AI-enabled Rapid Prototyping in Financial Services
Thrivent Financial for Lutherans supports charitable giving & investing. With the help of the SDG Team, they were able to drastically reduce time from abstract idea to functional prototype.
Turning vision into value
Thrivent Financial for Lutherans is a Fortune 500 financial services organization that has been serving both it’s members and the greater community for over 100 years. Providing a unique combination of financial services and generosity solutions, Thrivent helps its clients make the most of their assets.
To better serve an emerging audience, Thrivent was interested in creating a new product offering to expand both investing and financial giving opportunities. To do this effectively, they needed to ideate and design a service that, when built, would integrate with their existing technology architecture, equipping this new market segment with a convenient tool to help them use their finances as a force for good.
After considering multiple ways to accomplish this, they partnered with SDG to help in this process. In a matter of weeks, the combined SDG and Thrivent team went from initial concept to functional prototype, and the foundations of a code base that proved the idea both technically viable as well as aligned with the business’ expectations of features and functionality.
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Collaborative iteration, real results
Our teams came together to explore the market opportunity, define the potential service, identify the features users valued most, and determine how success would be measured. Front-end engineers and back-end architects collaborated to validate the technical feasibility through early research and prototyping, ensuring the concept could be brought to life within the existing technology stack.
At the same time, SDG resources also worked alongside Thrivent stakeholders to shape what the solution could look like—balancing user needs, business goals, and technical realities. Using a rapid, iterative process backed by AI-driven tooling, the team refined the prototype and code base into something tangible and testable.
By working this way, we enabled stakeholders to quickly see, use, and improve the concept—reducing timelines from months to weeks and accelerating confidence in the product’s direction.
“This was phenomenal work. This wasn’t even an idea a few weeks ago and the fact that you were able to bring it to life in a matter of days is amazing. We’re really happy with how far you’ve been able to take this.”
Matt Dorison – Engineering Director, Membership and Generosity Technology at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans
Outcomes
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Functional prototypeA clickable prototype informed by a deeper understanding of business requirements and ready for additional user research activities. |
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Backlog of requirementsAn initial pass at a definition of scope to help estimation and inform future planning. |
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Confirmed feasibilityExploration of service layer integrations that can help inform next steps of building the explored solution. |
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Contained costsWorking within a fixed budget & timeline, the team was able to deliver a prototype & vertical slice of functional code as a proof of concept. |