Atelio by FIS is an innovative fintech platform that helps businesses integrate financial services directly into their systems, enabling them to function like fintech companies. Backed by FIS’ robust security and compliance standards, Atelio’s platform encompasses embedded finance, financial intelligence, and automated finance. With Atelio’s easy-to-use solutions and APIs, businesses can offer credit cards, streamline payments, and gain deeper intelligence on their customers, all while maintaining compliance with financial regulations.
Atelio’s APIs are the main interaction layer for developers to access a wide range of features from issuing secured credit cards to the Know Your Customer (KYC) solution for customer identity verification. To underscore just how important Atelio’s APIs are to their solutions offering: Atelio’s developer hub launched on the same day as the company itself.
Customization Was the Name of the Game 🎲
With a turnaround time of less than a year from acquisition to a relaunch that included bringing together existing products, as well as adding new features and functionalities, Atelio’s Head of Developer Experience, Julie Hubschman, was working against the clock to bring Atelio’s developer platform to life. Having used ReadMe at three previous companies and inheriting developer docs that were built in ReadMe, Julie’s decision to use ReadMe for the fourth time to launch Atelio’s developer platform was partly influenced by creature comfort, partly efficiency, and partly knowing the customization possibilities within ReadMe. The goal was for Atelio’s developer hub to mirror the branding and UI that Atelio’s designer had crafted for its website. The question was if that level of customization was even possible in ReadMe, and even if it was, Julie knew it was no small task.
The first time I saw customization in ReadMe was at a previous company where we had a frontend engineer who could hack anything. It was very impressive, and I knew then that a lot of customization was possible. Because of my engineering background, I’ve hacked a fair amount of customizations in ReadMe too. But with Atelio, we basically had two months to go from designs to live docs. And so I basically said to your team, ‘I know a lot of this is customizable. I know you all know it’s all customizable. I know you all know where all the skeletons are. And I don’t. So how do we make this work?’ Julie Hubschman, Head of Developer Experience
Enter: ReadMe Professional Services 💡
Fortunately for Julie and her team, ReadMe had launched its Professional Services offering a few months prior. With à la carte options across content strategy and architecture, technical writing, and design and development customization, the fully customizable services are designed to supplement customers’ internal resources and ensure that their developer hub reaches its full potential. The additional resources that ReadMe’s professional services offers felt like the perfect solution for Julie and her team to hit their goals and timeline. Plus, the fact that ReadMe was already an approved vendor in FIS’ system meant one less lengthy and time-consuming vendor request for Julie to submit.
Within 48 hours of submitting the request to add ReadMe’s professional services to their contract, Julie was approved and the teams began working. They had ambitious content and design goals and two months until the launch date and public announcement.
Months prior to bringing ReadMe on board, Atelio’s designer, Lucy Ormiston, had created the gold standard prototypes for Atelio’s developer platform. Using API documentation best practices as a foundational guide and a design system that mirrored Atelio’s future website to inform the visual look and feel, the Guides and API Reference design looked great but didn’t exactly map to what was possible in ReadMe, or so Julie thought.
Our designer made the designs in Figma. I saw those designs and I was like, ‘I don’t think this is possible.’ I said, ‘This is nuts. But go in, ask for it, even though you probably won’t get it.’ And then they did all of it. They did crazy JavaScript. They did all of it. Julie Hubschman, Head of Developer Experience
Julie knew she was asking for a lot, and fortunately, ReadMe’s Solutions Architects delivered. Using Lucy’s Figma file as the blueprint and keeping an open line of communication between the teams, ReadMe’s Solutions Architects, Andrew and Jim, worked to ensure an almost 1:1 translation from designs to the developed site thanks to healthy doses of custom CSS and JavaScript. Some of the highlights included creating custom navigation to mirror Atelio’s homepage, and introducing a new breadcrumb functionality that spans across the top of every page to help orient developers as they navigate through Atelio’s Guides and API Reference. A custom-styled sidebar expands and collapses to enhance readability, and the first page of Atelio’s Guides features custom components like buttons and cards to provide an optimal UX, especially for developers just getting acquainted with Atelio’s docs.
Technical Writing Without the Writing ✍️
From a technical writing perspective, Julie needed someone who could get into the weeds of the docs with her. Julie came to Mansa, ReadMe’s technical writer, with an interesting, albeit tedious, challenge—collate the extensive, and somewhat disparate, docs into a structure optimized for readability, without removing or rewriting any of the content. Julie provided Mansa with a template to match the structure and flow of Atelio’s marketing pages, and Mansa got to work.
I had made an initial template for the docs to match what the marketing team was doing and I was told, ‘You cannot remove anything. Don’t rewrite anything. Just reorganize it.’ It’s a tedious task that involves going through everything. They were written by four people over time and you could tell by looking at them. Julie Hubschman, Head of Developer Experience
Bringing well over a decade of technical writing expertise to the project, Mansa employed information architecture best practices to optimize the Guides and API Reference sections for discoverability and navigability. The result was an entirely new content architecture, replete with categories, overview pages, and nested subpages, but with little impact to the content itself, per Julie’s request.
Ready, Set, Launch 🚀
It was a sprint to the finish line for both teams but launch day arrived, the press release went live, and so too did Atelio’s website and developer hub. “The docs are one of the most viewed parts of the site to this day. I think that speaks to who we’re serving,” says Julie.
In terms of the Atelio team’s response? You can say what ReadMe’s team delivered took them by surprise—in a good way. Julie commented, “We were able to get [Atelio’s developer hub] to look like it was part of a page made by a whole different company, which was really amazing. The fact that ReadMe did what they did is like witchcraft.”
