Finance Unlocked: Video learning platform for finance professionals

Finance Unlocked clients call it ‘The MasterClass for finance’ and ‘The future of learning & development in financial services’. Geniusee was proud to lead the development of this on-demand video-learning platform. It is designed to accelerate company-wide and personal education paths for finance professionals expand their expertise. Together, we empowered over 160 world-leading industry experts to educate thousands of professionals with more than 100 online training courses.

Services:

Industry:

Fintech

Location:

Ciaran Rooney

Finance Unlocked CTO

“Choosing to work with Geniusee has been a game-changing decision for the progress of our platform. Together the people at Finance Unlocked and Geniusee have become one big team, even a family. As CTO, it’s essential for me to have both a technically skilled and culturally integrated team, and Geniusee has delivered the best. Everyone on the team has a great personal attitude and in-depth expertise. With help of Geniusee, it has allowed us to build and customize our platform fast and easily.”

Business context

Both Geniusee and the Finance Unlocked team value transparency and collaboration, so we have proactively worked together for more than three years already. While we’re doing the development part led by their CTO, the Finance Unlocked team does sales and content development.

When the work started, Finance Unlocked already had a video learning platform on WordPress, yet they had a goal to expand. WordPress fits well with small and medium-sized businesses, but not global ones with institutional clients. In this case, a much better solution for Finance Unlocked was Laravel, which also allowed us to create a completely custom design.

Key challenges:

Transfer platform from WordPress to Laravel
Ensure secure 3d party connections
Rebuilt system design from scratch
Assure personalization for customers
Create easy-to-understand business and user analytics
Tailor team learning assignment process
Creating and managing multiple new platforms such as Sustainability Unlocked

Work approach

SCRUM

We’re trying to build an ideal SCRUM on this project with a 2 weeks sprint, sprint reviews, backlog refinements, and CTO approvals. This helps us to assure quality, deadlines, and budget adherence and allows managing tasks efficiently.
Kanban

Our team works not only with SCRUM but also with Kanban on, as we call them, ‘bug fixing sprints’. The Kanban system allows us to stay focused and deliver new iterations and establishments one by one in a smooth flow.
Effective partnership

Together, Geniusee and Finance Unlocked have built effective motivation and communication systems, so both teams see and understand the whole project in the context of the growing business.
User-focused design

Intuitively understandable and easy to use is the platform’s main goal and we continuously seek opportunities to improve it.
Working with user feedback

As Finance Unlocked puts the learners first, they constantly interview customers to understand the learner's opinion of features, platform usability, and content, passing the findings to the development team so further iterations are based on user feedback.
Proactive collaboration

Work, based on partnership, granted us the scope to come up with better solutions for the project. The Finance Unlocked team always takes account of our ideas and looks at features we offer to develop, which allowed us to improve the platform significantly.

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Process

Geniusee usually starts working with a client from a discovery phase, yet, here we skipped this part as Finance Unlocked already had a WordPress platform and the first main task was to move the on-demand video platform to Laravel and re-do all design. We didn’t even need a business analyst at the beginning of the project, as the Finance Unlocked CTO was really clear with all requirements, so one of Geniusee specialists joined after the project had grown significantly . Architecture and infrastructure were basically created by the Finance Unlocked CTO whois the tech lead for this project.

As usual, we come up with prototypes and design examples. Everything was based on the requirements of the Finance Unlocked CTO and product manager before being approved by stakeholders. We do sometimes conduct A/B testing of some design features, as well as focus on intuitively understandable UX/UI that is interactive and engaging for users. Our design iterations and improvements are based on end-customer feedback collected by the Finance Unlocked team.
As previously stated, we did not conduct the business analysis from the beginning, yet as the product grew, and we met the need to add more specifications to our process. The work of BA professionals in the Finance Unlocked project is mostly about stakeholders interviewing to collect, validate, and approve collect requirements, their formalization, and right prioritization, so during the sprint, we develop the most important features.
Finance Unlocked required the rebuilding of all its video platform frontend, starting from design and up to transferring everything to Laravel from Word Press. We chose React, which is easy to work with, simple, and ‘light’. The most essential part was that React is perfect for interactive UI. With React Geniusee frontend team built both stand-alone components based on logical principles that bound them together into one UI system which all needed visual elements.
As we brought Finance Unlocked to Laravel, it was logical to base our backend development on PHP, as Laravel is one of the PHP web application frameworks. It is open-source, so possibilities are broader and updates appear faster. Plus, Laravel allows following the model-view-controller design patterns. At this stage, the Geniusee team developed an admin panel for content management and customer support teams, app logic, features, etc.
Online subscription learning platforms are a never-ending journey as they will always scale and evolve. With Finance Unlocked, we started with manual testing (smoke, regression, and localization tests) and now we have moved to automated testing. Now we’re working now building test cases and plans that will become a basis for automated unit tests for core features. For example, load testing, as stabilization and refactoring is important for Finance Unlocked with the acquaintance of new global customers.
We used 9 beta environments to assure smooth flow and not to affect production that was still on WordPress back at that time. Shortly, we will be going to work on architecture and infrastructure diagrams to ensure the stability of the platform after serious scaling and throughput capacity of the system. Additionally, as Finance Unlocked is going to get a SOC2 certificate to ensure privacy, security, integrity, and confidentiality, we’ll boost our cybersecurity services here as well.

Project tech stack

Geniusee tends to look at the projects’ future needs, not only those our clients have today. That is why we had to choose technologies that will ensure scalability, high speed and will be “light”. This allowed us to satisfy Finance Unlocked objectives and business goals.

Front End:

React testing library

Storybook

React Router

Frontend Infrastructure:

Back End:

Backend Infrastructure:

Infrastructure as a code:

Terraform

CircleCI

GitHub Actions

Geniusee team

Together with the Finance Unlocked team, we successfully built an extremely proactive collaboration. Motivation and partnership are cornerstones of our work together. This working style is based on trust and transparency, which both sides are lucky to have as company principles, and engagement in processes that allows every team member to see the full context.

Product team

Development team

Nazariy

Tech lead

For me as CTO, it’s always not just about technical complexity of task, but our partners and project’s purpose. It was an honor to become a part of international success of Finance Unlocked. As we also speciliaze in FinTech, this experience is immesurable. The greatest challenge in my role - to make the most complex things in the easiest way possible. That’s what we did during our work with Finance Unlocked.
Dmytro

Project manager

It is always a pleasure to work with the Finance Unlocked team. They make us feel like part of the team, always considering our suggestions and thoughts. Every team member on the Finance Unlocked side is full of inspiration which is affecting Geniusee team as well.

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Features

Analytics
- Opportunity to track the progress of the whole team
- Possibility to check on each team member
- Tracking by hours, login times, last visit, credits, completion rates, etc
- Interactive dashboard on video analytics
Wishlist
- Watchlist for training videos users want to see
- Pathways and courses to learn later
- Insights (text content) to check
Navigation
- Intuitively understandable UI/UX design
- Filters by duration, topic, expert
- Content sorting by category, trends, pathways, adding time
Teams management
- Four roles based: team owner, account manager, team manager, team member
- Possibility to create many teams
- Adding team members
- Tasks assigned for online training due to date
- Progress tracking and analysis of the whole team and individuals
Single sign-on
- Login through LinkedIn
- SAML login with corporate credentials
- Login data “remember me” functionallity
Personalization
- Login to the Finance Unlocked system with internal company credentials
- Possibility to add company logo and name instead of Finance Unlocked’s labels
- Opportunity to use the Finance Unlocked platform as an internal company course library
3d party integrations
- Auth0 to ensure secure access to the platform and enable single sign-on
- ChargeBee as an external payment platform for monthly or annual subscriptions
- SSO to connect with CornerStone, allowing CS learners to use videos from FU
Finance Unlocked allows its users to:
- Personalized pathways and learning experiences for both individuals and enterprises
- Multiple types of content (insights, glossary, on-demand videos, pathways, courses, and customized learning journeys)
- Validated learning with certificates for completing training (CPD credits)
- Various educational topics for online video training

Let's discuss the features of your project!

Results

Two (and growing) engaging, interactive, intuitively understandable on-demand, video-delivered learning platforms: Finance Unlocked and Sustainability Unlocked.
Finance Unlocked provides educational videos for financial professionals. Sustainability Unlocked educated learners on the Sustainability challenges of today’s modern world.
Platfrom offers instant access to on-demand videos, pathways and courses for online learning on ESG topics, the climate crisis, sustainability data, and much more.
Geniusee continues to collaborate with Finance Unlocked, scaling the on-demand learning platforms, updating the design, and video player.
We’re also looking to incorporate new features such asvirtual classrooms, video messages, and conferencing, while solving customer challenges.
As Finance Unlocked keeps attracting new customers like Santander, GSK, BNP Paribas, Airbus, and many more, there’s much to look forward to!