Flexxa - financial services

Building the financial platform of the future for the MENA region

The company and product

Flexxa is an all-in-one fintech tool that enables its users to create unique professional invoices, send estimates to their clients, and instantly receive payments.

It’s aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises, but regular users can also be part of the payment process within the app.

After the initial discussions, the team at Flexxa decided to start the development work by building a Minimum Viable Product, with one of the features considered crucial: invoice management. The application is targeted at users based in Saudi Arabia, with plans to expand it to other countries from the region. That’s why visual coherence was particularly important for this project.

The Challenge

Our team started this project with a Discovery Workshop aimed at exploring the vision for the product, the tool’s objectives, and the user stories.

Once these were established in April 2022, it was time to decide on the designs and the infrastructure for the product. Here we had a few challenges to overcome.

As for the features to develop in further steps, the payroll and e-wallet features were also planned, but we zeroed-in on the e-invoicing first.

Key challenges of the project included:

The application is bilingual, with English and Arabic used side by side in the product's UI - read more about how we solved this challenge on our blog: Challenges and Solutions in Developing English-Arabic Applications
The final solution’s look and feel had to evoke the Arabic identity, with the primary target market set to Saudi Arabia
The app development was constrained by the governmental regulations in Saudi Arabia

The Process

After resuming the work on this project, our design team spent 3 weeks preparing the designs for Flexxa.

We had to make sure that the designs would be region-specific and would not suggest in any way that the designs are not aimed at the MENA countries or affiliated with non-Islamic religions. The designs were promptly approved by the client’s team.

The actual development work started in early September 2022 and lasted until the first week of December with - once again - the focus on the e-invoicing feature. The most important element here was compliance with the regulations issued by one of the government agencies in Saudi Arabia.

Building the infrastructure was another challenge due to a set of government-imposed constraints, including the fact that Oracle has to be used as our infrastructure platform.

Crucial parts of the cooperation:

Precise analysis of the design and legal requirements.
Regular meetings with the Product Owner to ensure our team were aligned.
Detailed roadmap for both the product itself and the development work.

Team’s voice

Patrycja Więcław

PROJECT MANAGER

Team members' experience

Our team played a fundamental role in both MVP scoping and the fundraising process for this project. Thanks to that, the team at Flexxa was able to secure additional funding to further develop the application.

The Outcome

The application itself is now at the stage when it’s ready to be sent for approval by the said governmental agency. Only after this institution approves the product, will we be able to continue working on this project and release it as a ready-to-use application.

The client's team has managed to secure additional funding to further develop the product thanks to the early - Minimum Viable Product - version our team at Monterail had helped to build. We've also actively supported the fundraising process, preparing a pitch deck detailing the development process that was later used during the meetings with the investors.

As for the design-related challenges, our Product Designer included traditional shapes and patterns that are characteristic of this region in the designs and they became the key visual elements of the product. We also used stock imagery from the Saudi Arabia-based company and included city landscapes from the local metropolises, including Riyadh.

The success of this project hinged on the following factors:

Visual awareness of our Product Design about cultural characteristics and unique project challenges.
Well-established initial scope for the MVP version.
Internal research to meet all legal requirements.