DXcharts for Mobile Platform: Implementing Native Charting for iOS and Android Apps March 18, 2024 Business Challenge According to a recent study, mobile traffic is growing yearly. This includes increased usage from professional and amateur traders who access the market 24/7, thanks to the new flexibility that mobile versions of desktop trading platforms provide. DXcharts received a large volume of requests that indicated, despite these trends in end-user behavior, there was yet to be a native charting library offering for iOS and Android mobile applications. The only solutions available on the market were, in fact, web-based solutions that just mimic native apps and aren’t ready to facilitate the full capabilities of modern mobile devices. Given the significant number of users transitioning to mobile applications, there is a clear need for charting capabilities. The DXcharts team saw this as an opportunity and decided to use their accumulated industry experience to build a solution that would align with the quality expectations and standards of the capital markets industry. Solution The Devexperts team was already experienced in building native mobile solutions with charts and various technical analysis tools. There were multiple ways to provide a solution: Take our legacy libraries and update them to align with modern quality standards. However, this approach presented many technical challenges, which could lead to an outdated solution that does not meet modern users’ needs. Start from scratch. This path didn’t fit our lean approach and objective to quickly deliver a quality solution to the market. Use the core of our advanced web charts and logic to build a mobile solution. The third option seemed the most promising. We evaluated the effectiveness of this strategy and concluded the approach offered numerous advantages: Accelerated time to market. By building on the core of web charting with mobile-optimized code (for better UX), there was no need to start from scratch. Reduced cost. The chosen option did not require a large team and could be implemented quickly. Met all objectives. A native application tailored to mobile traders’ needs filled the identified gap in the market. Results Mobile and desktop traders’ user scenarios are different, so our product team revised the existing features of DXcharts. Instead of providing all features available for the web and desktop, we focused on the interactive chart canvas. Meanwhile, we built and designed the entire UX from scratch in native mobile code. DXcharts Mobile We opted for the most efficient approach to charting, utilizing the latest technologies available. One of the key advantages lies in the fact that the charts are not rendered natively, ensuring consistent behavior across different devices. This significantly enhances the application’s adaptability, making it more flexible and expediting the release process. The most exhilarating aspect of this task was establishing a close interaction between our unique native features and the chart, creating a seamless integration of the mobile world with data visualization. Furthermore, we emphasized crafting a flexible structure, facilitating seamless integration and adaptation of our product to diverse needs. — Nikita, Software Developer Android platform, Devexperts Indicator configuration in DXcharts Mobile DXcharts mobile application is essentially an embedded browser rendering the core chart. A significant advantage of this approach was that if new features are added to the core web chart in the future, they will automatically be accessible in the mobile application with minimal effort from the mobile developers. One of the challenging developmental tasks is acquiring, processing, and displaying a substantial volume of data in a chart. We pay special attention to ensuring data flows in and is displayed without delay. We’ve chosen the most optimal approach for chart creation, employing modern technologies. One of the key advantages is that chart rendering doesn’t occur at the native function level. By using a ready-made solution for chart rendering, we expedite the development process and achieve uniformity across all platforms. An intriguing development aspect for me is creating interactive user engagement with the chart, allowing users to draw on it and visualize it in their preferred manner or style. The close integration of native functions with web components brings numerous advantages and flexibility. — Anastasia, Software Developer iOS platform, Devexperts Our team for this project consisted of only three developers, who accomplished the task in a short time, developing two native mobile libraries for applications around the charting core. This efficient delivery demonstrated the resources needed for future mobile app integrations. DXcharts mobile libraries We chose to use the existing dxcharts-light web library by embedding it in the web view instead of drawing the charts within our application. Essentially, we created a wrapper for the existing chart display functionality, saving significant resources. The web team focused on optimizing the data visualization while we focused on the user interface. The most fascinating part was designing the architecture for the future product. Since our project was an embedded library for other applications, we couldn’t fully use the standard methods for developing architectures for mobile applications. We had to consider how the end developer would integrate our library, how they could configure it, and how they would provide us with their data: instruments, candles, etc. — Dmitrii, Software Developer Android platform, Devexperts In the shortest possible time frame, the DXcharts product line obtained full-fledged charts for native mobile applications that provide users with complete freedom of action and a full range of functionality comparable to the web version of the product. Devexperts is currently integrating the new mobile charts with our existing DXtrade applications. As a result, DXcharts customers will soon have advanced, multifunctional, and powerful mobile charts with a wealth of features available in the latest versions of web charts, outperforming the competition in the market. The team did a great job—we studied the perspectives, chose the optimal one, and quickly delivered one of the most advanced mobile charts. Now we can maintain it at a reasonable cost, and the compatibility between Devexperts’ products is higher than ever. — Andrey Shuvlenov, Devexperts DXcharts for Mobile is designed to help brokers provide a unique service to their end-users. Your firm can be among the first to explore DXcharts for mobile. Organize your complimentary one-month trial here.
Stock Trading Platform for Leading Asia-Pacific Financial Services Provider June 1, 2023 About the Client The client is a Southeast Asia bank and one of the leading integrated financial services providers in Asia. The bank has a global presence in 20+ countries, including the EU, the US, and Australia, with 2.5+ million users. The client focuses on retail broking, institutional equities, derivatives, prime services, equity research, asset management, and online broking. Business Challenge All brokers in the region usually settle for a white-label solution from a particular platform provider. But this choice comes with certain limitations. For example, the product is standard, it doesn’t change looks. This diminishes the differences among competing financial firms. This lack of UI customization prevented the client from upgrading their offering and making it stand out from the competitors. It also meant the client couldn’t achieve their goal of becoming the first broker to offer fractional trading in Asia and on the Singapore Stock Exchange. As a result, this created an issue for the client’s strategy to grow and thrive in their own way. The white-label is also quite expensive because the client has to pay a commission for every trade executed on their mobile app. So they wanted to reduce this marginal cost. Additionally, the client had accumulated a number of legacy systems with little to no support. So they were looking for a partner that could deliver a flexible trading platform, where they could easily implement sophisticated features such as fractional trading or seamless and reliable back-office integration. This would give them the ability to adapt and optimize their solutions to stay ahead of the competition and keep up with changing user demands. The client needed a partner with expertise in the stock brokerage field and strong engineering skills. The partner should also be able to offer licensable trading software that can replace the existing vendor. This journey led the client to Devexperts. Solution After estimating the project’s multi-stage scope, the Devexperts team proposed a two-step process: Creating a white-label DXtrade XT trading platform adapted to exchange trading. This step involved integration with a third party back-office solution known as Nova, which is the go-to back-office for many Asian brokers. Creating a custom market data gate that can work with the Singapore Exchange. This step onboarded dxFeed, (Devexperts’ market data subsidiary) to create a custom gate using Morningstar API. This gate was essential to the delivery. The project completion dates were tight: only a few months separated the beginning of the project and the first trade on the Singapore Exchange. But the Devexperts team made it on time. Then, six weeks after the first trade on the Singapore Exchange, the Devexperts teams gave the client their first fractional trade. “The hardest part was the fractional trading part. On one hand, it required a multi-level risk management approach, and on the other, it needed significant technical skills to integrate the solution with the third-party back-office. Another challenge was adjusting our deployment practices and implementing a bespoke software delivery process. We needed to do that to comply with the client’s security and compliance prescriptions and pass their internal audits.” — Mikhail, Head of Delivery Unit, Devexperts Results Within six months, the Devexperts team implemented and customized the DXtrade XT trading terminal. In close cooperation with dxFeed and the client, Devexperts adapted this terminal to fractional trading and integrated it into the third-party provider’s back-office. The client received the trading terminal with a branded UI and an integrated flow of the Singapore Exchange market data from dxFeed. “We greatly appreciate Devexperts’ effort to make the target production go live — which was a very important milestone to achieve. Our ultimate goal was to have the right technology partner to support our platform strategy of Scalability as a Service. Congratulations on hitting this very first and important milestone, with more to come! Kudos to Devexperts and dxFeed’s teams for making it happen!” — Program Manager, the client
Platform with Post-Trade Allocation Management for a US Advisory Firm May 25, 2023 About the Client The client is a US-based digital custodian with more than 1,700 financial advisors, providing RIA services, including brokerage and wealth management solutions. Business Challenge The client required a technical partner who could develop a fractional order management system (OMS) capable of supporting block orders across multiple asset classes. The system needed to integrate with multiple counterparties, including market makers, clearing agents, and the client’s internal back-office system. Additionally, once the orders were executed, the proceedings (cash and securities) had to be allocated back to individual accounts. For example, a basket order to buy 10,000 shares of IBM would have to be allocated to 15,000 accounts, with 0.3 shares going to account A, 1.3 shares going to account B, and so on. The system needed to send orders to the market makers at the start of the regular trading session to ensure maximum liquidity. Failure to do so could cause multi-million orders to move the market and worsen the execution price. The client’s existing OMS did not meet expectations in terms of performance, and the allocation process couldn’t support the firm’s ambitious growth plans. To meet these targets, the client needed to upgrade to an OMS which could execute tens of millions of orders in minutes. The client also required the trading system to support a wide range of instruments, including stocks, ETFs, options, bonds, and mutual funds. Such a complex task required a team with strong technical skills and extensive experience in brokerage services which could provide a turnkey solution and significantly customize it on an ambitious timeline. Solution The first phase of the Devexperts solution was implementing the ready-made DXtrade XT platform, which enables stock, ETF, and options trading. Devexperts then added custom features, including: Fractional trading, which allows the client to place fractional orders. The client has a large number of accounts containing complex portfolios of fractional stocks Notional trading, allowing the client to buy and sell assets from individual accounts in money equivalent Block orders, including allocation instructions for the post-trade processing of funds and securities to individual accounts Reconciliation between the DXtrade XT platform and the client’s back office so that accounts can be automatically rebalanced post-trade. The second phase involved: Integrating the trading platform with the client’s clearing agents, so all trades and allocations are reported via both REST API and FIX Drop Copy Enabling the client to integrate new brokers onto its platform Integrating existing executing brokers and market makers Adding the ability to trade mutual and money market funds Aggregated account calculation to facilitate cross-collateralization. Fig. 1 High-level system design “The biggest challenge in this project was to create a system that could process tens of millions of allocations in minutes. Reliability was key: even if there is a system failure, it can restart without the loss of data or progress. Although DXtrade XT is very flexible and scalable, it was not an easy task involving numerous optimizations and extensive performance testing.” – Vladimir, a lead software architect Results The Devexperts team delivered a multi-asset, high-performance trading system which integrated with all counterparties and was tailored to the client’s wealth management business. The solution was delivered on time, and the client was provided with a system capable of executing and allocating thousands of orders for tens of thousands of accounts in under 30 minutes. “The customized DXtrade software is complex and sophisticated, and I admire the professionalism of the team and their willingness to meet all our requirements. It was a pleasure working with such a talented team.” – Head of Brokerage Product, the client
Back-Office Software for Leading Asia-Pacific Financial Services Provider May 2, 2023 About the Client The client is a Southeast Asia bank and one of the leading integrated financial services providers in Asia. The bank has a global presence in 20+ countries, including the EU, the US, and Australia, with 2.5+ million users. The client focuses on retail broking, institutional equities, derivatives, prime services, equity research, asset management, and online broking. Business Challenge To scale operations and meet the needs of a growing user base, brokers employ back-office software to keep up with the fast-paced financial industry and market changes. Without such software, banks and financial services providers must rely on manual processes that cause delays and inaccuracies. The absence of this technology put the client at a disadvantage when compared to their competitors who have invested in back-office software. This posed a challenge for the client to achieve their goals and keep up with user demand.The client was seeking a reputable vendor to develop their back-office software solution using a Python/Django stack. The scope of the system was to manage commissions and margin settings, produce various reports, and send them to a specific group of customers or employees. The vendor that had initially developed and supported the client’s system disengaged, leaving the client without the support they needed to manage their operations effectively. Accordingly, the client needed to partner with a reliable and experienced vendor that can give them stable, efficient, and integrated software to help them regain their competitive edge. Their search led to Devexperts, a well-known software development company that specializes in creating advanced solutions for brokerage firms. Solution Once familiarized with the scope of work, Devexperts set out to address three key issues: Rectify the instability of the back-office software Correct any bugs Add additional features, making the system design flexible to suit the client’s needs One of the largest challenges faced by the Devexperts’ team was the accreditation required by the regional regulator. Without this, third parties cannot directly access financial systems’ source code. This accreditation could take years to obtain, so Devexperts and the client came up with a workaround and used Amazon Workspaces (an AWS remote desktop service) to proceed with the project work as scheduled. “Working using a remote desktop is certainly less than ideal, but we had to sacrifice some of our comfort for the sake of the project’s success and time to market. Even though our engineers’ hands were tied by the client’s weighty information security policies, we managed to meet the deadlines. Kudos to our team’s experience and high qualifications!” – Mikhail, Devexperts Technical Lead. Results Devexperts was able to quickly get the client back on track by stabilizing their back-office solution, ensuring the system’s sustainability. The knowledgeable Devexperts team also resolved several issues and added new features needed to meet the client’s needs and preferences. “The Devexperts team’s attention to detail and testing were unparalleled during the entire development process. I commend their technical expertise and knowledge of the specifics of the broker’s business, and fully recommend Devexperts for such engagements.” – VP, the client.
A Comprehensive Sales and Operational Management System for an Investment Advisor September 15, 2022 About the Client The client offers asset management and investment advice to financial advisors and their customers. The firm manages customer portfolios and facilitates incorporating options into investments to manage risk. In practice, the process spans from placing buy and sell orders, execution with a custodian to options attribution and performance reporting. Before engaging in these activities, our client needs to find partners/ customers. The client then has to generate and negotiate proposals and track agreement status. Business Challenge The client needed to streamline pre-sales and new customer generation and negotiation procedures. Their processes relied on manual data input, mostly across separate Excel spreadsheets, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. This, coupled with broad data sources and large data quantities for processing, limited the client’s productivity. It also restricted how well they could track account creation and agreement status. The challenge was bi-fold, though. Once the client engaged with a new customer, the inconvenient UI didn’t facilitate configuring strategy attributes since it included many irrelevant fields, not unified on one single portal. The interface was complex; advisors had to refer to multiple documents to gather the information they needed. This, in turn, didn’t simplify performance monitoring. Instead, the client wanted a convenient web-based portal/UI which grouped all their former tools and databases in one place with a good looking, fast user interface. The system would also allow third-party access to data for performance assessment and analysis and options strategy simulation. As an added benefit, the software needed to simplify and improve internal operations management. Finally, time-sensitive and privacy-sensitive data weren’t handled properly. Data updates weren’t frequent enough: they only happened daily. The client also couldn’t grant access to junior employees without exposing sensitive data. This made data accuracy and security an issue. Solution The client approached Devexperts to create software that would help them improve operational management and sales processes. They also sought our expertise to build a UI that offered structured notes using options. The project was challenging due to its broad scope since the software required an API and a user-friendly UI for internal and third-party use. That’s why we decided to group the deliverables based on task priority—primary and secondary. Primary Deliverables We started implementing systems for separating access and authorizations based on user. The initial phase also targeted automating proposal generation and creating a widget for the work queue. We created a client portal with improved UI to simplify user inputs and queries. It included different accessibility options for the various entities using the UI. The solution sourced information from the client’s Excel databases into one fast and efficient portal. Each entity was also only able to view the dashboards relevant to it. For example, only the operations team would need access to the Work Queue widget to ensure workflow optimization. Admins as well wouldn’t need any work-related dashboards. Instead, they’d need to view access management portals. The solution also enabled the client to use the white-label reporting widget to generate analytics and invoices quickly. The second solution created at this level was the Work Queue. The feature tracks all changes employees and customers make to all the data, such as customer user information, equity holdings, option strategy, etc. It tracked all changes in the portal mentioned above. Then, it alerted the relevant entities to approve/ reject the changes. The client could even request additional work from employees or customers before approving changes. We even went a step further, creating automations that generate triggers based on predetermined conditions. These would prompt the relevant entities to perform additional work to complete any given task. Secondary Deliverables We then moved on to the secondary project deliverables to offer better analytics and access to data. The solution used Java and Python scripts to analyze the client’s historical data and generate daily performance reports. We created multiple modules to split processes and ensure they function most efficiently. One module is the admin module, which validates and simplifies user input. It also helps with form submission and strategy creation. Another module we delivered is the proposal generation tool. The solution automates data retrieval from customer databases and market data providers, such as Bloomberg. We created a web UI to help customers input equity ticker information and select their preferred portfolio management strategy. This tool is also linked back to the Decision Tree module to help the client choose the appropriate option strategy for that specific customer. We also went deeper, allowing the client to use the tool to create a final report showing the financial benefit to customers of adopting the proposed option strategy. The PDF report included all data and graphs relevant to submit a sales offer to prospective customers. For existing customers, we created a performance reporting tool to help our client generate specific financial performance reports. The client could choose the timeframe and the specific parameters to include in the final PDF report. All information would also be presented in a table or graph form. Results Ultimately, we helped the client scale the sales process and provide option strategies to multiple customers. The new UI empowered the client’s sales team to generate proposals easily and improve service consistency. The client could create and manage customer information. The solution also helped the client define competitive fees and allocate client-specific portfolio strategies. Aside from the sales process, the widget and dashboard improved the client’s day-to-day operational management. In effect, it simplified all processes and services the asset manager offers. The Work Queue solution helped the client track all changes and automate which information flows to the databases. It even helped the client identify work requirements and create work triggers to the relevant entity. The proposal generation and reporting tools helped the client combine all information into clean reports in a friendly PDF format. This helped improve the decision-making process for option strategy selection. It also aided in pinpointing financial benefit to potential customers and tracking financial performance for active clients. All of this funneled into the client’s structured note replications beating S&P 500 returns. It also allowed the client to buffer or even reverse the downside in normalized market conditions. The solution also helped the client deliver their options strategies and overlays at competitive prices. This, in return, gave it a competitive advantage over other investment advisors.
Unified Advisor Portal for Business Restructuring November 12, 2020 About the Client The Client is a US financial group established in the early 80s. The Client supports multiple business models with one of the largest networks of independently managed broker-dealers. Its specialties are CPAs, bank and credit unions, regional models, financial advisors, and wealth management. The Client employs over 8,000 financial advisors who manage over 80 billion US dollars. Challenge The Client had four legacy advisor portals used across its four business entities. In the course of restructuring the business model, the portals required large scale reconstruction. Multiple portals meant costly maintenance for the Client and major inconveniences for advisors due to the absence of a unified ecosystem. The Client’s primary request was to revamp the UI and information architecture and deliver a unified portal, which should also facilitate future functional evolution. The new portal should retain the full functionality of the legacy portals and provide advisors with a new set of features. The Client also required that the portal be capable of displaying its current broker-dealer center’s content. The broker-dealer center aggregates all account metrics across the Client’s four business entities. Solution Having previously delivered a family of advisor portals to a major US wealth management firm, Devexperts established a reputation as a trusted technology provider and partner in the financial services industry and was chosen to deliver the project. Devexperts focused on combining the functionality of the legacy advisor portals into a single web portal. All the existing tools for creating and analyzing customers’ portfolios, reporting, reviewing customers’ accounts and data, calendar, search tools, and watchlists were unified under the new UI. The portal was also integrated with the broker-dealer center to display its aggregations of all account metrics across the Client’s entire network of independently managed broker-dealers. Unifying the portals went hand-in-hand with revamping the look and feel, usability, and information architecture. The goal was to provide financial advisors with a modern interface and improved the user experience. Devexperts also implemented a flexible UI framework for future functional evolution. In addition to the new look and feel, Devexperts developed entirely new UI/UX options. The software vendor aimed to give advisors a personalized experience, so they deployed features such as a customizable dashboard with widgets, a common alerts framework, an improved entities search, and contextual help. The modernization also introduced an element of social networking to the advisor portal, allowing advisors to share their profiles with colleagues. Results The Client’s business model restructuring went as planned, as Devexperts successfully delivered a unified portal across the entire broker-dealer network. The new portal combines all original functions of the legacy portals and is also integrated with the Client’s broker-dealer center. For a top-notch user experience, Devexperts developed a customizable user interface and added new features for advisors such as a customizable dashboard with widgets, a common alerts framework, an improved entities search, and contextual help.
Asset Management Firm Solves Docflow Bottleneck with Report Automation June 24, 2020 About the Client The Client is a US asset management firm that specializes in derivatives and provides proprietary trading technologies to institutional portfolio managers. They offer a variety of services: options strategies, custom portfolios, and replication of structured notes. The Client improves existing portfolios with thoroughly selected options strategies that increase return and minimize possible risks. Challenge In asset management, paper flow is essential for accuracy and transparency. The Client’s employees—advisors—need to create various reports and invoices in a standard form across all custodians. They used to prepare all account-level performance reports manually. As the number of partner advisors, accounts, and custodians increased, the paper flow became even more time-consuming. In addition, an existing process had bottlenecks in interpreting the documents due to a lack of tools that quickly compile data and present them in a clear unified form. Thus, the Client’s operations team required a solution to easily build performance reports and invoices. Solution The Client came in contact with Devexperts while looking for a developer with a background in fintech and data management. Devexperts introduced a tool for collecting and processing the raw data prepared by the Client’s existing tools. Based on that data, new highly accurate reports were able to be built in PDF and HTML formats. New reports are generated by leading frontend technologies. These technologies make it possible to parse reports and reuse the obtained data in interactive widgets for future tool’s extensions. An example of such extensions is a web portal that combines reporting with a client proposal, operations, and risk-management subsystem. Results Devexperts provided the Client with the tool that automatically builds reports and invoices in a standard easy-to-interpret form across all custodians. Such process automation helped the Client to: Get rid of bottlenecks in data compilation.Avoid human errors in documents.Increase the speed of building performance reports and invoices.
Retirement Planning for Asset Management Firm as Response to Market Demands September 28, 2019 About the Client The Client is a private investment firm based in the US. They have been in business since the ‘90s, working with high net worth individuals, investment firms, profit-sharing pension plans, charitable organizations, and corporations. The Client employs financial advisors that provide expensive specialty services to retail customers through a turn-key asset management platform (TAMP). With almost $30 billion in assets, the advisors build retirement plans and manage funds and investments, based on their customers’ risk tolerance and personal preferences. Challenge In the 2010s, the US started experiencing a massive retirement wave of baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964). Their share of US economic activity amounts to $7.6 trillion every year. Baby boomers have been saving and investing with the Client, but retirement has shifted their financial aims toward spending. Thus, a demand arose for trouble-proof financial planning for a retirement period. Retirees want to maintain a standard of living that they are used to and to know exactly how long their savings will last because boomers are also living longer. The Client did not have a financial product to plan retirement spending, so customers who had been saving and investing with them before retirement started leaving for their competitors. This customer attrition led to an outflow of funds, so the Client needed to rapidly develop and implement a financial solution. The Client also needed to improve the field sales process. It was essential in making customer engagement convenient for advisors when working outside of the office. One more goal was to enhance the customer experience when communicating with advisors and tracking financial stats of retirement planning. Solution The Client chose Devexperts due to their experience in the development of tailored wealth management solutions and a record of successfully delivered FinTech projects. Devexperts are also known for the swift development of financial solutions from square one, and it was exactly what the Client needed at the time. To reduce customer attrition, which significantly affected the Client’s revenues, the retirement planning software needed to be implemented within 8 months from the start of development. Due to time constraints, the project was divided among several development companies. Devexperts were assigned to develop the back- and frontend of a system, which forecasts income for a set period of time. The system has been equipped with data charting and visualization of a customer’s retirement portfolio. It demonstrates two retirement portfolio use cases: modeling of a possible situation and demonstration of a current portfolio for printing. The solution is integrated with other of the Client’s products, which amount to a turnkey asset management platform, an investor portal, a portfolio management solution, and other modules. It was also fine-tuned to generate high-quality printable reports and documents employed in further work with investors. Devexeprts also succeeded in achieving two aims at once through the implementation of an iPad version of the retirement planning solution. On one hand, it has improved customer engagement for advisors during the field sales process. On the other, it has allowed for better customer experience, because retirees have received an opportunity to track their balance and flow of funds. The project was sophisticated due to changing specifications, as Devexperts had to sync with other software vendors engaged in the ongoing parallel development of other solution components. Devexeperts’ financial software solution for income planning covered the gap in the Client’s offering, which stopped the customer attrition. Results Devexperts have played a key role in launching a new retirement solution for the Client, which resulted in: A short time-to-market development of an entirely new software solution to plan spendings, which added up to the Client’s product line A sharp cut to their customer attrition The new solution enhanced Client account managers with powerful tools to serve customers looking for retirement savings services High sales conversion rates (iPad version for advisors) The optimized customer experience (iPad version for retirees)
Portfolio Solution for a Digital Transformation of an Asset Management Firm September 20, 2019 About the Client The Client is a private investment firm based in the US. They have been in business since the ‘90s, working with high net worth individuals, investment firms, pension, and profit-sharing plans, charitable organizations, and corporations. The Client employs financial advisors that provide expensive specialty services through a turn-key asset management platform (TAMP). With almost $30 billion in assets, the advisor-strategists build customers’ financial portfolios based on their risk tolerance and personal preference. They also assist in managing funds and investments. Business Challenge The Client used to provide advisors with a third-party off-the-shelf solution for portfolio management. This meant recurring licensing fees and incapability to enhance the software with the Client’s tailored features to fine-tune custom portfolios. The Client also required to reconceptualize the user experience. It implied the digital transformation of business processes, which was impossible with the off-the-shelf product. The Client decided to get a proprietary custom financial software capable of providing advisors with the best customer engagement experience. Advisors demanded a business tool for a full cycle of operation with portfolios and a customizable interface layout. Through a proprietary solution, the Client also wanted to eliminate the license expenses and increase their business capitalization with a new valuable intangible asset. Solution The Client chose Devexperts due to their experience in the development of tailored wealth management solutions and a previous record of successfully delivered FinTech projects. Devexperts developed both the front- and back-end of a new portfolio management solution, which incorporated the following features required by advisors: Compilation and on-the-fly adjustment of custom portfolios Comparison of solution’s portfolios with external accounts (held at any financial institution) Configuration of UI layout for the variability of portfolio visuals – intelligent customer engagement through the capability to shift and change portfolio information based on advisor’s demands On top of these features, the new proprietary portfolio management solution provides: Elaborate information with the risk-return ratio for portfolio returns evaluation based not solely on investment returns The fulfillment of customer demands according to short- and long-term investments – demonstration how different investment decisions and market conditions impact customers’ goals Additionally, the new software provides advisers with instruments that optimize their day-to-day business activities. They comprise of initial customer conversation, ongoing financial planning discussions, performance, compliance and tax reporting, and billing. Results New Client’s portfolio management solution consists of modeling, comparison, and analysis tools. The robust proprietary solution allowed the Client to accomplish the purposes of: Cutting costs on the key software for their business by eliminating license fees Implementing a portfolio management solution customizable for business requirements Providing the best service to advisors, the key customers of the Client Through the implementation of the new proprietary solution, the Client was also able to accomplish outstanding financial results. According to the Client’s financial reports, a year after the solution’s introduction, the business reached a CAGR of 17%, and net flow grew by 245%. The new portfolio management solution had a direct impact on bringing more assets to the platform and thus in successful valuation for the Client’s IPO launch.
Devexperts Develops a Proprietary Investor Portal for US Client July 30, 2019 About the Client The Client is a private investment company based in the US. It has been in business for over 20 years, working with high net worth individuals, investment companies, pension and profit sharing plans, charitable organizations, and corporations. With almost $30 billion in assets on their platform, the Client builds financial portfolios according to their customers’ demands and manages their funds and investments. Challenge The Client required a replacement for their investor portal, a software application for investors to see their assets and manage their portfolios, and for advisers to provide investors with investment strategy options and financial reports. The Client’s legacy investor portal was inconvenient for advisers in terms of design, performance, and core features. Therefore, advisers were hesitant to use it, leading to customer attrition in the Client’s business. The Client could not update their legacy portal to satisfy the advisors’ expectations because it was a third-party out-of-the-box solution. This task was complicated by the Client’s requirement for a software developer to integrate a new solution into the existing infrastructure, which was connected to various venues and had an overview of transaction history and holdings. Solution The Client chose Devexperts due to its offer to develop a proprietary investor portal with a conceptually new frontend and smooth integration with the existing infrastructure. An investor portal is a part of a turnkey asset management program. Having a pool of experience in integration with third-party software systems, combined with the best UI developers in the financial industry, Devexperts needed only nine months to release a new investor portal and replace the legacy solution. In such a short period, Devexperts was able to perform analysis of the Client’s business processes, identify the best use cases, develop design concepts, and implement the product. Devexperts developed an entirely new investor portal with a state-of-art UI, which is equally efficient and easy-to-use on desktop PCs and mobile devices. The software provides a clear view of investment goals and overall portfolio. Advisors praised the new investor portal for its functionality and performance. Result As a result of the meticulous work within a limited time period, Devexperts delivered to the Client the following: A brand new investor portal that replaced the Client’s legacy applicationSeamless integration with the Client’s infrastructureThe state-of-art UI, equally efficient on desktop PCs and mobile devices Implementation of the new investor portal resulted in increased customer acquisition.
