The Edelweiss group is one of India’s largest diversified financial services groups of companies. Edelweiss Financial Services Ltd wanted to offer retail investors a user-friendly way to plan their investments in the capital market based on personal financial goals. We worked with them to build a Goal Based Advisory system for them in record time.

How do you attract first-time investors from the burgeoning Indian middle class to invest in shares and mutual funds in a safe and friendly way? And how do you do this in less than a year from design to development to testing and deployment?

Due to the very tight timelines and complexity of the investment evaluation algorithms, our team took a few special steps to attack the project:

• Our team did a detailed analysis of each investment algorithm, simulating it with numbers in spreadsheets, and got them vetted line by line with the client team. This ensured that there were no mistakes in the critical financial calculations later.
• Our design team did a detailed software design with pseudo-code for the more complex pieces, so that there would be no ambiguity when the dev team stepped in.
• The project lead created a fine-grained WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) as the starting burn-down chart for the project, thus allowing him to do task tracking to the final half-day of work.
• All the dependencies on external systems and integration with the exchange based trading systems were studied and their specs obtained before coding, thus ensuring that no external roadblocks slowed down the actual development.
• Coding and testing were done with a small team of senior developers who could move very fast.
• Integration testing processes were set up to allow our back-end team to test code rapidly jointly with a separate in-house team which was building the UI of the system.
• The steering team from Edelweiss were kept in the loop through tight review processes and partial demo sessions.

All of these processes delivered the project on time in spite of algorithmic complexity, external system dependencies, and joint development with other teams.

The project had moved slowly when attempted earlier with a different team. After we came in, we executed the complete project from specs capture to final acceptance in less than five months, thus allowing the business team to take the new offering to market as per schedule and make a dent in the tough retail investing market.