Financial planners and investors need an online system where they can manage their portfolios, generate reports, and access the investment tools they need on a daily basis.
A self-service investment portal with robust security and powerful tools designed specifically for financial planning.
Nedgroup Investments approached us to design and build a secure and user-friendly self-service investment portal for their clients.
Our solution allowed investors and financial planners to manage investments, generate reports, make projections, transact, inspect data, and access the financial tools they need, all from within Nedgroup Investments's secure client dashboard.
Our agile approach and experience in financial technology meant that we were able to help NGI quickly get to market and respond to their clients' needs.We built custom investment tools straight into the platform itself, with a robust back-end that can handle thousands of on-demand data queries and plug into various data-sources in a secure environment.
The entire system was designed to equip financial planners with the information they need to make informed and accurate decisions.
We helped Nedgroup Investments reach their goal of offering an online self-service application with powerful security and a user experience that made it a joy for invesors and financial planners to use every day.
- Paperless onboarding
- View the real-time status of your investment portfolio
- Transact, switch funds, and make withdrawals directly from within the client interface
- Generate custom reports and projections
- Built-in tools and calculators for financial planners
- Morningstar integration
- Auto-scheduling of email reports and statements
- Auto-creation of PDF forms
- User-access and client-access security levels
- Built-in Capital Gains Calculator
- Built-in Regulation 28 Calculator
- Built-in TER Calculator
- Built-in IRR Calculator
- Adobe Analytics to measure and improve the user experience track user activity, and report on user patterns
- Market Data Charts
- Portfolio Risk Analysis Tools
- Portfolio Benchmarking Tools with International Indexes
Architecture
The platform offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to enhance both advisor and client experiences. A key integration with Morningstar ensures that users have access to reliable, up-to-date market data and research tools. Market data charts, portfolio risk analysis tools, and benchmarking capabilities using international indexes provide deep insight into portfolio performance and exposure. Built-in calculators—covering Capital Gains, Regulation 28 compliance, TER (Total Expense Ratio), and IRR (Internal Rate of Return)—equip users with essential financial modeling tools, reducing the need for external software.
Administrative and reporting workflows are streamlined through features like auto-scheduling of email reports and statements, as well as the automatic creation of PDF forms. The platform supports secure access with clearly defined user- and client-level permissions, ensuring data privacy and compliance. Adobe Analytics is integrated to track user behavior and patterns, providing actionable insights to continuously refine and improve the digital experience. The underlying architecture is designed to support scalability, flexibility, and ease.
The project consists of a multi-tier system integrating a number of different technologies to provide a solution focused on speed and security. The challenge was to combine existing infrastructure and services with new solutions required by the system.
- External authentication with Nedbank ID
- Local database for site content and security information
- Use of middle-tier web services to retrieve data
- Reporting services provided by middle-tier using a data warehouse
- Data Power devices handling additional hardware-level caching and security
- Load balancer distributing load as well as handling additional security checks
Design
The Nedgroup Investments Secure Site allows people from both business and client perspectives to view their investment portfolios.
It provides the business, the brokers and the individual investors access to their portfolios. We embarked on a complete re-build of the existing site, improving on look and feel as well as performance.
We accommodated different views based on roles - whether an investor, financial planner, business owner, or Nedgroup staff member.
To support the complex workflows of financial advisors and clients, our platform was designed with a comprehensive, component-based design system that ensures consistency, usability, and scalability across every touchpoint. The result is a streamlined interface that simplifies data-heavy interactions without compromising on depth or accuracy.
One of the key features is the fund performance viewer, which enables users to toggle between percentage and value-based performance over time. By visualizing returns, benchmarks, and inflation rates side by side, advisors are empowered to make data-backed recommendations quickly and clearly. Interactive charts, intuitive toggles, and well-defined colour indicators (green for returns, blue for benchmarks, grey for inflation) enhance the user’s ability to engage with complex financial data with ease.
The advisor dashboard is another example of the platform’s robust UX thinking. It offers high-level insights—like total assets under management (AuM), monthly fees, and pending client requests—at a glance. Modular cards and tabbed views break down data by category (e.g., fees per client, book type, fund allocation), while client-level data is surfaced through progress indicators and downloadable reports. The consistent use of layout grids, typography, and iconography ensures information is easy to find and interpret across varying screen sizes and use cases.
Underpinning all of this is a scalable design system, which defines the platform’s visual and interactive language. From form elements to data tables and graphing components, each element adheres to a shared system of spacing, color, and hierarchy. This ensures a frictionless development cycle and provides a familiar, trustworthy experience to users navigating sensitive financial data.
By integrating data visualization, system feedback, and thoughtful information architecture within a unified design framework, we’ve created a platform that not only looks clean and modern but directly improves efficiency for financial professionals and their clients.
Technical Requirements
Financial services businesses require a no-compromise approach to the quality of their software. Security and reliability is of utmost importance, and attention to detail is critical in every stage of development.
Our approach and our choice of technology allowed Nedgroup Investments to get to market quickly, while still delivering on a product that was stable, efficient,and secure.
These were the requirements in the development of Nedgroup Investments's portal:
- Industry-leading security
- 100% up-time and reliability
- A fast and responsive user-experience
- A user-friendly client interface
Tools
Our extensive experience in building financial software has earned us a deep understanding of the various tools, platforms, and technologies required to deliver enterprise-ready solutions. From understanding the user and client needs, to understanding the technical foundation required to build a fully secure and reliable system, our team ensures we remain ahead of current technologies.
The Nedgroup Investments investment portal was built using the following tools and best practice:
- ASP.NET MVC v4
- Angular for a dynamic front-end
- NUnit, QUnit, TeamCity and Selenium for automated testing and continuous integratio
- SQL Server for data storage
- SOAP web services integration with the back-end
- Entity Framework 4 for interaction with the database via a code-first data model
- Microsoft Unity for dependency injection
- Automapper to translate models into view models
We chose ASP.NET MVC v4 as our development framework to give us the best foundation to work from. ASP.NET MVC v4 is Microsoft's preferred choice and is one of the most secure and reliable frameworks available today.
Security
Central to the system is the concept of a Function Unit – a single logical function that the user can perform. It is used primarily for security purposes but is also able to provide context sensitive FAQs, help information and to drive the display of menu items based on the user’s permission levels.
Function Units are aggregated into Function Areas, allowing for both coarse- and fine-grained security as required.
- Integration with Morningstar
- The system now integrates with Morningstar and provides several useful tools to financial planners, integrated with the financial planner’s own financial data. These include Market data charts, Portfolio risk analysis tools, Portfolio benchmarking tools to compare portfolios to various benchmarks and international indexes
- Custom Adobe Analytics Layer
- Adobe analytics was implemented to track users experience on the front end. Further custom functionality was built in to be able to identify the type of user that interacts with the site (Financial planner acting on behalf of investors etc.), as well as being able to track what features and pages they visit and use.
- Bulk Report Scheduler
- The powerful Bulk Report Scheduler tool allows financial planners to configure automated jobs that execute at specific times (i.e. at the beginning of every quarter). These jobs execute and generate statements and emails the statements to investors on behalf of the financial planner.
- Enhanced Statements
- The new statement generation framework generates statements consistently across different browsers, and in the same format as physical printed statements sent out by Nedgroup Investments to their clients.
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