Wealth Management System
The Problem
Our client wanted an Internet wealth management system for their high-value retail customers that portrayed a "preferred customer" brand. The goal was to develop a "sticky" personalized portal that would repeatedly drive customers back to the web site as their financial needs changed and as they entered different life stages. The system had to integrate into an existing secure online pc banking platform developed by IBM. The site was to be accessible by password for those customers with special "preferred" access cards only.
Our client needed a partner that could design and build the system, as well as manage the involvement of the design firm that was responsible for the look and feel for the site. The roll out of the site had a hard deadline that had to coincide with the distribution of access cards to high-value customers.
Our Responsibilities
- Project planning and cost estimates
- Management of a team of 4 technical developers
- Management of site development / graphic design vendor
- Collection and management of requirements
- User interface design and site branding
- Technical design of overall system
- Development of all applets and questionnaires
- Development of user wealth database
The Solution
We delivered a full-featured solution with the following features, components, and technologies:
Features
- Life Stage Planning
- Investment Philosophy Calculator
- Preferences / Personalization Applet
- Portfolio Rebalancing
- Personalized Delivery of Services
Components
- Web Interface
- Java Transaction Server
- Personalization / Wealth Management Database
- Java Applets
- HTML and Java Wizards
- Dynamic Page Compositing Engine
Technologies
- HTML, Javascript
- Java Servlets
- Oracle Database
- NSAPI Filter (Security)
- HTTP, SSL
Unique Challenges, Solved.
- Jonah delivered online java applets on website circa 1997 for this client. The level of Java support in these browsers varied widely. We were required to develop many custom components including wizards, wrapping labels, and layout managers on top of the AWT to accomodate these differences.
- The system was connected to our client's secure online banking platform, to which we did not have access during development. We quickly developed a custom NSAPI plugin to simulate the operation of the platform's secure URL management and automated logout functions. We followed all of our client's branding guidelines so that the site would integrate well into the overall online platform.
- JSP had not yet been developed, and we needed a way to dynamically generate page content based on the user ids and what the users had previously done on the site. We developed a custom template language and page compositing engine in java, which allowed the delivery of this dynamic content.
- Support of users with 28.8kpbs modems was mandated. To accomodate this, we incorporated a number of download tuning measures to increase the perceived performance of the java applets, including code obfuscation, cache "warming", zip file planning, and image aggregation.
- Jonah managed the involvement of a graphic design team in the creation of the website. Due to the fact that they were non-technical, we trained them on source code management techniques, remote file tranfer, and we provided them with documents and tutorials on how to set up their development environments for testing their designs on development servers.
- We delivered the project 2 weeks ahead of schedule, allowing a longer UAT before access cards were delivered to preferred clients.
- Questions? Ready to move your project forward? We'd be happy to discuss a solution for your needs. Contact Us to find out more.
