How Upwork Helped One Fintech Startup Hire a Trustworthy Team

Traditionally, credit card issuers base approval and spending limits on previous credit history. This means building credit is hard if you've never had a card or if you're dealing with the fallout of defaulting on a payment years ago. But building good credit is important in today's digitally connected age — and Atlas has a solution.

Instead of looking at your past credit history to determine approval, Atlas looks at banking activity. From there, the company offers applicants a safe spending limit along with other features that can help cardholders spend within responsible limits, build necessary credit history, and even improve credit scores by an average of 50 points in the first year. This makes Atlas a more accessible credit card for many people — over half a million, to be exact.

The challenge

Atlas' rapid rise in popularity among Americans interested in building credit meant the company needed to scale its team quickly. But finding the right help was tough for a lean startup without a full HR and recruiting team. 

"We needed to scale responsibly, in a compliant way, and at lightning speed," said Crystal Singh-Stephens, head of customer experience and fraud operations at Atlas. "We have hundreds of thousands of people who trust us with financial services. It's up to us to be good stewards of their data and their finances. Traditional BPOs weren't the right fit for us — I wanted more visibility into who we were hiring and how they were being treated. Ensuring that we're hiring the right trustworthy people is pretty paramount to what I'm doing."

The solution

Rather than try to manage high-volume hiring and screening all on her own, Singh-Stephens turned to Upwork to find help — starting with a trustworthy chief of staff.

"I found my chief of staff on Upwork, and she's fantastic. She started as our first customer service agent. Then I asked her to be the very first manager on my team, she accepted, and she's done an absolutely incredible job. Now she’s my Chief Of Staff," said Singh-Stephens. "I cannot express how I would be lost without her support both personally and professionally."

From there, Singh-Stephens and her team continued to use Upwork to find professional, reliable freelancers who provide support for several aspects of operations — including customer service, data analysis, and fraud detection.

"I've found two really good talent pools on Upwork. The first is people who interact with customers, and the second is analysts who are able to take rather complex pieces of data and simplify it for us," said Singh-Stephens. "Upwork helps me make sure that I find good talent."

The results

Today, Singh-Stephens has found dozens of contractors on Upwork, all of whom provide capacity when needed across 10 different teams. And, with a distributed freelance workforce, the company sees only 1–2% churn across its frontline contributors — far below the ~30% typical in call centers and ~45% in BPOs.

"Leveraging Upwork is a huge, almost secret advantage that we have. Not everyone else is using Upwork, and I don't know why," said Singh-Stephens. "If you want to be able to find talent quickly and hire them, without having to worry about building an HR team or a talent team first, then Upwork is the place to go as you're growing."