Nimble Takes Holistic Observability Approach Thanks to New Relic

Nimble is an Australian fintech with a mission to remove the traditional barriers associated with lending. In 2009, Nimble became the first company in Australia to crack paperless applications. In 2013, they began to pay their members every day of the week, and by 2016, they had funded 1 million Nimble loans. In 2019, Nimble moved into personal loans and then car loans, and continued on their journey to remove barriers, provide solutions, and make lending better for their customers.

Just 15 minutes. That was all it took to triage a customer application saddled with problems.

Before New Relic, Nimble wouldn’t have known why and when a customer “abandoned cart”. Nimble has always been ahead of the pack. In 2009, the company became the first financial services provider in Australia to introduce paperless applications.

A decade later, Nimble announced lofty ambitions to become a full-service and branchless digital bank to make lending a better experience for every Australian. The organisation burst onto the scene in 2005 offering quick cash loans and prides itself on delivering an easy and frictionless customer experience. It has since introduced personal and car loans, and secured more than 1.6 million loans for customers.

As it inches closer towards realising its ambition, the customer acquisition process came under internal scrutiny. The aim: Take the guesswork out of customer conversion.

“We knew customers were coming to our landing page, but we didn’t know what they were doing there”, recalls Nimble Chief Digital and Innovation Officer Jason Barry. “When people visited our site, we had some high-level ideas of what the expected conversion rates or abandonment rates were but nothing concrete.”

Nimble realised it needed a platform that could effectively observe customer behaviour so it could take clear and decisive action. Nimble turned to New Relic in the hope the world’s leading observability provider could help separate the wheat from the chaff.

 “We can now see what our customers are doing [on our site], and what requests they’re making on which page at any given time.

“We can see when someone is just about to accept an offer. We can trace the whole path … the entire application process right to when it gets reviewed and everything that’s required to get the application approved.

“I’ve got a [New Relic] dashboard and can jump in at any time and in real time, as I can see what customers are doing, and I find that absolutely invaluable,” Barry says.

With New Relic, Nimble has been able to track and observe customer behaviour and conversions in real time, and proactively react to any hurdles faced by potential customers.

In terms of their tech stack, Nimble leverage services provided by AWS (including API Gateway, Lambda [Serverless], IAM, CloudFront, and S3 amongst others). Nimble also uses Terraform to create their infrastructure and track its state. They’re able to bake in the New Relic components alongside their infrastructure, which allows each component to be observed from the very moment they’re created. This gives the team clear visibility into their entire stack, enabling them to observe customer behaviour and deliver the best customer experience.

"From identification to fixing (the issue) probably took us about 15 minutes. Without New Relic, we would have lost that customer"

Jason Barry, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Nimble

“We're not necessarily looking to fix issues … what we're doing is we're using New Relic [dashboards] to observe our customers’ behaviour. 

“It has allowed us to be proactive and I've actually found it really valuable to have that degree of insight,” Barry says.

Implementing New Relic solutions meant Nimble was no longer in the dark when it came to the customer conversion journey.

“Previously, we wouldn’t have known instantaneously if [customers] didn’t complete their application,” Barry says. He recalls the first time New Relic saved the day: “When the customer didn’t move to the next step [of the application process], New Relic alerted me to the situation. 

“We dove in, we got into our production bunker and triaged it using the logging capability in the platform.

“We managed to close out the loop. We spoke to our operations team, and they contacted the customer who basically just hit refresh and continued through to the acceptance process.

“From identification to fixing it probably took us about 15 minutes. Without New Relic, we would have lost that customer,” Barry says.

Barry says that New Relic also plays an important role in Nimble’s customer retention process.

“We cannot afford to lose people unnecessarily when we’re fighting for every customer,” Barry says.

As Nimble continues to grow from strength to strength, it hopes to forge a closer alliance with New Relic.

“We will continue to push the boundaries to make lending better for everyone, and we see New Relic as a capable and trusted partner every step of the way,” Barry says.