Robo Advisor

Project overview

The project consists of a suite of platforms intended for public use to allow potential customers to accomplish all the pre-requirements for opening an investment account with our client or one of the other financial institutions enrolled in the B2B partnership offered by them.

Client background & business context

Our client is a fin-tech company that developed an investment algorithm allowing customers to place investments according to their choice of investment topics. For example, they might opt into investing in precious metals, renewable energy, emerging technologies, or businesses from certain parts of the world. Users are provided with information regarding each topic; potential gains or risks are provided here. Using these choices, the investment algorithm performs operations to maximize the customer's growth while allowing them to fund the domains they feel inclined towards.

The entire architecture needs to be scalable to allow parallel development and deployment, often for multiple partners simultaneously. The project is based on microservices and cloud-hosted, allowing fast and agile development cycles, easy deployment, and minimized downtime.

To enable customization, a CMS was used to deliver texts and rich media content to the various applications in the platform, allowing updates on the fly, often made by business analysts or product owners, without them needing to get their hands into the application code.

Challenges

Expanding the platform capability allowing for more partners and diverse requirements, was always a challenge; continuous improvement was needed. The platform now also includes a mobile application, a back-office tool, and an alternative solution for onboarding customers addressed to bank representatives, who guide new customers through the process using the platform. Every piece of this suite was built from the ground up with white-labeling as a core feature, each of them being ready to be customized to the partner’s desire.

Our approach

To achieve this flexibility, our team conceived a plan where we developed a base version of each application, with custom-made components specific to each partner snapping into this base, either overwriting or enhancing the functionalities. These are a large number of React components, and we apply the white label concept so we can overwrite or improve them quickly for each partner’s needs. We successfully implemented this approach to 6 partners for expanding the portfolio and customer base.

These six partners are part of two different branches of the application; one is the Private Banking branch, with Internationales Bankhaus Bodensee (IBB), Bank für Sozialwirtschaft (BFS) and Value Experts Vermögensverwaltungs AG (Valexx) as the partners. This branch requires the customers to work with an advisor from the chosen financial institution (IBB / BFS / VALEXX) to create their accounts and verify their data. The other branch is the ROBO advisor, which removes the advisor’s involvement in a customer’s account creation and data verification process, giving the customer complete control over his account; for this branch, the partners are IBB Jiminy MAIESTAS and Triodos.

Team members

The team is mixed, with people from mindit working closely together with our client’s team. We covered mainly the development part.

1 PM, 2 Front-End Developers, 1 Fullstack Developer, 1 Backend Developer, 1 QA, 1 UX/UI Designer.

Technologies

The technologies used are Java 8 with microservices architecture, Sprint and Jersey for BackEnd, JavaScript with React for FrontEnd, Redux with Redux Thunk as a middleware for state management and React Native for the mobile apps.

Results & Impact

Our relationship with the client has lasted for more than three years, with a roadmap planned for next year as well. We expanded the reach and number of customers, improved processes, and increased confidence in the product and its capabilities. Like our objectives, abilities, and goals, this platform has grown significantly throughout the years.

As a result of our long-term partnership and the advanced product knowledge, we ensure flexibility by adapting and implementing the requests faster for end-users.

Next step?

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