Context
1859 Cloud’s outlook is simple—“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change.”
The collaborative organisation attracts and selects a private club of finance professionals, builds an idea-based meritocracy based on their economic forecasts, and brings the most universally supported ideas to an investor-focused fund.
Given its low cost base compared to traditional funds, 1859 Cloud has the capital to redistribute a large share of the difference to charities. Who said FinTechs can’t have a soul?
Challenge
We were approached to build both the front-end and back-end of 1859 Cloud’s platform. The directive? A slick app to facilitate high-level financial insight and straightforward communication.
As a FinTech platform offering investment advice to customers who are already very careful with their money, legal regulations were stringent and expectations were high.
For our development team this meant delivering a super-stable product every two weeks, undergoing more thorough backlog grooming, formal acceptance tests, longer qualification times, and delivering a top-shelf UI for even the first release.
Outcomes
The final digital product is typical of our work (full-stack Javascript, lean in nature and sporting an API-centric architecture), but also very unique. The PALO IT team took the wheel for 3 years to ensure the platform surpassed benchmarks and developed ahead of the curve. When all was said and done, 150,000 lines of code formed the backbone of:
- A front-end app used by all club members
- An admin app for the 1859 Cloud staff
- A RESTful API employed by both the front-end and admin apps
1859 Cloud’s payoff reaches much further than users, as its fund aims to give almost US$1,000,000 in charitable donations over the next year.
