GoalsGetter by Nikko AM
NZ's first robo-advisor investment platform
Background
Nikko AM is one of the largest asset managers in Asia managing 201 billion USD globally. With local experience and global reach, Nikko AM NZ actively manages over 5 billion NZD for wholesale investors. In the recent past, their leadership decided to expand their services and open their funds for retail investors and individuals.
The project scope
To reinforce their position as visionary market leaders in the investment industry, Nikko AM sought to be the first Asset Managers in New Zealand to provide a complete online investment platform featuring robo-advice to everyday Kiwis. They wanted to build an online service where individuals could:
- Create financial goals tied to their lifestyle.
- See projected returns of their potential investment(s) to analyse if they are saving enough to reach their goals.
- Get instant, tailored recommendations for retirement savings target, investment strategy and regular contributions through the use of the system’s complex financial algorithms, .
- Onboard quickly and easily through an entirely online AML process, in order to invest with Nikko AM without leaving the comfort of their couch.
- Monitor the ongoing performance of their investments and manage them as needed.
Challenges
Transformative welcomed this massive challenge which included:
- Managing local, global, internal, external and regulatory stakeholders
- Growing domain complexity
- Evolving financial algorithms
- Continuously shaping business processes
- Integrating with APIs from other vendors which are still under development
- Managing legal and compliance
- Learning curve of leading technologies and cross platform development
- Using modern architecture and design principles, practices and patterns
- Implementing the latest in cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines
- Adhering to demanding security requirements and legal compliance
- Undertaking rigorous performance, functional and usability testing
- Implementing detailed custom reporting
- Racing to be the first in the market
Technical achievements
Using an agile approach, lean team, leading edge technologies and modern enterprise software architecture and design principles and patterns, Transformative developed and delivered this project in just 14 months. Some of the features worth highlighting about the successfully delivered project:
Front-end: Single Page Application powered by Vue.js
Back-end: RESTful Web API built using ASP.Net Core 2.0 with a MySQL database
Infrastructure: Docker containers running in AWS Cloud
Architecture and design: Microservices, CQRS, Domain Driven Design, Event-based Architecture, Onion Architecture
Conclusion
On 6th March 2019, www.goalsgetter.co.nz was released to the wild to help Kiwis achieve their financial goals and prosperity. While already an extremely feature rich, and complete product, there are still plenty of opportunities for innovation and growth on the horizon.
