Launching an APEX-Powered 401k Robo-Advisor Mobile App that Helps Users Prepare for Retirement

Key Features/Deliverables

GuideMe BlueStar’s user-friendly mobile enrollment experience presents the user with a retirement plan and allocation choices

Robo Advisor to provide automated investment advice and address the diverse investment needs of customers

Face ID and Fingerprint Login to verify user’s identity based on their device with face ID on iPhone and fingerprint login on android. Retirement funds experience the highest percentage of fraud in the financial industry and security was critical

Retirement Readiness Dashboard enables users to set goals for their retirement and show progress towards those goals

Retirement Calculator and Visualizer assist users with calculating their monthly payments and the impact on their balance at their retirement age using data visualization

Push Notifications to encourage users to engage with the application, new features, marketing messaging, and updates

Client Testimonial 

The Problem

The good news is that Praxent had done the first iteration of our mobile app, it was a really, really strong first release. As we moved into our planned phase two, the issue was that our app was primarily view-only. You could get lots of good information from it, but it wasn’t transactionally capable. If somebody wanted to change contribution rates or enroll in a plan, they had to go to our website. Our goal with the second version of the mobile app was really to make it a full user experience, so we were extending the functionality of it to include those transactional items. 

A lot of our competitors haven’t been able to get to that second phase, so for us from a competitive edge perspective, being able to actually complete that phase two, we thought, is going to position us competitively with some of the most innovative firms out there. The other part of it too is that it gave us an opportunity to reimagine our transaction experience that we currently have on the website. I think our website is awesome, but it also kind of divorces the guidance from the transactions. We have guidance and education all over our website, but you have to go and visit there and then go and do the transaction. What Victor was able to do for us is marry the two: As people are going through enrollment or changing their contribution rate, all that education is just part of the experience. So that is what we’re super excited about and what our primary goal is: to make this so that as people are trying to make decisions, we are giving them the help in real time. I think we really accomplished that.

In summary: Going beyond just the informational aspect so it is a full user experience.

Why Praxent 

I think what was really eye opening for me is just the amount of time [Praxent] spent on the design element. Your instincts are always to get to development and start putting code down. But we spent probably half the time that was dedicated to this phase just getting the details right. 

I’m super impressed with both Karen and Victor. They don’t just have a passing knowledge of our industry or what we’re trying to do or the transactions. They really dive into it; they have a financial base; they weren’t just drawing pictures. They really have that deep understanding of what users need to do in order to be successful in their retirement.

We spent a lot of time talking, we did lots of iterations; the design process was really deep and iterative. I thought it was super successful, and I think it set us up for success when we started actually getting into the code phase. I can’t say enough about Karen’s project management abilities. We’ve gone a little bit over the optimal timeframe but our project was super complex, and as you get in, you realize some additional complexity, so I never felt like when we missed a couple of deadlines it was related to bad planning. It was just more complex than any of us anticipated. I thought she was really smart bringing the project owners into the grooming sessions and stand ups in the morning, because there was just a lot of opportunity to have this ongoing dialogue about the complexity of the project. 

One thing I think was very clear—one of the reasons we initially chose Praxent and ended up being very apparent through the process—is that there is a strong financial services knowledge and background already. So when we would bring up issues related to ‘We can’t say that,’ or ‘We don’t want to approach it that way because it does get into that ‘advice vs. guidance’ kind of territory,’ people were fully engaged on those topics and thinking about them. Also the importance of the accuracy of the data, how exact we needed to be with the wording and things like that. 

The Solution

First, each different plan can have very different specifications—they allow different things to happen. Between pre-tax and Roth, matching contributions or profit sharing—some are deferral-only, some don’t allow participants to manage their account—there’s a lot of variation. This isn’t a plain vanilla approach. What participants see has to be custom to their plan restrictions. Added to that, each participant has a different experience. Some of them have money, some of them are at different stages of their retirement planning. So the messaging and what would be appealing to them from a UI perspective can vary. Beyond plans, specs, and participants, there is the investment aspect of this. When you start getting into ETFs and mutual funds and models and collective investment trusts, there’s just a lot of nuance around the way you help guide somebody through their investment allocation. Understanding it really helps them make good decisions. 

I think with the first version of the app we had very positive feedback, people were very excited about it. It definitely helped us check a box. When we were doing RFPs or talking with customers, not being able to say ‘Yes, we have a mobile app,’ took us out of consideration for a lot of potential deals. It’s been really well received, the fact that we had designed this whole, ‘response potential:’ How are we going to answer these questions when we run into issues? I think we’ve had three issues logged over the past five months (participants who haven’t been able to navigate the app successfully). That really speaks to the strength of the testing and the code and all the different phones. So, you know, overall, there haven’t been any negatives, which I think there could have been if our launch wasn’t really solid. It’s just been all upside for us.

Results

What does this mean for us? There isn’t a competitor we can’t go toe-to-toe with. 

Our industry is made up of some pretty archaic [players] with a lot of technical debt, people who are struggling to keep up. But there are new disruptors in our field as well that are coming in as software-first companies that happen to offer 401K plans. Looking at that competition with our prior technology, while we were completely outshining most of the traditional companies, those new disruptors were looking pretty slick. This mobile app puts us toe-to-toe with all of them. 

Being able to say, ‘Hey, we’re pairing this state-of-the-art technology with a small organization and a service record,’ we’ve got a really good story to tell. I also think it transforms our user experience. When we’re doing enrollment meetings, to be able to go and pull out your phone, go through this enrollment that is very guided, that provides that education as you make selections, it makes that experience for the participants so much better. 

Our hope is, if the [success of the app] isn’t ROI-related for us, it is for them. I think it will help our participants to be more successful in their retirement. They’re not going to be guessing about how to invest and what their contribution rates should be. We’ll be able to actually help them get where they’re going. [Retirement is] confusing for most people.

Project Management

The transparency on the invoicing aspect, the time, keeping to a really tight schedule. On most projects I’ve worked on, you add 30 to 50% to the timeline or to the estimate. I think Praxent has done the best job of any firm I’ve worked with staying on task and on budget. In software development I feel like that’s a huge plus. I really do credit that a ton to project management and drilling into those details. They get it right up front. They spec it all out; all the tickets are just incredibly well thought out, so we can minimize any rework. I’ve experienced people making guesses, and then most of the time you’ve got to go back and refactor and change it, but we’re getting it right up front. It takes longer to get started, to actually start getting the code done, but you’ve got this really detailed roadmap. I thought that was a good model—it’s changed the way we think about our internal development as well after seeing how this plays out.

We have six internal developers. In this project, Praxent did all the design work and all the frontend work, and we have one or two of our developers on the backend side. It really was very collaborative—effectively my guys were working on the Praxent team, and it worked well. Everybody was on the same project board. It was nice. 

In our prior lives, we worked with a development firm, and they did the whole project from A to Z. I felt like that left us a lot more vulnerable because we just weren’t as involved. We didn’t have the insight in terms of the architectural review to really understand the quality of the code—a lot was happening behind the scenes. I know this isn’t always the way [Praxent] works, but having the opportunity to do the backend where you all do the frontend work and just work it as a collaborative team was a great way to leverage outside resources—particularly in the mobile space where my team wasn’t strong enough—but still own the project.

I think we’ve done a good job with communication. We made a change midway through as to who was defining the contracts. Initially, the backend team was doing that and it was slowing down the frontend team a bit. So you all changed that and I thought I made it a lot more efficient. Just being able to be nimble and see where some of the roadblocks were was good. [Praxent also has] a really good testing team. There was a lot when we started doing our business logic testing. We weren’t running into major problems but there were some things it makes sense for Praxent not to catch. 

My development team is a great resource, but I can’t say enough great things about Victor. Just having the real design element and how thoughtful that was; he also has development knowledge, so he was thinking about ways to be efficient with some of the code. I feel like that in many ways made the project—being able to reach out and realize we don’t have to have everything on our team when we can have a partner like Praxent and leverage some of your unique resources.

Diego and Molly have been wonderful. Obviously super talented, but on a different angle, as we were approaching deadlines, the fact that Praxent could ramp up the team and bring on additional resources to meet the deadlines and have that depth, for Molly to come on and be able to get up to speed super quickly, that was great too. I didn’t feel like, regardless of what my priorities are, I’ve got this team and I’m just going to stick with it for the next six months. [Praxent was] able to expand the team as needed to meet certain deadlines.

The only thing I don’t think we’ve solved is, as we do the mobile release 2, at some point soon, my team needs to be able to support it. We haven’t really thought yet about how to transfer a lot of that knowledge. They’ve definitely picked up quite a bit as the backend folks work with the frontend, but that’s a little bit scary for me, having that outside firm and then us effectively owning this thing that we didn’t build—so I’m trying to think through that handoff into real time. We’re not quite there yet but it’s right around the corner.

We had some turnover on the team, which caused some significant concern at the time, but the people that stepped into their shoes were just as capable so that felt good.