Case Study: Streamlining an Investment Platform

Summary

Industry: FinTech
Location: Western Europe
Project duration: 5 months
Size of the project team: 3 experts
Software product: Web application
Expertise delivered: Web development services, UI/UX development, performance tuning, cloud migration, code quality improvement.

Challenge

A leading Western-European provider of equity research and investment advisory services, which has been in the business for over 20 years was looking to streamline their on-premise custom-developed investment advisory platform.

The application was used to provide the company’s clients with information on businesses’ investment potential. The software consisted of 5 modules, all of which lacked user-friendliness as originally the system was developed for internal needs and looked like an admin portal. The process of providing investment information was not fully automated. It had to be manually supported by the company’s CEO and other employees. They also had to access the platform in order to provide their customers on demand with reports, graphics, metrics, company comparisons, and dashboards.

To aggravate, the client’s investment platform also had a very slow performance that was badly in need of improvement. Additionally, the client also wanted to migrate their current infrastructure from on-premise to Google Cloud.

SPD Technology became the provider of choice for the project due to our then 13+ year experience in developing similar systems. We also had a readily available team of software developers that was a perfect fit for the project.

Solution

Our project team that started working on the project included a front-end developer, a back-end developer, and a Team Lead. With some changes along the way, our development team had always consisted of 3 dedicated experts.

We started by creating an intuitively user-friendly User Interface for the application. This included adding tips, implementing responsive design to display websites in proper resolution on different screens, and adding spinners for the infinite loading of components. We have also added sets of templates, libraries, and components, such as Bootstrap.

It is now possible to customize the number of components on the screen to enable the end-user to choose which ones to display. We’ve also grouped the various elements on the screen in the most user-friendly way.

Migrating to a later version of Angular to be able to use some of the technology’s components and improving the legacy code posed additional difficulties during the UI/UX-related part of the project.

To improve the performance of the client’s platform, we needed to solve some typical problems associated with the ineffective use of the Hibernate and N+1 frameworks. The main task here was to reduce the number of queries, sent by the server to the database that slowed down the application’s performance. Our experts successfully resolved this problem, while also optimizing the SQL queries and adding caching.

Lastly, our project team needed to migrate the on-premise application to Google Cloud.

As the initial version of the client’s platform was not designed to be deployed to the Cloud, our project team had to first make several upgrades and optimizations in order to eliminate several major code-related issues.

We converted the application into a 12-factor app that is based on a stateless architecture, enabled by Cloud-native techniques. After this, it became possible to easily scale and deploy the platform to the Cloud without any additional changes.

Our project team helped the client migrate the app to the Google Cloud. We also introduced continuous integration and continuous delivery practices into the process, thus achieving zero downtime deployment for the application.

To ensure a higher level of security, our experts have performed a migration to Auth0, the modern SaaS service, compliant with the latest security standards and protocols. Auth0 has an array of important, out-of-the-box features, such as the support of magic links, social connections, SSO, MFA, and others. Migrating to Auth0 provided us with the authorization mechanisms and facilitated the management of user roles, while also sparing us the trouble of developing this functionality from scratch.

Technical Solution

• Spring Boot
• Angular
• Java 8
• GCP
• MySQL
• Git
• Auth0

Methodology, Tools:

• Kanban
• CI/CD

Result

Our client has received a significantly improved version of their investment platform that has fully automated their core business processes. Their customers are now able to leverage the modernized Cloud application to quickly and conveniently fulfill their financial information needs.

SPD Technology’s project team has been able to achieve a 10x performance improvement, as compared with the application’s original on-premise version.

After our project team has improved the deployment speed and automated code deployment, any new feature introduced to the application becomes available to the end-user within just a few minutes. This means that the time-to-market for our client has shrunk dramatically, and the client’s team can now promptly add new features to improve their customer experience even further, with or without our assistance.

Thus, the platform has now become fully scalable. It is now optimized for unlimited traffic and supports future growth.

As of summer 2021, the cooperation between SPD Technology and our client has been put on hold due to some COVID-19-related budget constraints on the client’s side. However, the client is very happy with our project team’s performance. They are planning to evolve the application even further in the future by introducing some new features and adjusting the software in accordance with customer feedback.