A web platform for socially-conscious investing

CNote, a privately held U.S. company, came up with an idea to close the wealth gap with the help of an innovative financial solution. For this purpose, our client needed an investment platform that would not be aimed only at generating returns for financial asset owners. The platform was supposed to provide financially underserved communities with access to capital, while enabling corporations, institutions and individuals to efficiently invest in fixed-income and time deposit products.

By the time the client reached out to EffectiveSoft, the investment platform was partially developed, but assistance was needed to speed up the product launch. We were contracted to complete the development of the platform and expand its functionality. In addition, our engineers were expected to create the admin panel to facilitate platform management.

The web-based platform we enhanced allows its users to invest money in socially-impactful initiatives through a network of community development financial institutions (CDFI) and low-income designated (LID) credit unions.

We improved the software interface following the UI/UX best practices and used React JS for the front end to achieve better performance, provide simplicity for users, and improve the scalability of the platform.

When interacting with the platform, the user can:

• Create a personal or a business account.
• Link an investment account to a bank account.
• Invest in multiple products with no fees.
• Set up one-time or recurring investments.
• Withdraw funds.

Our team created the administrator panel from scratch to provide a site administrator with an advanced set of tools. 

The panel allows the administrators to:

• Manage user accounts and track users’ interactions with the platform.
• Configure different investment products for the platform users.
• Verify investments and withdrawal requests.
• Transfer investments to a platform-branded Dwolla* account in batches.
• Synchronize the platform data with the Dwolla account data.
• View reports on users’ registration and investments.

*Automated Clearing House (ACH) facilitator used by businesses worldwide to digitize payments.

For the ease of platform development and monitoring, we fully migrated the application to AWS.

Our engineers also integrated the Dwolla API into the platform for the users to transfer funds easily.

Compliance with industry security regulations has been achieved by:

• Encrypting all PII and other sensitive data.
• Applying firewall and strict security policies, including a Content Security Policy.
• Introducing multi-factor authentication.
• Tracking and monitoring any access to user data (full data provenance).

The product was a great success, and our cooperation with the client continues as we keep improving the platform.