Orangebus & Capita

Synaptic Financial Suite

While working at Orangebus (which was later acquired by Capita) I contributed to a project for Synaptic Software which is a financial advisor suite of products which provides whole-of-market financial advisor planning and research software. They wanted to migrate their current suite of products over to a more up to date technology platform, and harness some of the benefits available from Salesforce around data and analytics. A key driver for this update was to decouple their existing suite of products so that it was easier to add or remove modules depending on which subscription model financial advisers and other users chose.

Understanding the Users

Multiple rounds of research were performed on this project to identify the behaviours across different personas and to identify which elements of the existing software suite were more common amongst different user groups, and which were specialist modules depending on the user's financial role within their organisations. We also performed multiple usability testing research rounds to validate and test the updated designs using the Salesforce design library to validate the new layout would be fit for purpose, creating an intelligent work space which could be customised depending on which point in the journey the financial adviser was at.

Mapping the Journey

As part of this project 'as is' and 'to be' journey maps were created to map the current and future journeys that different users would need to perform on the system. This also enabled us to identify similar functionality and any dependencies on other areas of the financial suite. Later on in the project a service blueprint was also created to map out the entire service end to end and to list what the different dependencies where from a front and back office perspective.

Creating Custom Components

As part of the product development on this financial suite of products we created some custom Salesforce components based on the original Salesforce Axure library components, however we needed to craft specific components around visualising some complex financial data, around dashboard functionality and financial modelling which was not standard Salesforce behaviour.

Outcomes

This was a challenging project to work on as the subject matter was very technical and required a degree of understanding into financial projections and portfolio management in order to fully understand the required finance functionality that the suite of products would need to be able to perform. It was enjoyable to work on a brand new concept of micro service products which could be used together or in isolation, and the resulting proposed Axure prototype was a good example of how this could be implemented within Salesforce and enabled us to do iterative rounds of design and user testing to refine the final MVP version.