An investment platform managing a billion pounds

Context

The screens on which clients opened accounts and viewed their portfolios ran on a technology whose support was ending: no more security fixes, and fewer and fewer people able to develop it. In a system under regulator oversight that is not debt to be paid off someday but a risk to be removed by a deadline. At the same time there are no “minor” bugs here: a fee calculated wrongly, a trade booked wrongly or a report sent to the wrong client is real money and a reportable incident, so the move had to go through with no change at all in what clients see.

What I built

Together with the SDK Global Ltd team I moved the account opening wizard and the client dashboards from the old interface technology to a new one, with no downtime for the platform and no change to what clients were used to.

Investment account opening wizard

• A multi-step process for opening an investment account: personal details, financial situation, investment goal and horizon, choice of account type, consents and documents, each step on its own screen with visible progress.
• Later questions depend on earlier answers, so the client never sees fields that do not apply to them, and a joint or a company account gets its own path.
• Data checked at the field where the mistake was made, not at the end of the path. The client can stop and come back to the wizard without filling everything in again.

Client dashboards

• The value of the portfolio, how it has moved over time on charts, and how the money is split.
• The charts recalculate along with the data, without reloading the page.

The client’s name and the technical details stay under a non-disclosure agreement.

Outcome

The wizard and the dashboards now run on a modern, supported technology: with current security fixes, with people on the market who can develop it, and with the option of maintaining it for years instead of another rebuild. The platform meets the regulator’s security requirements, and the move went through with no downtime and no change to what clients were used to. A new client opens an account alone, step by step, and sees their portfolio on the dashboard without calling an adviser.