Context
Our client provides financial research and advisory services in the Canadian FinTech sector. Their customers are institutional investors deciding whether to place money with an asset manager.
Problem
Operational due diligence is supposed to surface business, operational and structural risk before an investor commits. In practice much of the industry’s ODD research does not.
The pattern our client saw repeatedly: a research provider receives data electronically from the asset manager, reformats it, and publishes a report. There is no verification, no analysis, and no experienced professional asking whether the numbers make sense. Investors then rely on reports that describe symptoms and never reach causes.
To do it properly you need the underlying filings — and ADV filings are long, unstructured, and change over time. Reading one is work. Comparing forty, or tracking how one has changed across five years, is not something a person does by hand.
Approach
The engineering problem was aggregation, not presentation. Regulatory filings do not arrive as tidy fields; they arrive as documents written to satisfy a regulator, and any two managers describe the same thing differently.
We spent the design phase on how to map unstructured filing content into consistent sections that could be compared across managers and across time. Once that mapping held, the interface followed from it. We also built a live link between the application and the filing source, so the platform reflects the most recent ADV for a given advisor rather than a snapshot someone remembered to refresh.
What we built
- Ingestion and mapping of extensive unstructured filing data into consistent sections
- A live connection to the data source, keeping the latest ADV filings current per advisor
- Exploration tools — maps, charts, icons and search
- Comparison across managers and across historical filings
- Dynamic access so investors can move from overview to underlying detail
Stack: CodeIgniter, MySQL.
Results
The platform is delivered and in use, and we continue to scale and extend it.
Metric slot — needs client approval. Filings ingested, advisors covered, or research hours saved per diligence exercise.
Related
Customer Onboarding and Prioritization Platform · Online Tax Preparation and Filing · B2B SaaS Product Engineering
