Loyalty Yield is a full-service loyalty platform that powers credit card rewards programs for banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions, helping them attract and retain customers through meaningful, points-based incentives redeemable for products, experiences, and gift cards.

What started as a single division in 1999 has grown into a robust, multi-faceted platform over 25 years. However, with that growth came accumulated technical debt. With test coverage gaps across mission-critical financial logic, even small changes carried real risk. Institutional knowledge was spread thin across the team, and a fragmented suite of applications required employees to work across three or more tools simultaneously just to complete everyday tasks. Loyalty Yield knew it was time for a change. In 2024, they partnered with Clean Coders to consolidate their system into a single, modern, fully-tested application, with a redesigned user experience grounded in real research.

Challenges

After over 20 years of expansion, Loyalty Yield's codebase had become an ambitious target for modernization. Years of growth and fast-moving decisions had layered complexity into their software system — a phenomenon known as technical debt, and the team was ready to tackle it head-on.

One significant piece of that puzzle was the programming language COBOL. From the 1960s through the 1980s, COBOL became the gold standard for financial computation, prized across finance, insurance, government, and healthcare for its accuracy with large-decimal arithmetic. While modern programming languages have since matched COBOL's precision while becoming far more scalable and developer-friendly, many companies in these industries have understandably held on to COBOL — the stakes were simply too high to risk numerical errors. Loyalty Yield's commitment to accuracy served them well, and now it was time to bring that same precision into a modern tech stack.

Another catalyst driving Loyalty Yield to rewrite their codebase was expanding test coverage. In an ideal system, every change is verified by automated tests, but gaps in coverage meant that adding new features carried real risk. In a financial application, bugs involving money are simply unacceptable, and that reality had made modifying untested code feel too risky to attempt. Loyalty Yield was ready to build the kind of safety net that would let their developers move fast and ship with confidence.

Finally, Loyalty Yield's software suite had grown into three separate applications, supplemented by spreadsheets, forcing employees to juggle four or more windows simultaneously. The opportunity to unify these tools into one seamless experience promised a massive boost to team productivity and efficiency.

It was time for Loyalty Yield to rewrite their software as a single, consolidated, and tested application.

Our Strategy

Loyalty Yield came to Clean Coders with two goals: a rewrite of their computational logic and a redesign of their user experience. Since we were working with a largely undocumented system, these tasks presented a circular challenge — rewriting the logic required understanding the user experience, and redesigning the experience required understanding the logic. Our solution was to pursue both simultaneously, each thread of discovery feeding the other.

Documentation

Just as Loyalty Yield's functionality was distributed across multiple apps, the deep domain knowledge of their system was distributed across their team. Clean Coders created its own documentation of Loyalty Yield's software system by conducting extensive interviews with Loyalty Yield employees and distilling those conversations into a comprehensive, authoritative compendium. These interviews became a critical foundation for both the logical rewrite and the UX redesign, allowing Clean Coders to understand each application in the real-world context in which it was used.

One of Loyalty Yield's greatest strengths as a business is the flexibility of their sales team, who have long been willing to accommodate custom contract terms for financial institutions. Rather than being constrained by the programmatic complexity that came with those customizations, we reorganized features and data around clear use cases and mental models. The resulting compendium became the definitive resource for Loyalty Yield's software system — a true teaching tool, built to inform and empower their team for years to come.

User Experience

While documentation research was underway, Clean Coders began building a consolidated user interface for managing customer orders. Loyalty Yield's customer service team sits at a critical intersection between financial institutions and their cardholders, and they deserved a purpose-built solution to match the importance of their work.

Rather than simply polishing the existing interface, we went back to fundamentals — conducting fresh user interviews that uncovered countless opportunities to optimize workflows and reimagine how the software could mirror the natural shape of each agent's job. The result was a single, unified workflow that weaves together the best of Loyalty Yield's three legacy applications, dramatically simplifying and streamlining the daily experience of every customer service agent.

Impact

The partnership between Loyalty Yield and Clean Coders delivered results that went well beyond a technical upgrade. Clean Coders' research and documentation gave Loyalty Yield a clearer picture of their system than they'd ever had before — and a solid foundation to build on. With comprehensive unit tests wrapped around every line of new code, their codebase is now more robust and better documented than ever before.

The new user interface, shaped entirely by the real needs of the people using it, is a true leap forward. Where the previous model asked users to adapt to the software, the new experience is designed around them.

And while Clean Coders was initially brought on to address technical debt, the deeper gains of a clearer mental model, stronger relationships between systems, and a user experience that truly serves its people turned out to be equally transformative.