Integrated Financial Platform Saves 15,000+ Hours Annually

Overview_

A US-based SaaS Technology company specializing in benefits engagement for the financial services sector partnered with Euvic to develop innovative software from the ground-up. Within 9 months, Euvic delivered a fully integrated and scalable platform that auto-generates customizable financial planning proposals for this client’s customers.

• Collaboration between Euvic and this company empowered inhouse teams to focus on feature development and core skills
• Saved advisors more than 15,000 labor hours in the first year, estimated at an annual value of a few million dollars. 
• Transitioned advisors from arduous manual processes to a fully automated proposal platform
• Supports financial advisors by simplifying and accelerating pre-sales consulting activities.
• Created scalable technology that supports further market expansion
• Proposals are automated and customizable, giving advisors flexibility while saving time

Background_

A core pillar of employee benefits is the retirement plan. The Defined Contribution and Retirement benefit industry is burdened by legacy systems, manual processes, and complex regulations – all of which make it difficult and confusing for advisors, employers, and employees to optimize their tax liability and retirement planning. A retirement plan should deliver savings and tax benefits, but for many employers, the complex array of services and service providers is challenging to manage.

Challenge_

A central role for financial advisors is to develop a retirement plan and proposal for their current and prospective clients. Advisor challenges included:

• Frustration because they must manually collect and analyze detailed company information from different sources
• Delivering a plan proposal was time-consuming and lacked intuitive processes
• Without better options, advisors often had to create their own tools in excel or with analog worksheet

These challenges created a prime opportunity for the company to better serve its customers. A software platform would bring the efficiency that the advisors were desperate for, but this was complicated by the vast integrations required with third-party services.

The project must be designed, built, QA’d, and launched within one year.

Solution_

Euvic was engaged to design and develop an automated and multi-functional platform from the ground up. The solution needed to be user-friendly so comparisons between retirement plans would be effortless for advisors, employers, and customers.

Euvic delivered a solution with the following features:

• Proposals must be auto generated, based on inputs into the system
• Proposals must be fully branded to the advisor’s business.
• Advisors can update and edit proposals including the ability to modify brand colors and logos, update the number of slides, customize the content, and edit images.
• Must include an interactive ROI calculator.
• Must enable advisors to include a personalized voice-over for each slide in the proposal.
• Must enable prospects and customers to book a call with the advisor.
• Must incorporate detailed search features with industry-specific results displays.

The project was designed, built, QA’d, and launched within 9 months. The work included 3.5 months for research and UX/UI design, followed by 5 months for software development, testing, and integration.

Third-party integrations

To provide seamless process automatization, Euvic engineered integrations with related services including:

• The Form 5500 Series is essential compliance, research, and disclosure tool for the U.S. Department of Labor, a disclosure document for plan participants and beneficiaries, and a source of information and data for use by other Federal agencies, Congress, and the private sector in assessing employee benefit, tax, and economic trends and policies.

• ERISApedia — is a cloud-based compliance library that offers a retirement plan and administrative services. 
• Apollo — Apollo’s sales intelligence and engagement platform searches, engages, and converts more than 250 million contacts at more than 60 million companies.
• Newsapi — provides access to NLP-Enriched News Data with NewsAPI.ai, including Entities and Categories. It gets historical and real-time news content from 150,000 news sources.
• ALICE — researches, quantifies, and describes the number of struggling households.

The Dream Team_

Euvic clients have access to the group’s many Centers of Excellence (CoE), and can leverage the specialized expertise and capabilities of each CoE based on individual project needs. As a result, we can offer our clients deep expertise across a broad range of solutions. In this case, Euvic’s client was served by our CoE, Artkai, which excels in user experience design.

Euvic was chosen because of our deep bench of experience in the finance and fintech industry. The project’s dream team included: 2 UI/UX designers, 3 Front-end engineers, Back-end engineer, Software Architect, Project manager, Business analysts, DevOps, 3 QA Engineers.

Result_

Euvic delivered a system that balances automation with customization and increases retirement advisors’ effectiveness and productivity.

• 3000+ auto-generated proposals are generated each year
• 15,000 labor hours saved for advisors each year, estimated at an annual value of a few million dollars. 
• x 2.5 acceleration in time-to-sale for advisors. By outsourcing to Euvic, the company accelerated feature development and platform deployment, better managed the workload for its internal technical team, and controlled costs.
• Strengthened customer loyalty by demonstrating its proactive approach to product development
• Onboarded several hundred retirement consultants to the new platform within the first quarter.
• The company’s retirement advisors reach thousands of companies, improving the financial outcomes for exponentially more employees.