We were just entering the market and needed to show off our platform to investors and put our claim of helping wealth managers “get to market 3x faster” to the test.

For WealthOS, as a startup entering the market, it is vital to demonstrate the key value proposition of the platform. We found that the best way to do this, especially to more business-focused stakeholders (usually, the first to see a demo) is to build an example of a D2C (direct to consumer) investment app integrating with WealthOS. It would model the journey directly from the end investor → potential client → to WealthOS and show off our comprehensive marketplace of integrated service providers. We came to this conclusion because of the following reasons.

Take it from us, enterprise fintech B2B solutions are particularly nightmarish to demo! Firstly, it is hard to demonstrate actual user journeys due to the platform’s complex and technical nature. Secondly, there is an added complexity when the target audience of stakeholders have varying levels of comprehension of fintech and come with different priorities and requirements. Carrying out a clear concise demo using API endpoints, web sockets and an Admin UI does not always paint the whole picture of the platform’s capabilities.

Last but not least, in the wealth management industry, time and money are of the essence when getting a new value proposition out to the market. We had a point to prove about how cost-efficient and quick it would be to integrate with WealthOS. 

So we kicked off a project to build “Acorn”, a mock D2C investment app running on the WealthOS platform.

We wanted Acorn to carry out the following key flows:

1. Investor data capture and onboarding – Capture all the investor information and pass details on to WealthOS for KYC/AML checks with Onfido. An Investor should only be able to proceed when all checks have successfully passed. 
2. Creation of a Pot/Goal with portfolio attachment – Allow an investor to create savings goals and either self-manage their investments (Execution-Only proposition) or let Acorn fully manage their investments (Robo-advisory). The fully managed pot should automatically pick the relevant portfolio based on the investor’s savings goals. 
3. Make a contribution to a Pot/Goal – Allow an investor to make a contribution via a debit card using the WealthOS integration with Stripe for seamless cash movement.
4. Buy/sell transactions – Allow an investor to carry out buy/sell instructions for self-managed pots, and instruct WealthOS to automatically invest cash based on the attached portfolio for fully-managed pots. Show status updates of all transactions as WealthOS manages the entire order lifecycle.
5. View transactions, holdings and valuations – Allow an investor to drill down to each pot/goal and view their investments (value at market prices), available cash and all pending and past transactions. 

We contracted an external front-end development company, handed over the UX designs, business context and WealthOS API documentation and kicked off the build process. It took two developers and one QA engineer just six weeks to build out all the required flows running on WealthOS, with a very thin backend.

Happily, the developer experience with Acorn exceeded our expectations for the time and cost to build an investment app. This case study validated the WealthOS value proposition and we are confident that wealth managers can launch a fully functional D2C wealth app with minimum time and effort. 

The WealthOS platform is accessible via our sandbox to test out for free. It is ready for startups looking to build a proof-of-concept for investors or early adopters, or for innovation hubs of an enterprise to test out new ideas and ultimately take their proposition live on WealthOS.

If you would like to take our platform for a test run, sign up for our sandbox here. If you would like to work with us to get your proposition off the ground in record time, reach out to shri@wealthos.cloud

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