Platform for independent asset management

The idea

Manage your own assets on a grand scale, as only a few were once allowed to do. Without conflicts of interest, with clean planning and even cheaper thanks to tendering in the marketplace. Prof. Dr. Klaus Wellershoff and Patrick Müller stepped out of the shadows in 2014.

ZWEI Wealth has been growing ever since. A digital platform was needed to bring together investors, ZWEI Wealth advisors and asset managers. This enables end-to-end digitalization of processes - which in turn brings various advantages.

The platform

An expert places an order on the digital marketplace, whereupon asset managers submit various offers. The assets are invested. The ZWEI expert then checks and evaluates the asset manager.

The customer can log in at any time and has an overview of her assets, performance and costs - completely independently of the bank and asset management company. She benefits from a better and cheaper service. Thanks to the marketplace. Today, more than 40 experts are already looking after 500 customers - and the trend is rising sharply.

Quick to market with an MVP

We started with the minimum viable product. The aim was to bring a functioning product onto the market as quickly as possible and then continuously improve it. This involves making certain compromises in terms of functionality, which have to be addressed later. However, the efficient time-to-market is worth it.

With real customer feedback from the productive environment, the next steps are much easier to plan. You are less in the dark and can already onboard the first customers. And let's be honest: even without an MVP approach, there are compromises that we would adapt again later. After all, you're always smarter the second time around. So why not get into the ring right from the start and go live before you have everything gold-plated and perfected.

Design Sprints

In intensive design sprints, we developed solutions together with the ZWEI Wealth team. We tested these directly with real people using visual prototypes. This allowed us to ensure that our ideas worked as we had imagined. And all this before we even started implementation.

Better workflows

The online platform not only supports customers. It also simplifies workflows for asset managers. What used to be done with different digital tools can now be handled uniformly and in one system.

Lean UX

The user experience has priority. Our interaction designers are fully integrated into the development process. New features are continuously developed and validated with visual prototypes. This leads to better results and shorter product release cycles.

Technology

For the Wealth Office of ZWEI Wealth we use Next.js with TypeScript and a GraphQL API. Why? Because we like the developer experience and because you can build really good solutions with it. We use Playwright for the automated tests.

Faster with model-first approach

Instead of writing the code for the platform directly, we create a data model. Then we write code that generates the actual code for the platform from this model. Sounds crazy? With this approach, the initial effort is a little higher, but we are now really fast with new functions. We can iterate quickly and realize new ideas.

DevOps

When we make adjustments, these are automatically deployed to the test or production system. GitLab CI/CD and Terraform ensure that the system lands on the Google Cloud platform as planned. Various tests are also run so that we can ensure that our changes do not trigger any undesirable side effects. Have you read all this? You've read this far? That makes us really happy!