Credit Karma: Mobile App Critique

For the discussion this week, I'll share insights, opinions, and review the Credit Karma app. The application serves as a financial management tool, offering free credit services, such as scores and reports. Signing up for credit karma is required to leverage their plethora of financial services. Considering the sensitivity around the information delivered, their sign-up process requires remarkably minimal personal information. To sign up, users follow a three-step process, first providing email and creating a password. The second step is to fill out primary information like name, address, and date of birth, during this step you will also be prompted to input the last four of your social. The third and final step is to confirm your identity through a series of authentication questions. For example, you will be given a list of addresses and asked to select those where you've lived, once the series of questions is complete, you will receive a confirmation email and be granted access.
After confirmation, you will have the flexibility of accessing either through a mobile application or web. The mobile experience will require you to create a PIN as a security measure. Credit scores are visually represented with a sleek gauge chart, your numeric credit score, and health status.  Many visual indicators have been created to enhance a user’s involvement with their credit score. One enhancement that I really enjoy is the up and down arrows, the arrow is updated several times in the month, based on credit reporting. This subtle feature is so powerful, emphasizing real-time financial decisions and their positive or negative reflections on your credit score. So far, all this detailed information has been achieved in a presentable manner with minimal clicks, as a matter of fact, this is all found in the home screen. Moving away from the main menu, as noted end users are exposed to two credit bureaus, each with their unique guidelines. Due to this, Credit Karma gives end users the ability to better understand how their credit score is derived by use of a detailed menu that synthesizes the weighted criterion for each bureau. It's here where subheaders, such as credit factors detail the total number of accounts, age of credit, derogatory marks, payment history, hard inquiries, and credit card utilizations are displayed. Users can enter each submenu to know the constructs behind the percentages or values from which they are derived. Credit Karma does a great job of grouping accounts, loans, etc. into categories. Both mobile and web applications categories consist of credit, accounts, auto, housing, and tax. Credit category has the primary information as the main menu but also shares tips and “hacks” on improving credit. Additional credit offers can be found, including new credit card offers and approval odds (poor, fair, good, and excellent). Account category emphasizes on Total Open balances, slices credit and loans into (credit cards, student loans, Auto loans, home loans, etc.). Here end-users can see balances on all loans and their payment history. Auto category analyzes car loans and makes insurance provider offers. Housing category makes use of selling and buying power tools, such as calculators, for market value analysis. All these services in one powerful application free of charge. This is because Credit Karma makes money from Ads and offers, such as refinance, zero percent credit cards, etc. if you apply through them and are approved. If you have no desire to act on their ads you still get a wealth of knowledge and credit scores for free.
Credit Karma has done a superb job of cornering the credit market niche and creating partnerships with any credit-related service from the likes of banks, auto financiers, and insurance companies. Their presentation is very user-friendly, exciting, and full of valuable functionality. The most obvious recommendation, I could make to Credit Karma would be to work on expanding their partnership to all three credit bureaus. As a presumed leader in the Credit/ Financial Management space, their analytics and data science targeting would make for a near perfect product. To be fair, I’m sure Credit Karma has tried to build a partnership in the past. Most recently, Credit Karma has gotten into Tax preparation, with that in mind, I could interpret that as they are branching out into other areas of the financial sector. If that be the case, my second recommendation would be for Credit Karma to get into the investment sector. My thoughts are that the algorithm used to recognize debt to income ratio and approval odds could be instrumental for users to comprehend cash flow and investment opportunities. Rounding out their services to liabilities and assets. From a user experience, the sole improvement would be for them to introduce voice search functionality. Most hardware like iPhone and Droids have this technology today, but none the less, I think the functionality would bode well with their services.