The easiest way to
invest in alternative
assets.
Background story
Retail investors are looking for financial freedom and portfolio diversification but cannot access attractive and reliable alternative assets easily and corresponding with their portfolio size. Splint invest decided to fill in this gap by creating a product that allows retail investors buy and trade tokens of alternative assets, starting with 50 eur.
The unique approach using data and artificial intelligence to screen and select investment assets allows Splint Invest to optimize the return for the customers. Additionally the processes are fully automated. Like this, Splint Invest can offer the services at significantly lower cost compared to other platforms. The app has been available in app stores since November 2021.
The client was looking for a reliable technology partner to deliver the MVP version and possibly continue with further development. The products include an app for investors and a platform for suppliers. Splint Invest came to us with a very clear vision of what they want to achieve during defined. We shared the responsibilities in the following way:
SCRUM Team, Roles and Responsibilities
Splint Invest provides
Product Owner
User Journey
Requirements
User Acceptance Testing
Architect
Architecture
Quality Standards
Code Reviews
Project Management
You provide
UX/UI
Wireframes
UI design
Engineering
Delivery and documentation (pre go-live)
Bug fixing (post-go live)
Operations
Operational structures and documentation (pre go-live)
Availability (14/7) and maintenance (post go-live)
Engineering Requirements
Methodology
Scrum (2-week iterations)
Continuous integration
Continuous delivery
Automated testing
Infrastructure-as-code for dev, testing, staging and prod
DevOps (whenever there is active delivery)
Technology
App: your recommended multi-platform technology
Backend: your recommended rapid prototyping technology
Infrastructure-as-code: Docker, ARM Templates
Key product features
After launching the MVP version of the product and testing real users, we kept working on product UX and feature improvements. Key product components include:
Authentication
users are able to sign in using social media accounts.
Verification
in order to participate in investment activities, a user has to undergo a KYC process.
The client chose to use Onfido integration, a technology that allows Splint Invest to verify users’ identity using a photo based identity document, a selfie and AI algorithms, making the process extremely easy and fast.
Explore page
users can find investment opportunities across a range of different categories including wine, whiskey, watches and many more. Individual investment page presents extensive information about the investment, including the investment case, maintenance and cost, related documents and other details - everything an investor needs to know in order to make a decision.
Card payment
a user is able to add a new card, top up Splint account and use the balance for Splint purchases. The balance can also be easily withdrawn using your IBAN.
1.
![First step of applications payment flow]()
2.
![Second step of applications payment flow]()
3.
![Third step of applications payment flow]()
Dashboard
provides the investment summary and lets users track their investments by category, their performance and market value.
Post MVP development highlights
Splint Invest team after introducing the app to the market, continued with further developments:
Blog
In-app wallet
Loyalty program development
UX improvements and development that resulted in user conversion rate increase
Challenges and learnings
Every project comes with its unique challenges and learnings.
1.
Real time splint reservation - addressing an issue when multiple clients want to simultaneously invest in the same opportunity by introducing splint reservation.
2.
Loyalty program - the client needed a highly configurable solution which supports multiple referral programs of different types and different rules at the same time.
Welcome program type can be used for campaigns involving multiple, randomly generated, unique codes which can be used only once (e.g. DayDeal). So, we provide bundles of codes for Partners and track how many they have distributed. If the campaign is successful, additional codes can be generated.
Affiliate program type allows to handcraft a unique code per campaign, which can be used multiple times. So, let’s say - some Youtuber/Influencer could give out this single code to incentivize users to get on the platform.
High level of configurability brought a large amount of use cases.
Technologies:
Python (Django)
Django rest framework
PostgreSql
Typescript
Fastlane
Firebase
React Query
Next.js
React Native
AWS
AWS CDK