Axiom Investors
Reimagining a Global Investment Firm’s Research Management Tool to Improve Utilization and Adoption

Review Summary
- Global Investment Management Firm
- UX/UI Design and Development
- Proprietary research tool for analyzing, aggregating, and sharing data
- 26 users
- Connecticut, USA
“We wanted a system that was more reflective of the kind of work we did and could speak to some of the concerns that investors have. … We needed a collaborator and a partner and handholding through the process. [Praxent’s] vision of what the interface looks like was a little different than what I had anticipated but in a good way, a much better way. I think it surpassed my own thought. I was ready to settle for something that was functional but crude, and they gave us something that’s functional and elegant.”
Edward Azimi – Chief Operating Officer, Axiom Investors
Axiom, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based global investment management firm founded in 1998, was looking to modernize its proprietary Axware research tool, which its team uses to analyze, aggregate, and share data on investments. Built more than 10 years ago by a third-party firm, the tool had become outdated, lacked some of the features of more modern applications and needed additional functionality to fully leverage the vast amounts of data points collected over the years. Despite the team’s desire to fully incorporate it into the decision-making process, Axware lacked advanced analytical capabilities, essentially acting as a store of information. Due to its complex user interface, employees required long onboarding times and were not using the full power of the research database. Most importantly, Axware did not reflect the firm’s core competencies and desire to be seen as ahead of the curve.
Axiom was seeking a partner that could approach Axware’s navigational issues objectively and resourcefully, address its cosmetic appearance and suboptimal user experience, and essentially function as an in-house team by providing strategic guidance and direction for UX/UI design and technology decisions. They were looking for a primarily U.S.-based team that could deliver value to justify their investment and help them build a robust technology platform going forward.
“We went in with a very open mind about how things should look; we didn’t have a great preconceived notion of ‘This is how it looks today, and this is precisely how we want it to look tomorrow.’ [Praxent was] particularly good at providing ad hoc guidance that allowed us to feel our way through this and be adaptable and flexible, knowing that we didn’t have this written-in-stone final product. … They played a big role in helping to guide us, to shape the final output. … Maybe there are firms that have the internal resources to put together that mock up and say, ‘Just make this happen,’ but investing is our core competency, not software design.”
Edward Azimi – Chief Operating Officer, Axiom Investors
Summary
The Problem
After more than 10 years of using Axware, Axiom’s team of research analysts were increasingly hampered by its lack of functionality.
The old system simply was not robust enough for the team’s or their clients’ needs.
How We Helped
We revamped and revitalized an outdated system, giving it the look, feel, and functionality of a modern database.
Technical Discovery
- Perform technical spikes on in-scope functionality for more complex features
- Produce implementation plan (including staffing and timeline)
- Including analysis on scope to support business value / cost tradeoffs
Design
- Design Kickoff
- Prototype in High Fidelity
- Updates to Style Guide
Delivery
- Weekly Project Updates
- Meeting Coordination and Facilitation
- Build Product Backlog
“There was just a general comfort with the [Praxent] team, and I think there was a sense that they understood where we were coming from. They ‘got us’ and understood our pain points and were able to articulate potential solutions in a way that made sense to me as a layman, but also folks on my team who were far more technically savvy could ask them those types of questions and get answers. A nontechnical person like myself still felt that I could understand the things that they had in mind. I think their ability to communicate ideas and technical things without excessive jargon made it easier for me to connect with them, as opposed to some of the other teams we spoke to.”
Edward Azimi – Chief Operating Officer, Axiom Investors
The Problem
After more than 10 years of using Axware, Axiom’s team of research analysts were increasingly hampered by its lack of functionality. They wanted to be able to perform tasks like bulk loading data without having to rely on the IT department. They wanted to be able to analyze massive amounts of data and track subsequent moves in stocks in order to validate their conclusions.
Portfolio managers were hesitant to showcase their work to clients and prospects on what appeared to be an old, outdated system. They didn’t feel the system adequately reflected the level of effort and quality of work that goes into researching, analyzing, and choosing stocks. In addition, they wanted a tool that could speak directly to the concerns today’s investors have, like is their firm taking into account ESG considerations, are they talking to management, etc.
The old system simply was not robust enough for the team’s or their clients’ needs.
- Axiom needed to modernize its Axware platform to improve the efficiency of its team and ultimately provide greater value to its institutional investment clients.
- Axiom wanted to take a phased approach in order to validate the investment and provide incremental value to its end users.
- Axiom was looking to prioritize the refresh of the grid to make it more filterable, searchable, and exportable.
- Axiom wanted a user experience that was seamless, enabling portfolio managers to better utilize the research data.
- Axiom needed to add features to Axware that would increase adoption and that could be leveraged to demonstrate the functionality to prospective clients.
- Axiom was seeking to leverage a modern technology stack by displaying Screener data served from MS SQL Server via a .NET Core API, rendered in a Blazor SPA web app.
- Axiom needed a plan for building a robust technology platform that will grow seamlessly over time as they discover new and valuable ways to capture, segment, and visualize data. The MVP would only be the first step.
“The system certainly worked but it was designed over 10 years ago, and it looked every bit of that. It was a little simplistic and unrefined and utilitarian. … The grid as we call it, the user interface, the primary way our users touch Axware, needed a major overhaul. And we have done that.”
Edward Azimi – Chief Operating Officer, Axiom Investors
How we Helped
Praxent partnered with Axiom to revamp and revitalize an outdated system, giving it the look, feel, and functionality of a modern database.
Subsequent sprints involved tackling security issues such as making sure only authorized users can access proprietary data as well as revamping company screens to purge exogenous information and remove unused fields.
Future iterations will include addressing data integration, bringing in disparate data sources, and adding enhanced analytics to the platform.
The approach included:
Technical Discovery
Including analysis on scope to support business value / cost tradeoffs
Design
Project Management
Delivery
Results
The feedback Axiom has received from its team on the modernization has been extremely positive. Analysts are now able to sort, group, and analyze data in a way that is customized and personalized to them, saving them valuable time.
Axiom has embarked on its own internal development work as an add on, combining the Axware platform and grid with transactional data from its trading system to build a transaction screen. This has helped to enrich the user experience by creating a “one-stop shop,” which also saves time.
Future versions could include a company summary page, more robust integrations, and greater analysis capabilities.
“We always had all this data, but it was in different places. Now one-stop shopping is yet another time-saver convenience. These minutes and little tips and tricks add up over the course of time and are meaningful.”
Key Features/Deliverables
Default Screener View: Data grid with the columns
Column Features: Column selection, column sorting (optional multi-sort), column resizing, column reordering
Filtering: Multi-selection column filtering from column header
Search: Grid-wide text search
Legacy Navigation: Navigation bar that loads existing Axware pages in a new window for capabilities such as adding rankings, modifying rankings, and running reports.
Export: Export of records in Excel, PDF, and CSV formats
Auto-Refresh Toggle: Ability to turn off the table’s default behavior of automatically refreshing the feed. This allows users to navigate current records in view.
Top-level Filters: Before top-level filters, users were required to use individual filters on columns to sift through the data. Having these prominently displayed at the top of the table makes navigating data much faster.
On-Hover Notes View: Users often want to gain a quick summary of what is inside a record and the quickest way to do that is via the notes field. Previously, a user needed to open a new window with that information. Now, users can hover over the field and get a quick view into what’s inside the record.
Client Review
Background
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the COO of a registered investment advisor firm. We manage investments in the public equity market, predominantly stocks for institutional investors like pension funds and endowments. We manage about $15 billion in assets and have about 60 people on staff. Our company has been in business for over 22 years.
Opportunity / Challenge
What challenge were you trying to address with Praxent?
We had a proprietary research database, which we used to collect information on companies that we potentially might invest in and those we’d already invested in. The app was built over 10 years ago and had minimal functionality — it was starting to show its age and limitations.
Solution
What was the scope of their involvement?
We’ve engaged with Praxent to revamp and further develop the application. We’ve done it in two phases. First, they’ve rewritten the program using modern technologies and platforms instead of the .NET outdated version that we had. It’s an update of the underlying technology, and we also have done a facelift to make it look and feel like a more modern program. The next step has been enhancing the functionality to use better the data we collect and do things like charting, cross-referencing data, and more functions to help us leverage our work to make better investment decisions.
We meet regularly to outline our vision for what the software should look like and take them through the existing system and some of its flaws and limitations. They’ve worked with us to understand the program and how it works. Then, they’ve spent an additional amount of time understanding what we want to get out of the end goal. We’ve talked about ways to break up the work into discrete sprints, which has allowed us to spread the cost of development over time. We make one sprint, digest it, and test it to let our users work the system. Then, we come back and do another iteration. Over a year, we’ve developed at our own pace.
What is the team composition?
We’ve been assigned a project manager who has shepherded us and been involved throughout the whole process. Then, they’ve brought in 2–3 developers to work with us.
How did you come to work with Praxent?
A developed on our staff found them. I believe it was through a recommendation from a colleague from his previous work. We also interviewed five other similar firms in New York, the US, and abroad. However, we clicked better with Praxent. They seemed to understand our needs better than some of the other companies, and their pricing was competitive. Overall, they just were the best cultural fit for us.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with them in March 2020, and our relationship is ongoing. We’re getting to the tail end of the project.
Results & Feedback
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
We’ve rolled out features to users in batches over time, and we’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback from a practical level. We can now enter data more efficiently and faster, which has helped speed up our entry. Although nobody cares about entering the data into the system, it’s a necessary evil, so the fact that we’ve streamlined it has made fans out of our users.
Secondly, the project has been very impactful because we use this database to demonstrate how we think about companies to our prospects and clients. Therefore, it’s an excellent window into our investment process. When we present it at meetings, it comes across as more professional-looking and impressive than when the software was over 10 years old. Therefore, it has given us a lot of marketing cachet in addition to the pragmatic aspects.
How did Praxent perform from a project management standpoint?
They’ve been excellent at communicating. We have regular meetings, and they stick religiously to them unless we ask them to postpone or move them. They’re available for everything and have been very responsive to communication beyond the weekly calls. In general, they’ve stuck to the guidelines. If there has been a significant deviation, it has been caused by us changing the parameters.
What did you find most impressive about them?
Their ability to understand is outstanding. Not only do they understand what we need, but they guide us to things that we may not have reached on our own in terms of layout and functionality. Praxent hears what we ask for, but they interpret that and make suggestions beyond what we want. We didn’t know we needed those things until we were introduced to them by Praxent.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I think about that, but I’m pretty happy with them. I’d be stretching to come up with something.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Try to find someone you can partner with instead of just hiring someone to do a job. If you don’t come from a development background, you should work with someone who understands your business and needs — it’s important to find a partner that’ll guide you through the process.
Ratings
4.5
Overall Score4.5
Scheduling
On Time / Deadlines
4.5
Quality
Service & Deliverables
4.0
Cost
Value / Within estimates
4.5
NPS
Willing to Refer
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