Forge Trust

Fintech Portals

Customer and Employee Facing Web Portals UI/UX Design and Development for Forge Trust (Formerly IRA Services Trust), a US Based Trust That Provide Custodial Services for Individual Retirement Accounts.

Summary

Antiblanks Were Approached by IRA Services Trust’s UK Based Development Partner King Street Apps to Take Ownership of the Product and Front End Development for Migrating Their Existing Legacy HP MPE Custodial System and Developing New User-Facing Web Sites for IRA Services Trust as Part of Their Ambitious Growth and Digital Transformation Programme.

Having developed their legacy HP MPE custodial system in-house over thirty years, IRA Services Trust were well aware of the complexity and magnitude of replacing this piece of software so there was no fixed budget for the project. Yet suspecting their competition would have plans to develop their own comparable digital solution and stifled by the limitations of their existing software which would not allow them to scale, there was pressure for this software to be delivered at the highest possible quality and in as little time as could be achieved.

Backstory

Antiblanks Founder Dan Ivanovic and King Street Apps Founder Thong Nguyen Have a Long Standing Business Relationship, the Pair Having First Met When Dan Worked for Thong While He Was CTO of the Music Streaming Service bloom.FM, Where Dan Eventually Took Ownership of the Web Version of the Product and All Subsidiary Brand Web Sites.

When King Street Apps secured the contract for this project with IRA Services Trust, Thong approached Antiblanks knowing from past experience that Dan’s team possessed the skills required to deliver on the product focused elements of a project of this scale and that Antiblanks could be trusted implicitly. Antiblanks were hired only a few weeks after this first engagement.

Problem

As if Often the Case With Projects Of This Scale, There Were a Lot of Problems Yet the Majority of These Were Not Easily Identifiable From the Outset. Further Analysis Highlighted the Following as Potential Issues:

1. Complexity of the domain

As with most financial software projects understanding the domain is the first and foremost challenging hurdle that needs to be overcome. IRA Services Trust provide the settlement, safekeeping, and reporting of customers’ cash and assets that are held within their retirement accounts, and with such responsibility comes a number of complex rules and regulations that the business have to adhere to, and that we needed to understand to create a piece of software that is fit for purpose.

2. Complexity of the process

A domain as complicated as custodial services inevitably brings with it a multitude of very complicated processes. IRA Services Trust have various different departments that facilitate different parts of the process to create customers’ retirement accounts (New Accounts), bring assets or cash into those accounts (Deposits and Transfers In), invest the customers’ holding into whatever it is they want to purchase (Compliance and Investments), reconcile and report all activity (Treasury and Audit) to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and eventually move assets or cash out of these accounts (Distributions and Transfers Out). Building software to facilitate all these processes was going to be no mean feat.

3. Legacy software limitations

The creation of the legacy software that supported IRA Services Trust’s practice was instigated over thirty years ago. It had evolved during this time but the underlying infrastructure and code base was old fashioned and had some fundamental limitations, the biggest constraints being that importing large amounts of data to the legacy data structure or rewiring the software to connect to a modern scalable database were both not going to be possible. This would present some large integration and migration challenges.

4. Outdated workflows

The workflow of the departments within the business had largely been shaped by the capabilities of the legacy software. This had resulted in some old-fashioned and labour intensive workflows which were by today’s standards highly inefficient. The challenge here would be to translate these into modern practices but ensure that in doing so the workflows were similar enough that the business could continue to operate efficiently with its current employees.

5. Resistance to change

As is common for a business of thirty-something years old that operates with a very low staff turnover and a workforce of a mature age, there was some resistance to change within the company and this had bled into the roles, responsibilities and processes. There was perhaps a misconception that the proposed software was going to replace people and this presents problems when attempting to gather requirements as individuals can sometimes be less forthcoming with information.

6. Little legacy software knowledge

The legacy HP MPE custodial system was created and maintained by a single long standing IRA Services Trust stakeholder. This individual, though embedded in the company, was the only employee that had complete knowledge of the system. Though there was a user guide, there was no technical documentation so any technical requirements elicitation would need to go directly via this one person who was (as you can imagine) very busy.

7. No internal product direction

There was for a time no one appointed at IRA Services Trust with knowledge of custodial services to help steer the development of the product. Any surfacing and prioritisation of high-level product decisions would need to be driven by the development partners.

Solution

A large enterprise project such as this relies on good project management and good use of the right management methodologies.

This starts with having clear goals that are established from the outset, understood and documented in a shared collaborative workspace. It’s important to open good lines of communication between all development teams and with key stakeholders in the business. On top of this it’s important to create a relevant and agile workflow that runs in short controlled sprints that allows development to be flexible, and are structured such that there is complete transparency with regular previews so that the client can see progress and is aware when deliverables will be affected. Finally, the workflow needs to incorporate regular reviews to reflect on work completed, assess velocity and improve on processes moving forward.

1. King Street Apps and Antiblanks worked together to formulate a process that satisfied all the above criteria.

And we used this process to successfully deliver all client facing products alongside a new custodial management platform developed by the backend team. Our deliverables included a responsive and customisable white label sign up funnel and a fully featured self service client portal used to manage all aspects of a self directed US retirement account. After gaining traction with investment provider partnerships and growing rapidly to service around a half a million new accounts, we built an employee facing product on top of this foundation to replace the legacy back office system.

2. Establishing goals, eliciting, understanding and documenting requirements.

Steps taken to elicit, understand and document requirements helped us to fathom the complex domain and business processes associated with custodial services and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs).

The learned domain and process knowledge was also paramount in enabling us to take effective ownership of product focused decision making and operate efficiently in the absence of an internal product owner within the business.

Initial kickoff meetings with key stakeholders to establish high level goals.

Initial meetings with team leads from each department to gain a high level understanding of how each department operates and begin to understand how important the existing software is to their workflows.

Multiple focused workshops with each department coupled with self-directed research into custodial practice to understand the entire process in greater depth and to create comprehensive process flow diagrams that illustrate everything each department does day-to-day and the function of the existing software within this.

Codifying the process flow diagrams into user stories, breaking these apart to define high level features and documenting this in a Gannt chart to form a high level project plan, and making all documentation available on our collaborative workspace.

Presenting everything to key stakeholders in the business and holding Q&A sessions to demonstrate we’ve understood the end-to-end requirements.

Presenting everything to development team leads so that all creators understand the requirements and the scope of work.

3. Constructing a relevant agile development process

Building a relevant agile development process influenced by scrum and kanban and supporting this with a solid infrastructure to facilitate regular independent front and back end releases, product demonstrations and user acceptance testing helped us to efficiently modernise the software and replace outdated workflows.

Regularly communicating with stakeholders and educating users on a per-feature basis enabled us to breakdown any resistance to change and encourage advocation of the new system.

4. Practicing enterprise grade application development

Adopting an enterprise approach to application development was key in maintaining a high quality and cohesive codebase, allowing us to scale quickly and easily when required, minimise bugs and limit technical debt.

Establishing an integrated suite of project management and development tools.

Constructing a modern build pipeline incorporating development, test, sandbox, beta and production environments, test automation and reporting to drive regular and smaller releases.

Documenting all aspects of the software development process in a shared collaborative workspace.

Adding high level requirements as epics to project management software.

Breaking epics into features and adding these as subtasks to project management software.

Establishing an integrated suite of project management and development tools.

Forming multi-disciplined development teams to efficiently deliver each feature with little-to-no resource downtime.

Sprint planning at the beginning of each sprint to devise the scope of the sprint and set realistic goals with clearly defined deliverables for the business.

Sprint retrospective to reflect and refine both our process and solution with an incorporated demo to key stakeholders and system users to obtain critical feedback through user testing.

Enforcing best practices across all areas of the UX, design and development process.

Exercising strict separation of concerns between business and presentation layers within our code.

Making use of modern architectures and design patterns including adoption of functional programming paradigms.

Utilising widely adopted and well documented libraries and outlining clear coding standards and practices to ensure consistency and assist in knowledge and ownership transferal.

Putting security to the fore of decision making when procuring 3rd party libraries to integrate into our software.

Enforcing unit tests are written to cover a high percentage of the system code and promoting a Test Driven Design (TDD) approach to development.

The Outcome

Over a Three Year Software Development Cycle Antiblanks via King Street Apps Have Established Ourselves as a Trusted Product Development Partner to IRA Services Trust, We’ve Contributed To the Delivery of a Custodial Platform That Has:

Increased the Number of Customer Accounts

Raised the Amount of Custodial Holdings

Enlarged the Valuation for the Sale of the Company

Increasing the Number of Customer Accounts

The software we created for IRA Services Trust has allowed them to increase the number of customer accounts in their system by over seventeen times the amount held before to 750,000 accounts at time of writing and this continues to grow by around 3,000 new accounts each day.

Enlarging the Valuation for the Sale of the Company

The software we created for IRA Services Trust has helped to make the company more attractive to buyers and has contributed to enlarging the valuation for the recent sale agreed at $55 million to Forge Global as reported in April 2019 by TechCruch.

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Fintech Portals

Customer and Employee Facing Web Portals UI/UX Design and Development for Forge Trust (Formerly IRA Services Trust), a US Based Trust That Provide Custodial Services for Individual Retirement Accounts.

Summary

Backstory

Problem

As if Often the Case With Projects Of This Scale, There Were a Lot of Problems Yet the Majority of These Were Not Easily Identifiable From the Outset. Further Analysis Highlighted the Following as Potential Issues:

1. Complexity of the domain

2. Complexity of the process

3. Legacy software limitations

4. Outdated workflows

5. Resistance to change

6. Little legacy software knowledge

7. No internal product direction

Solution

1. King Street Apps and Antiblanks worked together to formulate a process that satisfied all the above criteria.

2. Establishing goals, eliciting, understanding and documenting requirements.

Initial kickoff meetings with key stakeholders to establish high level goals.

Initial meetings with team leads from each department to gain a high level understanding of how each department operates and begin to understand how important the existing software is to their workflows.

Codifying the process flow diagrams into user stories, breaking these apart to define high level features and documenting this in a Gannt chart to form a high level project plan, and making all documentation available on our collaborative workspace.

Presenting everything to key stakeholders in the business and holding Q&A sessions to demonstrate we’ve understood the end-to-end requirements.

Presenting everything to development team leads so that all creators understand the requirements and the scope of work.

3. Constructing a relevant agile development process

4. Practicing enterprise grade application development

Establishing an integrated suite of project management and development tools.

Constructing a modern build pipeline incorporating development, test, sandbox, beta and production environments, test automation and reporting to drive regular and smaller releases.

Documenting all aspects of the software development process in a shared collaborative workspace.

Adding high level requirements as epics to project management software.

Breaking epics into features and adding these as subtasks to project management software.

Establishing an integrated suite of project management and development tools.

Forming multi-disciplined development teams to efficiently deliver each feature with little-to-no resource downtime.

Sprint planning at the beginning of each sprint to devise the scope of the sprint and set realistic goals with clearly defined deliverables for the business.

Sprint retrospective to reflect and refine both our process and solution with an incorporated demo to key stakeholders and system users to obtain critical feedback through user testing.

Enforcing best practices across all areas of the UX, design and development process.

Exercising strict separation of concerns between business and presentation layers within our code.

Making use of modern architectures and design patterns including adoption of functional programming paradigms.

Utilising widely adopted and well documented libraries and outlining clear coding standards and practices to ensure consistency and assist in knowledge and ownership transferal.

Putting security to the fore of decision making when procuring 3rd party libraries to integrate into our software.

Enforcing unit tests are written to cover a high percentage of the system code and promoting a Test Driven Design (TDD) approach to development.

The Outcome

Over a Three Year Software Development Cycle Antiblanks via King Street Apps Have Established Ourselves as a Trusted Product Development Partner to IRA Services Trust, We’ve Contributed To the Delivery of a Custodial Platform That Has:

Increased the Number of Customer Accounts

Raised the Amount of Custodial Holdings

Enlarged the Valuation for the Sale of the Company

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