How we built Partners a system that opens new business for advisors and raises the quality of client service

What needed solving

The investment agenda at Partners ran in a system that had grown naturally with the needs of the business. Every new function added another screen, so information about a client and their portfolio ended up spread across dozens of pages. An advisor who needed the full picture could only get it by moving through several screens in sequence. With hundreds of client portfolios, finding the data took more time than the decision it was meant to support. The brief therefore rested on three pillars: aggregate the data in one place, cut the number of screens significantly and raise the security standard in line with new regulatory requirements.

Business layer

Advisors had no single place to see the state of their client portfolios. The system did not proactively flag opportunities to optimise a portfolio or offer additional services, so advisors had to go looking for their priorities themselves.

Regulatory layer

A single codebase serves both a licensed investment firm and a fund management company, which makes the application a critical part of the group's internal infrastructure. During development, the strict European DORA regulation also came into force, pushing financial institutions towards significantly stronger cybersecurity and tighter management of third-party risk. From day one, the application therefore had to meet the highest standards of data security, auditability of operations and operational resilience, so that the holding would be fully prepared for the new European requirements.

Architecture layer

The client needed a multi-tenant solution capable of serving multiple organisations from one shared platform, with clean separation of data and entity-specific configuration. That architecture was already in place, and we built the UX, frontend and integration layer on top of it so that the platform can take on further entities without a structural change turning into a rebuild from scratch.

Understanding the fintech domain

Before we drew the first wireframe, we had to take apart how an investment company actually works. The goal was to understand the client's business model in depth, along with the regulatory requirements and above all the end-to-end investment processes. We mapped the full lifecycle, from opening an investment through ongoing portfolio servicing to exiting the investment.

Ergonomics redesign for advisors

The core idea of the new design was that an advisor should see their entire client book the moment they open the application, and plan their day from that data. The system was meant to help actively, flagging in good time what deserved attention.

Requirements gathering and desk research

We put together a focus group of advisors who used the original system every day. Across a series of workshops we mapped their real workflows, named the bottlenecks and found room for improvement. Those business inputs turned into wireframes and interactive prototypes for the key flows: client management, portfolio management and the investment process itself.

User testing

We then validated the prototypes across three rounds of user testing with nine advisors. Their direct feedback surfaced a long list of details from everyday work, particularly around how they use client data. These are details we would never have spotted from a desk in the office, yet they make a real difference to the quality of an advisor's work in the field.

The final UI is built on our own design system, which keeps the visual language consistent across tenants and makes launching a new market fast.

Selected elements of the advisor interface

The application has three main parts: the advisor interface, the client interface and the back office. Together they cover the full operation and all communication. To show how the system changes day-to-day reality, we picked four key elements from the advisor interface:

Architecture and development

A critical fintech application has to hold up under a strict regulatory audit without flinching. We built the system on a proven combination of Next.js, Express.js, PostgreSQL and Redis.

A single codebase now runs both organisations in the group, Partners Investments and Partners Asset Management. The multi-tenant architecture keeps their data, configuration and regulatory framework separate, across organisations and across markets.

The integration with the backend logic rests on precisely defined contracts, a versioned API and rigorous error handling, so that a technical change on one side does not destabilise the other. Security, auditability of operations and operational resilience are built into the foundations of the architecture. We treated the DORA requirements on operational resilience as a hard acceptance criterion from day one, not as something to catch up on before an audit. The entire release process is aligned with the client's internal IT team and their regulatory windows.

What changed for advisors and for the business

For advisors, the whole routine around managing client investments now lives in one environment. Modelling a scenario, issuing a new contract or an amendment and getting a portfolio overview all take less time, with far less administration around them. That leaves advisors more clear time with their clients, and the goal is to cover the entire investment process in one place, from the first look at a portfolio to the signature.

From a business perspective, the group now has a continuous view of service quality: which portfolios need attention, where investment questionnaires are out of date and which clients are ready for a next step. It also opens the way to identifying new business opportunities more precisely, which feeds directly into growing assets under management.

What the project taught us

A complex fintech application cannot be built in a few months, and this project showed exactly why. We worked through moving regulatory requirements, the integration of multiple data sources and demanding coordination between three parties, all against fixed deadlines.

On the architecture side, one thing was confirmed: multi-tenant separation of data and configuration is the only way to serve two regulated entities with different licensing regimes from a single codebase. The same goes for compliance. When it is part of development from the beginning, the regulator's audit becomes a formality rather than a last-minute scramble.

In UX and analysis, our biggest asset was deep domain knowledge from financial services. Our contribution was not drawing screens. It was translating a regulated investment process into an interface an advisor can use live, in front of a client. That shared context, combined with three rounds of user testing, is what let us deliver a system that is not only technically sound but genuinely usable for advisors in the field.