Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners

Neighborhood Trust is a nonprofit social enterprise empowering workers to take control of their finances and achieve financial health. With more than 20 years of financial counseling experience, they blend trusted guidance with innovative technology solutions and actionable financial products to help workers’ paychecks go further.

Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners have partnered with more than 60 businesses, non-profits, credit unions and government agencies across the country to help countless workers prosper.

Neighborhood Trust asked us to become an integral part of their development team, in support of their nationwide Trusted Advisor product.

About Trusted Advisor

Trusted Advisor is Neighborhood Trust's financial wellness benefit that helps workers alleviate financial stress via one-on-one counseling linked to vetted financial tools. It features a user-centric, web-based platform to embed financial counseling into the busy daily life of today’s worker, with features like mobile scheduling, live counseling via phone/Skype, a Digital Financial Action Plan and automated ”Take Action Today” text messages that nudge clients towards action. Employees use a bilingual scheduling tool to sign up for one-on-one counseling sessions with experienced financial counselors anytime, anywhere.

These screenshots do not feature real counselors.

After scheduling, employees complete a questionnaire requesting information about their financial experiences in preparation for their first session.

Finally, an authenticated area provides the employees with ongoing financial support featuring a number of reports, the option to pull a detailed credit report for review with their counselor, and the ability to enter and maintain monthly budgets.

These screenshots do not feature real people.

Platform Consolidation

Initially the scheduling and authenticated portions of Trusted Advisor were two separate applications built by separate agencies using different technology stacks.

We recommended that the Trusted Advisor team invest in consolidating the two applications and choosing an ongoing architecture.

The architecture chosen was Spring Boot and React/Redux, partly to leverage the better of the two original applications, and partly to support a one-page-architecture vision that could facilitate a modern, highly interactive front-end experience.

A High-End User Experience

Design is important to the Trusted Advisor team. They have in-house design staff and invest in user testing to ensure that their users find their online experience usable and memorable.

Production-ready, Secure, Scalable

Login, data security, SSL, PaaS hosting and deployment configuration, and more — Coat Rack helps Trusted Advisor's product team make strong technical choices.

Ongoing Maintenance and Growth

The application is in full functional development with a strong growth trajectory. Coat Rack Web Services is there for the long term, continuing to support Trusted Advisor as a key member of their development team.