Overview: Credit Spark is a free Credit Karma feature designed to build credit by reporting on-time rent, utility, and phone payments to TransUnion. It strengthens credit history by adding up to two years of past payments and up to five everyday bills, targeting users with thin files, low scores, or those in need of credit building.
Role: Design, Research and Content lead
Member problem: Throughout foundational research with members that had low to no credit history, we found that they needed a low cost way to improve their credit score so our team took that insight and collaborated with TransUnion to build a free product that helped our target audience retroactively report up to 24 months of past payments. Most users see eligible bills added as new trade lines within seven days.
Project learnings: Early user testing proved instrumental in shaping funnel performance — giving the team a clear foundation to anchor the product's core value proposition before scaling. Those insights directly informed design decisions that drove meaningful conversion improvements downstream.
We also identified a strategic opportunity to collaborate with an adjacent engineering workstream focused on recurring payment detection. By integrating that capability into our experience, we were able to automatically surface and categorize utility payments on behalf of the user — eliminating a significant point of friction and dramatically simplifying the onboarding and activation flow.
Business results: Assisted in driving the ecosystem 5M connected accounts, 100k activations within 4 months of launch (and scaling), stat sig lift in member engagement and peripheral recurring revenue