Profile Pensions: Crafting a bespoke and scalable web platform

The Challenge

Profile Pensions needed a new web platform to underpin its growth journey, as it targeted the 16 million people in the UK’s ‘pensions advice gap’

Profile Pensions is on a mission to make savers better-off during retirement. It provides accessible, impartial pension advice, and the next step on its growth journey was to target the 16 million people in the UK’s ‘pensions advice gap’. These are individuals who need financial advice, but are put off by the cost. To do this, fintech startup Profile Pensions needed a new website and web platform that could scale to support the anticipated boom in customer numbers, underpin a strong and unique brand identify, enable new products and services, and ensure it could maintain competitive pricing.

Key elements included:

• Self-service sign-up, to replace a labour-intensive, phone-based system
• Close integration with existing systems and back-end microservices, to automate large parts of the customer journey, improve user experience and measure success
• Enabling the marketing and development teams to update their respective areas, without the risk of marketeers inadvertently changing code, or developers altering content

Recognising the technical complexity of its requirement, and to enable it to deliver this new capability more quickly, Profile Pensions decided to collaborate with a digital engineering partner, and selected Softwire.

Our Solution

We crafted a bespoke and scalable web platform, integrating it with Profile Pensions’ other systems to automate key business processes

As there was no content management system that met Profile Pensions’ needs, we designed a bespoke platform and data store, using React and MongoDB. This meant we could create a high-quality customer experience, an easy-to-use content editor and separate area for developers.  Built on Google Cloud in line with Profile Pensions’ broader technology strategy, we linked the platform to its other business systems, in some cases via Google Pub/Sub. This included Profile Pensions’ Advice Platform Services, Google Analytics and new marketing automation software.  To improve the user experience and reduce the cost of customer acquisition, we built a digital signature system into the sign-up process. This enables individuals to give formal consent to proceed, without Profile Pensions having to call them back and send out a paper form.

The Result

Profile Pensions now has solid and scalable web foundations to underpin its growth drive. The new registration process has quadrupled the number of monthly sign-ups – and this is only the beginning

Within a few months of the soft launch, the new registration process had led to a four-fold increase in monthly signups, and a frictionless digital signature feature.  Once individuals submit their details, the new integrations with other services mean data is automatically pulled through and followed up. This streamlining of the workflows means Profile Pensions can process significantly more sign-ups, and has reduced its customer acquisition costs. With the new web platform proven, Profile Pensions is readying its forthcoming marketing drive with confidence.

Mo Brahim, CTO at Profile Pensions, concludes: “Bringing in Softwire was about accelerating our journey, and they were super-important in that regard. We wanted people we could trust and who would focus on delivering something of value. Softwire quickly gave us the confidence they were the right people and would do a good job. This project has been a great example of a fintech business collaborating with an engineering agency to create something amazing.”

Profile Pensions