Agentic credit applications that improve completion rates

We rebuilt the Nuvo credit application to be agentic. The Onboarding Agent now shapes every application in real time to each buyer based on your credit policy.

By Mallory Watkins, Head of Product & Design

The credit application is the front door to every trade relationship. It's how a supplier decides who to trust, and on what terms. It's also where a lot of good buyers quietly give up, somewhere in the middle of a long form asking them for things that don't apply to them.

When we built the Nuvo credit application in 2021, we set out to fix that front door. We put trusted third-party verification in by default, so suppliers could approve customers with confidence instead of questions. We made it deeply customizable, so every application could be as flexible as the custom PDFs that businesses had been using for decades. And we made it a genuinely good experience for the applicant, including the ability to reuse the information they'd already provided to another supplier on the Nuvo network. A buyer who's already been verified no longer started over from zero.

All of this worked, and resulted in the industry-leading verified digital onboarding experience. But underneath the surface, it still suffered from one of the same issues that the paper and PDF forms did: once an application was started, the applicant saw the same steps, in the same order, whether or not those steps applied to them. And the longer the form, the more potential buyers would stall or drop out, resulting in lost revenue.

Today, we're rolling out a total rewrite of the Nuvo credit application. It's now AI-native, resulting in a dynamic, context-aware credit application that is managed in real time by Nuvo Intelligence. The Onboarding Agent built to keep applications moving while sticking to your business’ unique rules.

Tailored to the buyer, built on your policy

As a buyer fills out your credit application, the Onboarding Agent adapts the experience as they progress through it, based on both their answers and your credit policy. This means applicants only ever see the sections and questions that are actually relevant to them.

Say your policy skips trade references for businesses under a year old. The application can ask "How long have you been in business?" up front, then quietly drop the trade-reference step for newer companies. Each buyer gets a shorter, more relevant application. Your team gets a cleaner submission. Shorter for them, cleaner for you.

Your credit policy governs the agent's decisions in routing your customer through their credit application

Your rules, more ways to set them

The dynamic application gives you more ways to shape and customize your credit application:

• Conditional, branching steps. questions can appear or disappear based on a buyer's answers as they move through your application as well as your pre-defined credit policies.
• Exceptional exception handling. Arm the Onboarding Agent with how to handle exceptions and edge cases at every step, like letting a buyer sign a personal guaranty if they’d prefer to not complete an instant bank verification.
• Reorder and split sections. The credit application’s ordering and sequencing of questions can change in real-time based on the answers the applicant provides
• Remove sections altogether. Some applications are simpler than others, like COD or a backfill of an existing customer, so the agent knows when it can skip an entire section

All of this is grounded in the policies you set. The Onboarding Agent sticks to your guardrails, surfaces what needs human review, and leaves the judgment with your team.

A better experience for your customers

We’ve used the rewrite of the onboarding experience as an opportunity to make what was already the best-in-class applicant experience even better:

• Save for later. If a prospective customer is stuck at a required step, they can always move it to the end so they can continue with the rest of the application first.
• Share with a colleague. An applicant can tag in a colleague to handle individual sections. The nominated teammate is gated to seeing only the section they were added to, not the whole application.
• Final review. Before signing your terms and submitting their application, applicants are presented with a new review screen to double-check their answers.

Now customers can share parts of the application with colleagues or save sections for later, increasing application completion rates

Shoring up a leaky funnel

Shorter, more relevant applications mean fewer good buyers stall out or drop out all together. Cleaner submissions mean less back-and-forth. And faster time to completion means accelerated revenue.

Now, your credit team can take on a bigger book and handle a higher volume of applications without a bigger bench. Credit analysts and managers can spend less time managing application thrash and more time reviewing and approving the accounts that actually need their judgement.

Available now for all Nuvo customers

Existing Nuvo customers don’t have to do anything to upgrade to the new experience. Starting today, all customers managing credit applications on Nuvo will automatically have their credit application flows migrated over, with all of their custom configurations and logic automatically moved over exactly as they are today. And, for a limited time, Nuvo customers can even preview their applicants’ new experience by logging into the Nuvo dashboard and clicking the banner at the top of the page.

With Nuvo Intelligence, the Onboarding Agent is just the latest of a growing set of agents working across the entire order-to-cash lifecycle, drawing on the world's largest trade network of verified businesses to give every decision more context. Onboarding is where the relationship starts. Making it smarter is where trade starts moving smarter.

See the new agentic application experience in action.