Aura

About the Client

Aura Buy Invest Donate Pty Ltd (Aura) is a global FinTech disrupting inequitable loyalty programs by enabling responsible commerce that builds long-term wealth for their members and enduring value for their partners. It has a distinctly different model for return for their members, that being actual money, not points. Members can earn cash back, invest to grow their savings, and with a strong philanthropic focus members can give back to the community by donating to a charity or club of their choice.

We created Aura because we wanted to help Australians get fairly rewarded for their purchasing loyalty whilst at the same time helping businesses to cost effectively acquire new customers whilst retaining their existing ones.

Challenge

As a completely new business in start-up mode, Aura came to Cerebrum looking for a development partner. Sharing a conceptual model of what they wanted to do they asked us to build a ‘prototype’ from scratch demonstrating key features of an Aura customer facing app, for use with both mobile and web. This would not only allow Aura to test the app but also enable them to present to potential investors, banking institutions, and rewards companies.

The second phase of the project required the development of middleware integrations between these organisations once secured. This integration was key to the success of the app, enabling connectivity between different applications and services (not necessarily designed to connect with one another) and allowing them to efficiently communicate with each other. Also crucial was establishing secure integration and transfer of data as well as capability to scale and managing utilisation dynamically.

Solution

To deliver the initial build of the 'prototype' we chose a pragmatic solution building Aura a minimum viable product (MVP) to demonstrate the features of the app, including:

• User signup/registration
• Transactions and rewards listings/reporting
• Partner/charity listings and details
• Investment overview/returns
• Invite friends and link Aura cards functionality 

In developing the beta-version, we worked closely with Aura to document their requirements and to product API specification to share with other partners in the project. We intentionally created components that would smoothly become the foundations of the full release.

The Aura app is designed to integrate seamlessly cross-platform from a single-code base that ensures secure and efficient third-party inegration. This includes payment nextworks, funds managers, charities and premium partners. For the app to work optimally across iOS, Android, and Web interfaces, it's imperative the encryption and data processing components are safeguarded at all times.

At the heart of the Aura platform is a highly scalable customer engagement infrastructure that can process millions of daily customer interactions. And its feature rich back-end processing lets you deliver sophisticated real-time personalised consumer communications and engagement campaigns.

Providing functionality that ensures secure, efficient, and intuitive connection we developed a robust investment component for the funds under management feature. This includes two-factor authentication for any funds transactions, a 'micro-services' automated workflow taking reward value and auto investing it for the user, and implementing an efficient process for customer verification through KYC (Know Your Customer). Cross-platform cohesions can become trickier and trickier the more elements are added. Rigorous measures to minimise risk were embeded, including rearchitecting partner integration and financial data encryption. We also developed a card link transaction feature to implement cross-platform and crypto libraries, encrypting data in specific ways to meet cross-platform code requirements.