Web platform for retirement advisers

Creating absolute transparency for the pension advisory service in the USA.

OVERVIEW

About the business

To understand the background behind the product, it’s essential to dig into the industry specifics first. The Defined Contribution and Retirement landscape have changed dramatically in the past decades. With shifting responsibilities, technologies, and goals, the industry has fallen short of defining and measuring plan success. A retirement plan was designed to deliver savings and tax benefits, but for many employers, the complex array of services and service providers got challenging to manage.

The process was not only elaborating for the employees but also for retirement advisers. They had to look for prospects or use outdated stuff manually. That increased the time spent analyzing all the criteria and creating personalized retirement proposals.

The idea behind the Hero7 platform was to create a tool for the advisors that would not only streamline their work but show benefits for their prospects transparently. Thus we had a chance to improve things for three types of persons: advisers, company owners, and their employees.

We knew it would be a demanding product because to automate the process, it was necessary to implement many uncommon integrations with different services. Both our team and the client followed the ambition to make a change in the industry, and it was the best motivation to succeed.

OVERVIEW

Project tasks

OVERVIEW

Project team

Team: 2 UI/UX designers, 3 Front-end engineers, Back-end engineer, Software Architect, Project manager, Business analysts, DevOps, 3 QA Engineers.

Design and development are done in parallel after the research and discovery phase.

OVERVIEW

Tech stack

TypeScript

React.js

Redux

Next.js

Node.js

Nest.Js

AWS

K8S

PostgresQL

REST

Swagger

Socket.io

GraphQL

Microservices

PROJECT JOURNEY

Product development

Product Overview

One of the pain points was that advisers had to collect various company information from different sources and manually analyze it. Sometimes it took a significant amount of time and usually didn't have a guidance note. Also, there was no unified instrument for keeping records. Some advisers used CRMs, others excel or paper notices at worst. Altogether, it distracted from the core goal — making a perfect proposal for the advanced prospects.

As a part of the solution, our team created the following functionality:

Detailed search filtration for companies

We created advanced search functionality that allowed advisers to set precise filtering and searching companies by specific parameters. There was also an option for saving specified search parameters as templates for use in the future.

Automated search for prospects

We developed functionality to collect information about each company on a single page, automatically analyzing the company according to the search criteria. It also included any updates highlighted in the news sources.

Hero 7. Platform

Magical proposals

The primary value proposition of the Hero7 platform is to create business proposals for retirement advisors magically. Our product aimed to allow them to tell a compelling story of the impact that will guide their prospects on "Do Well by Doing Good."

At the first point, proposals had to be auto-generated, based on either questions or data from the system, and fully branded to the advisor's business. But at the same time, there had to be room for changes depending on the prospect. For example, advisers could modify brand colours and logos, the number of sliders, the core message, and collateral diagrams.

Also, we made it possible to integrate into a proposal template an interactive ROI calculator that shows a potential return on investments based on the number of employees, ALICE percentage, and average wage.

Another remarkable feature our team added was the ability to make a voice-over for each slide. That's how we enabled advisers to literally tell a unique story for each prospect while being thousands of miles away. In closing, we devised two call-to-action elements — the ability to book a call or leave contacts.

Benefit Gap Analysis
The proposal shows the business owners the gap between their current benefits and their employees' needs.

Impact Gap Analysis
The proposal highlights for business owners the gap between their current impact strategy and employees' needs.

Plan Governance Index (PGI)
A review of the company's retirement plan on its compliance from a governance perspective.

Hero 7. Reports.

Third-party integrations

To provide seamless process automatization, our team had to build a list of integrations with the related services.

The Form 5500 Series is essential compliance, research, and disclosure tool for the U.S. Department of Labor, a disclosure document for plan participants and beneficiaries, and a source of information and data for use by other Federal agencies, Congress, and the private sector in assessing employee benefit, tax, and economic trends and policies.

ERISApedia — is a cloud-based compliance library that offers a retirement plan and administrative services. It provides a new way to quickly find answers to the tough and not-so-tough questions advisors face every day.

Apollo — Apollo’s sales intelligence and engagement platform searches, engages, and converts over 250 million contacts at over 60 million companies.

Newsapi — provides access NLP-Enriched News Data with NewsAPI.ai, Including Entities, Categories & More. It gets historical and real-time news content from 150,000 news sources.

ALICE — researches quantifies and describes the number of struggling households.

Hero 7. Learn.