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

What needed to be solved

The original ecosystem at Partners was pieced together from several partial tools. To fully serve a client, several systems had to be used at once. Although each of them worked on its own, advisors had to constantly click between windows, manually re-enter data and calculate scenarios outside the main application. When managing hundreds of clients and portfolios, administration swallowed a substantial part of the working day.

Business layer

Advisors lacked a consolidated, real-time overview of the state of client portfolios. The system did not proactively alert them to opportunities for portfolio optimisation or offering additional services. Historical technological debt also forced users into lengthy workflows, so a large part of portfolio monitoring had to be done manually in Excel or other tools.

Regulatory layer

Since the developed system serves multiple entities within the entire financial group from a single codebase, the whole application became a key part of its internal infrastructure. During development, the strict European DORA regulation also came into force, pushing financial institutions towards significantly higher cybersecurity and management of supplier-related risks. The resulting application therefore had to meet the highest standards for data security, auditability of operations and operational resilience from the start, so that the holding would be fully prepared for the new European regulatory requirements.

Architectural layer

The client needed a multi-tenant solution capable of serving multiple organisations from one shared platform, with clean separation of data and specific configurations. We designed the architecture so that the platform is technically ready for the smooth onboarding of additional entities without a change in structure being equal to building the entire application from scratch.

Understanding the fintech domain

Before we drew the first wireframe, we had to break down in detail how the entire investment company works. Our goal was to deeply understand the client's business model, complex regulatory requirements and, above all, complex end-to-end investment processes. We mapped the entire life cycle from the initial establishment of an investment through ongoing portfolio management to the final redemption.

Redesigning ergonomics for the advisor

The main idea of the new design was for the advisor to have an immediate overview of their entire client base right after opening the AMS application, and to be able to plan daily priorities effectively based on this data. The system was to proactively help them and detect priorities they should attend to in time.

Requirements gathering and desk research

We put together a focus group of advisors who worked with the original system daily. In a series of workshops, we mapped their real workflows in detail, named the bottlenecks and found room for improvement. From these business inputs, wireframes and interactive prototypes emerged for the key flows: client management, portfolios and the investment process itself.

User testing

We then validated the prototypes in three rounds of user testing with nine intermediaries. Thanks to their direct feedback, we captured a wealth of detail from everyday workflows, especially around making use of client data. These are details we would never have uncovered from a desk in the office, but they have a huge impact on the quality of an advisor's work in the field.

We built the final UI on our own design system, which guarantees visual consistency across tenants and enables a fast ramp-up of new markets.

Selected elements of the advisor interface

The AMS application consists of three main parts: the advisor interface, the client interface and the backoffice interface. Together they cover complete operations and communication. To give a better idea of how the system changes everyday reality, we selected four key elements from the advisor interface:

A fully configurable table of clients and portfolios. Every advisor can compose their own view depending on whether they are currently acquiring new clients or servicing existing portfolios that have not received attention for a while. Filters, segments, custom columns. One place for work that used to be done in five.

Architecture and development

A critical fintech application must handle both a surge of users and a strict regulator audit without hesitation. We built the system on a proven combination of technologies: Next.js, Express.js, PostgreSQL and Redis.

Thanks to a robust multi-tenant architecture that separates data and configurations between organisations and markets, two separate organisations of the group now run from a single codebase: Partners Investments (a securities dealer) and Partners Asset Management (an asset management company). Both have strictly separated data, specific configurations and their own regulatory framework.

Integration with the backend logic stood on precisely defined contracts, a versioned API and thorough error handling. This ensured that technical changes on one side do not cause instability on the other. We built security, auditability of operations and operational resilience into the foundations of the architecture. From day one, we treated the DORA directive's operational resilience requirements as a hard acceptance criterion, not a topic to catch up on before an audit. We also aligned the entire release process precisely with the client's internal IT team and their regulatory windows.

What AMS changes for the advisor and the business

For the advisor, we integrated the entire routine of managing client investments into a single environment. The result is less time needed to model scenarios, issue a new contract or amendment, and immediate access to portfolio overviews without unnecessary administration. The advisor can thus spend more quality time with the client, the goal being for AMS to fully cover the entire investment process without the need to open external systems and calculators.

From a business perspective, the new system helps eliminate critical spots - it reduces the number of clients without regular service, the number of "forgotten" portfolios, portfolios with zero value and clients with unpaid fees. At the same time, it opens the way to more precise identification of new business opportunities, directly supporting growth of the total volume of assets under management (AUM).

What the project taught us

A complex fintech application cannot be built in a few months, and this project clearly showed us why. We successfully dealt with dynamic regulatory requirements, the integration of multiple data sources and the demanding management of three parties, where firmly set deadlines had to be met.

From an architecture perspective, two key decisions from the beginning of the project were confirmed. Designing the system as multi-tenant from day one meant that we can safely serve both organisations of the group from a single codebase, with each having completely separated data and specific configurations. Equally, when compliance is a natural part of development from the start, the regulator's audit itself is just a formal check, not last-minute firefighting.

In the area of UX and analysis, our greatest asset was deep domain knowledge of the financial industry. Because we understand this segment, we knew exactly what the client required from us and why, without them having to laboriously explain the basics. This shared context, combined with three rounds of user testing with intermediaries, allowed us to deliver a system that is not only technically correct, but maximally intuitive and useful for advisors in the field.