in the countries it serves, including Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. In 2019, it decided to enter the financial services industry by launching its own credit card to help unbanked and underbanked people living in the countries it serves.
“If we look at financial services in many Latin American countries, they are often based on technologies from the seventies and eighties,” says Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder of Rappi. “We wanted to give unbanked and underbanked people in particular access to streamlined digital services, such as instant bank transfers. With that in mind, we set out to establish an infrastructure that enables payments using microservices.”
Since Latin America has some of the world's lowest approval rates for credit and debit cards, Rappi knew it had an opportunity to better serve people in the region by making its credit card applications easier to complete and submit as well.
Maximize transaction transparency through geolocation…
Rappi sought to create the smoothest possible customer experiences by putting more data in customers' hands, something it believed was seriously lacking in traditional banking services.
“In Colombia, for example, some banks do not show when or where a transaction took place, even a few days after it was completed,” says Juan. “That was our first goal, and we used Google Maps Platform APIs such as Places, Geocoding, and Static Maps to include information such as the address and show people on a map where the transaction happened.”
We would have needed much more time and costly development resources if we had tried to reverse the geohash and manually enter latitudes and longitudes into our service. With Google Maps Platform, we only need about five minutes to get everything working.
– Warren Gutensohn, Head of Product, Rappi
Rappi uses internally developed machine learning solutions in the background to encode information in a way that is easy to read and understand. This relatively small improvement in transparency not only gives Rappi credit card customers greater confidence in their digital transactions but also reduces costs by lowering support ticket requests caused by confusion or unnecessary disputes.
Google Maps Platform proved to be the right choice given its availability in Latin America and the ease of entering addresses and other data for accurate geocoding. The ready-to-use APIs offered through Google Maps Platform accelerated time to market for the financial services side of the business.
“We save a lot of time with Google Maps Platform,” says Warren Gutensohn, Rappi's Product Director. “We would have needed much more time and expensive development resources if we had tried to reverse the geohash and manually enter latitudes and longitudes into our service. With Google Maps Platform, we only needed about five minutes to get everything working.”
Choosing transparency also proved to be the right decision. Rappi customers repeatedly say that the map feature is their favorite component of Rappi's new digital credit card and financial services.
