About Forefront Product

Forefront Product builds and tunes customer financing programs for retailers and service businesses. We work where a customer decides whether to buy and how to pay: the offer, the application, the approval and the first purchase.

Our founder. Sean McAuliffe has spent a decade launching and running credit and lending products for national brands, with experience at Shop Your Way, Sears, U.S. Bank, Ford Credit, Rate and Quicken Loans.

• Helped launch a store credit card and checkout program that is live in Sears and with other merchants.
• Led the work that lifted that program’s card application conversion 33% in 2025, inside the issuing bank’s approval process.
• Led the main mortgage application at Guaranteed Rate (now Rate), used by 5,000+ people a day, where a re-engagement program brought in 5,000+ new customers and raised post-close engagement 65%.
• Ran the payment processing platform at Ford Motor Credit and spent four years on the mortgage origination platform at Quicken Loans.

What else we build. Arclo, a financing tool for veterinary practices. Sean is also the author of Autonomy Lost: The Silent Crisis in Product Management (2023) and the forthcoming Pay Later (2027), on how credit and pay-later are reshaping checkout. Books and writing →

Independence and conflicts: Forefront is not a lender and doesn’t sell any one lender’s product. We check for conflicts before every engagement. If Arclo is ever a fit for your business, we’ll tell you it’s ours, and if a lender would ever pay us for a referral, you’ll know first. Client names and data are held under NDA.

Results listed here were delivered by our founder on programs he has led for national brands. Forefront Product works with local retailers and service businesses in Northeast Ohio, and with card programs across the U.S. LinkedIn · sean@forefrontproduct.com