In 2020, Canadians opened 2.3 million self-directed investment accounts, three times the number in 2019¹. The number for these DIY accounts is only expected to grow in the post-pandemic world as investors take matters into their own hands.

The industry is also growing at a time when technology is making banking and finance-related services ever more accessible, whether it is online banking or getting a mortgage.

Olympia wanted to make it easier for its clients to access their accounts, make online transactions and payments, among other things.

The OTC Online portal and app did exactly that and much more. With secure online infrastructure, integration with payment solutions, intuitive UX/UI and a range of convenient features, the solution provided another efficient and functional touchpoint between clients and the company.

According to an April 2021 survey of self-directed investors by Ontario Securities Commission, a quarter of the respondents were below the age of 34².

As many as 25 percent of the respondents signed into their online accounts daily, while 28 percent did so weekly³. Aren't we all curious about our money?

According to another 2020 study, 46 percent of self-directed investors expressed dissatisfaction with their investment firm's web portals⁴.

Referral rates for investment firms among satisfied investors is as high as 59 percent⁵, according to some estimates. As the average age of investors decreases, technological touchpoints are only expected to boost these metrics.

Olympia Trust Company had good reasons to seek an online portal and a mobile app to simplify the experience for its large customer base.

Early Spring of 2018, Launchcode wowed OTC decision-makers with an impressive mock-up as part of a proposal. Clean interface, convenient features and a robust understanding of the task at hand won it for Launchcode.

Follow-up involved understanding OTC's proprietary backend, their already existing app, its capabilities, dependencies on the client's in-house IT team, and the goals behind the whole project.

As a development company, Launchcode focuses on accomplishing the client's vision. That holistic process involves understanding what's important to the client and to their customer base.

The first step involved a deep dive into the business model, the services offered, the data the company held, etc.

The user journey for the mobile app had to ensure customers had access to numbers they were looking for as intuitively and as quickly as possible.

In the already existing app, calculations for a lot of these numbers were done at every instance of showing, involving the system reaching out to the backend at each instance, making the process much slower. While the process would have still worked for a single client, it would only overload the system to repeat the process for thousands of clients, and brokers with many more clients in real time.

Launchcode developers incorporated a cache system at the frontend to make the process faster.

While users interacted with the app, the solution reached out to the backend again for the most commonly asked-for transactions to have the information ready.

Payment integration made it possible for customers to add funds to their accounts, pay fees, among other things, cutting down a lot of paperwork on OTC's part.

New user registration, dashboards, digital signatures, documentation, customer service, made it easier for customers to invest through OTC.

Launchcode developers added functionalities that empowered customers to make their own investments, open new accounts, make changes, fill up forms, etc.

Multiple sprints turned into phases, and newer features found their way to the web portal and the app.