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Here’s a story about how we automated the factoring process for game developers and helped them achieve financial liquidity.

When a user makes an in-game purchase, money is not instantly transferred to the game developer. Sometimes it takes weeks or even months until a bank approves the transfer and the money is paid out to the developer by App Store or Google Play. Until this happens, the cash is effectively frozen. That’s why many game developers use factoring.

Factoring is a form of financing. By using factoring, a game developer can sell their outstanding invoices to a third party (referred to as a factor) and get immediate liquidity. The factor buys the outstanding invoice, pays the sum to the game developer, and withholds a commission for their services.

Background: Why do game developers need factoring?

Our clients wanted to achieve several goals:

There were several challenges along the way.

Previously, the client used Google Sheets to estimate the potential profitability of game developers. This was a manual and time-consuming process. To automate it, we needed to connect a newly developed app with Google Play and App Store and feed financial data from these apps to our financial model. Moreover, the project also required a robust API with a bank partner.

Since Google Play and App Store APIs don’t have all functions that our client needed, besides reading data via their APIs, we also built a data parser that collected data and processed it in the backend.

The game development companies that reached out to us also had a large database of clients who were provided with different financing options depending on various criteria. These criteria were not documented anywhere. This made it difficult for the companies to determine whether a client qualifies for a specific type of financing. We had to reverse-engineer their business processes, standardize them and implement them in a more streamlined way.

We faced a challenge

Before starting the project, we assessed the requirements, analyzed the API documentation of different apps, and then assembled a strong team of 12 professionals:

On the road to developing an automated factoring app

QA manual

QA automation

Frontend developers

Backend developers

Project manager

DevOps

x4

x4

How it works

Our app allowed the client to automate the lending process. We built an app where both the factor and the game developers could create their accounts and easily sign legal contracts.

The app has KYC verification and integrations with HelloSign and PandaDoc. It also connects with App Store and Google Play accounts and reads financial metrics that are recorded there. The app doesn’t have access to any development tools and uses financial data to improve the accuracy of its underlying financial model. The app reads how much revenue a game developer generated over the previous period and calculates their credit score based on historic data and financial forecasts.

To provide our clients with more data on purchases, improve the accuracy of the scoring system and increase players' engagement rates, we built integrations via API with third-party analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, Amplitude, AppsFlyer

We also built a robust API integration with a partner bank to make sure that our client doesn’t have to deal with bureaucracy. Once a game developer is approved for factoring, a sub-account is created within the factor’s bank account. This allows seamless transfers from the factor to the bank which would withhold the required commission and then ultimately to the game developer.

Here are a few benefits of the developed solution:

Let’s see how we can help you

If you want an expert team exclusively working on your project, we can build this team for you from scratch.