Case Study: Personal Financial App Development

Summary

Industry: Personal Finance
Location: Seattle, WA, the U.S.
Partnership period: A total of 8 years; the most recent phase of the project started in September of 2019.
Team size: 5–7 experts.
Software products: Progressive Web Application
Expertise delivered: Custom Software Development Services, Testing, Feature Improvement

Challenge

Our client Mogami was founded by a team of professionals, who had previously worked for PayPal, T-Mobile, Uber, Linked-in, and Samsung. As Mogami, they have since built around two dozen various hi-tech businesses.

SPD Group’s cooperation with Mogami began almost a decade ago, in 2013. The company’s CTO, who had worked for a major eCommerce client of ours before, recommended us as the most suitable IT provider to handle the development of the product they now had in mind. The client wanted to build an effective tool for guided personal finance to improve the way people save and spend money.

Mogami engaged SPD Group to implement the whole of this project.

From the beginning, the client’s team was going to build a full-fledged financial planning application that would eliminate most of the hassle and inconveniences in personal finance management. This included the need for time-consuming personal visits to financial advisors offices, payment of multiple fees, long waits, and the need to understand unnecessary financial jargon. The application needed to be scalable and customizable enough to respond to any future needs of its users.

The extremely intricate functionality of the client’s application  allows the user to make an efficient personal finance plan for an extensive future period regardless of their age, net worth, or assets. To enable this, the application analyzes a diverse host of parameters, associated with the various aspects of the user’s life. These parameters can include the user’s income, that of the user’s spouse, their monthly expenses, mortgages, kids, pets, and multiple other aspects. The solution juxtaposes this information with the life goals that the user has indicated. In turn, the latter can include a planned amount of savings, educational goals, retirement plans, a marriage that is to take place in a certain number of years, a long-term future vacation, and various other life goals, or their combination.

As a result, the user receives an evaluation of how likely their life goals are to be achieved given their indicated parameters. Furthermore, the application provides recommendations on how one or more corresponding aspects of the user’s life should be adjusted for their life goals to become more realistic.

The solution’s document-scanning capability allows scanning bank statements, retrieving the required information from them to facilitate the input of user information, and attaching the statement scans to the user’s info in the system.

Solution

The project kicked off in 2013, but got paused for two tears during 2018-2020. Since then, it has been under development for a total of 8 years.

To implement the project, we assigned a project team that initially consisted of a PM, BA, QA, and three full-stack developers. This composition of the project team has varied during the different stages of the project and peaked at 7 people. Currently, our project team includes 1 frontend and 2 backend developers.

We opted for the MVP approach and Hybrid SCRUM as the development methodology for the project. Our PM has constantly been in direct contact with the client’s CTO, an eminently qualified and demanding IT professional, who has been taking active interest in, and keeping close tabs on the code quality and various other technicalities of the project.

During the project’s first iteration, our team had successfully developed a Web-only version of the application. Initially, the app had some architecture-related limitations that made it difficult to add any new features and scale the software. This became the primary reason for the client’s decision to completely overhaul the application.

We decided to change the application’s technical design and implement the Progressive Web App (PWA) approach. In September 2019, Mogami decided to build an entirely new application from scratch and engaged our R&D team for the job.

Developing the extremely complex functionality of the client’s product was made even more challenging by the need to explore and take into account the regional differences in some of the parameters, like, for example, the loan interest rates or legislature that often vary in different U.S states.

The application’s performance has become a significant challenge too. The software needed to gain access to all the users’ personal banking information in order to be able perform transaction analysis and offer comprehensive financial advice.

Incorporating the banking integration feature slowed down the app’s performance dramatically, as users’ profiles were now linked to their bank accounts. As a consequence, the slow loading of multiple screens by multiple concurrent users became a major issue. We have managed to resolve this issue.

Another challenge that has taken our project team an additional effort was increasing the processing speed of the system’s calculation model – we have managed to reduce the calculation time from the initial 15 minutes to just 2 minutes.

One more challenge we’ve been successful in overcoming was integrating the application with the MX solution. Currently, SPD Group’s project team is engaged in expanding and improving the client’s application.

Technical Solution

To build the solution, SPD Group’s project team has been using the following tech stack:

• Backend: Kotlin, Spring, JUnit, Flyway, GraphQL
• DB: PostgreSQL 10.0, Jooq
• Frontend: TS, React, Enzyme + Jest
• DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
• Computing: Google Cloud

Methodology, Tools:

• PMS: Club House
• Design: Figma
• Documentation: Google Docs, Storybook & Bitbucket

Result

Our client Mogami has received a feature-rich and powerful product that now has a steady user audience.

Integrating the application with the MX has enabled its use by banking institutions, and the client now has excellent prospects for marketing the solution in the Financial Services sector.

Engaging SPD Group to implement their Personal Financial Application development project has helped Mogami find a strategic long-term partner. Having become well-acquainted with our competences, the client has approached us to implement several more projects we have successfully delivered.