CMS, Custom Software Development, UX & Design
A digital client onboarding tool with electronic signatures to improve acquisition of new 10X customers without requiring input from financial advisors.
Problem:The onboarding of financial clients is a slow and cumbersome process, discouraging new clients and burdening financial institutions in admin and overhead costs.
Solution:Design and develop an automated onboarding process that meets the security and regulatory requirements of the industry, while speeding up and simplifying the process for clients.
10x Investments believes in simplifying the process of investment and retirement saving. With hundreds of complex investment choices and an army of middle-men, 10x wanted to eliminate the need for advisors and digitise the entire investment process.
We worked with 10x to develop electronic sign-up forms and automate their on-boarding process. The user-experience and security was critical to their success.
Beneath the regulatory and legal standards we were designing for, we also architected a system that allowed 10x to seamlessly integrate client data into every part of their business. Clients could directly interact with any part of 10x's investment portfolio without the need for advisors, and 10x could automate their client management using all the client data already in the system. Everything could be managed by a central database.
In an industry that is traditionally slow to innovate and overburdened with paperwork, we were breaking new ground.
We designed an on-boarding process that could be completed in just fifteen minutes, compared to the industry best of two working days. Clients could start their application today and have an investment two hours later.
Our electronic client on-boarding process lead to 10x growing their client base.
Automating the client admin process and moving to an electronic system has decreased the turnaround time and cost of securing new investment clients. Our experience in creating such effective on-boarding processes has been invaluable to the financial industry and continues to be key to how our clients secure new business.
Financial institutions have held onto the outdated, manual, paper system for so long mainly because they believed it to be more secure. Developing the technology to replace this system meant that we not only needed to match the security of the traditional system, but also improve on its speed and efficiency enough to make the change worthwhile.
We aimed for a ten-fold increase in speed and needed a verification process that met every legal and regulatory requirement of the industry. Automating a traditionally manual process also meant that we had to replace the role of a consultant with technology.
These were our technical requirements:
Our experience in building financial technology helped us put together very strict system specifications to meet 10X’s legal and regulatory requirements. We built our system on the most secure and stable technology available to us today, and created an automated process that outperformed even the most efficient traditional firms.
The 10X Investments’ application process was built using the following tools:
We used ASP.NET and Azure for its stability and security, with Azure Application Insights to keep track of system performance and rapidly respond to errors or bottlenecks.
To make digital authentication as seamless as possible, we built our forms with Adobe Sign, which specifically focuses on the user experience and security of onboarding and data capture.
10X Investments has a challenging architecture of databases, all of which need to stay in-sync and consistent across their business. To achieve this, we built a universal investment API, Orka, which acts as a central platform for 10X’s entire data architecture – managing their various services, investment portfolios, and partners. Orka allows the 10X architecture to be infinitely scalable to meet the needs of the market.
The 10X web application helps users complete applications for various fund products through an easy-to-use process facilitated by Adobe Sign. The web application was built on top of our core NML CMS which uses a tiered architecture and object-oriented design.
Orka integrates with 10X's CRM system, updating it with leads from various contributors, including invest.10x. Any updates in the CRM system are then updated. Webhooks are used to integrate with external services such as Mailchimp and Google Analytics.
We built the data layer using Entity Framework code first methodology, which allows for increased portability and scalability. All incoming requests are secured using HMAC encryption. Systems integrating with Orka are given an API key and an App ID, which are used to generate an authentication string.
Orka integrates with 10X’s CRM system, updating it with leads from various contributors, including invest.10X. Any updates in the CRM system are then updated. Webhooks are used to integrate with external services such as Mailchimp and Google Analytics.
Both invest.10X and Orka make use of Application Insights for integrated reporting and error tracking. Dashboards are created for custom and quick views of the performance and health of the system and its sub-systems.
