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Case Studies, Software Development

Developing Multiplatform PhiloPort to Achieve Greater Functionality and Flexibility

Background

Philo Technologies is a company that deals with portfolio construction and management to enhance their clients’ investment processes and services. For a number of years they used an in house legacy solution to service the needs of their clients. While the old served the company well Philo Technologies decided to develop a new application from the ground up with greater functionality and flexibility. Incorporating their many years of experience it is designed to provide them with a powerful strategic advantage.

The Requirement

The new application is called PhiloPort. It is designed to possess multiplatform and multitenant capabilities, configurable templates, updated processing logic, and increased account customization capabilities. The development itself has used the latest technologies to future proof it and to provide greater flexibility around deployment.

The Solution

To develop the new application, Philo Technologies engaged Mitrais’ captive team services and employed their own Project Manager to supervise it.

Developing the application in Australia was not economically feasible, hence Philo Technologies had to look at offshore alternatives, despite having had an unsatisfactory experience when working with an Indian offshore software development company.

“Philo Technologies engaged Mitrais to develop our new managed account software after a search in Australia and the region for a development partner,” recalled Brett Sanders, Philo Technologies’ Joint CEO. “We had some trepidation about going offshore after a smaller development in India had been painful – but the economics of developing locally did not work for us. We needn’t have worried as the experience of working with Mitrais has been excellent. This reflects the quality of their people, their commitment to robust development methodologies and the constructive way they have worked with Philo’s project team.”

He explained that, after their due diligence process that took them into Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, Philo Technologies chose Mitrais’ captive team services due to the range of skills offered as well as its nearshore location. Mitrais’ Bali development centre is only a short flight away and the time zone is not too different from Sydney, enabling realtime communication due to the overlapping work hours.

“The captive team approach has worked well for us. We chose the senior members and let them pick the rest of the team,” Brett explained. “We put our project leader on the ground with the team for a few months during the specification and design stage and then we mostly worked remotely during the build.”

During the initial design phase, Mitrais used Sparx Systems’ Enterprise Architect to capture Philo Technologies’ requirements for the application’s design.

PhiloPort will enable far more efficient client portfolio management with its capability to service multiple financial advisory firms using multiple platforms without requiring separate managed account software instances for each firm or platform. The financial advisory firms who use Philo Technologies’ services can generate new and more sustainable revenue streams. This in turn leads to enhanced profitability and business valuation for all involved.

“PhiloPort embeds many of Philo Technologies’ learnings over the years in terms of what makes a successful managed account. It is the key piece of infrastructure that enables thousands of investor portfolios to be fully customized and regularly reweighted in a highly scalable way,” Brett explained. “For end investors, they get a more dynamically managed portfolio using a managed account that is also less administratively burdensome on them. With the right investment managers in place this can lead to better investment returns over time, relative to a process where advisers implement portfolio changes manually.”

The captive team used Agile development methodology in the application development. The regular Sprint meetings were used to set objectives and track progress. Establishing a good rapport between Philo Technologies and Mitrais teams early in the project had made it easier when they had to work through issues throughout the build.

Mitrais used ASP .NET MVC 4 for the main web application and REST technologies for the data transfer between client and server applications. It also incorporated Microsoft SQL Server 2012 for its procedure and function storing capabilities, sophisticated calculation capabilities and integration capabilities with other Microsoft technologies.

Combined with AngularJS for the frontend calculation engine, Bootstrap for look and feel, and SSRS for report making, PhiloPort is ready to be deployed as the new multi-platform investment management application to improve the bottom line for financial advisory firms using Philo services.

Seeing the end result, Brett expressed that he was pleased with his choice in Mitrais. “The quality of Mitrais captive team’s work has exceeded our expectation. We hope to keep using Mitrais in the future and recommend any organisation looking for a development partner that is not too distant from Australia and with a compatible time zone to give them serious consideration,” he said.

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