Upvest: Boosting financial operations with human-centered software

We supported Upvest, the leading investment infrastructure provider in Europe, in redesigning their operations software for more efficient workflows – a major step in further unlocking their scaling potential.

The challenge

Upvest is one of the few fintechs in Europe that can provide its B2B clients with a full range of investment opportunities via its Investment API.

As Upvest’s business grows, so does the workload that their operations team manages. With this project, we sped up the necessary operations to allow for a faster scaling of Upvest’s customer base.

The redesign of Upvest’s internal software supports and accelerates workflows such as reconciliation, booking management, trading, treasury and risk management. Minimal context switching is key as much as process-related data output.

Impact and outcomes

User experience around workflows
Instead of data-output, the internal software puts people and their workflows front and center.
Faster operations processes
The redesign enabled the scaling of operational processes, allowing for bigger volumes to be processed per day.
Introducing additional capabilities to the client’s product team
We collaboratively added further knowledge around UX research, clear principles, and product design.

What we did

We wanted the operations team to feel like a part of the team building their main tool. After a thorough onboarding to Upvest’s internal tooling and transaction flow, we analyzed workflows and user interfaces in a co-creative way. In 1-on-1 sessions with operations team members, we looked at key tasks to accomplish, identified possible automations, and sketched out optimized interfaces. All changes to the user experience and interfaces were validated with prototypes and implemented incrementally.

The result is an updated structure to Upvest’s tooling application, with core modules reflecting major operations processes, human-readable data output, as well as a new look and feel.

In parallel, we set up a design system to support consistent and effective application development.

From process flows to interface sketches to testable prototypes, we co-created a new user experience that supports an optimized workflow.

In the last six months, Futurice enabled our Tooling Apps team to start transitioning Operational Tooling into a product that puts users front and center. Their support increased our operators’ experience and confidence in the tooling.

Florian Thiel

Head of Engineering – Tooling & Users and Clients, Upvest

Why it matters

Upvest's next stage of growth requires operational processes to scale with it. This has been made possible by a further increase in both the level of automation and user-friendliness.

The first iteration of the first new workflow module boosted process efficiency. Our contribution helped improve the internal tools and exceed related KPIs such as Handling Time. Together we also advanced the product development process and included a user-centered design perspective.

About Upvest

Upvest is on a mission to make investing as easy as spending money. The company empowers other fintechs to offer their end users a wide range of investment products and the best experience in the field of capital market investment and retirement planning. To achieve that, Upvest has developed an Investment API that is easy to integrate so that small and large fintechs alike can save resources and fully focus on their core business.