The Software House was brought in to boost development productivity for Pension Lab's fast-growing fintech platform, enabling them to scale from onboarding individual users to signing entire pension providers without losing speed.
Pension Lab had built a successful pension dashboard that helped users track their retirement savings.
However, when they started acquiring users wholesale, their technology was unable to keep pace. Each new business partner took months to integrate, and their IT team spent most of their time on repetitive work instead of building new features.
Partnership goal:
→ To transform Pension Lab’s development productivity and reduce business client onboarding time.
Pension Lab
Pension Lab provides a unified view of all retirement pension balances that UK residents have paid into throughout their careers. The platform helps users track lost pension schemes, analyze their retirement spending, and consolidate their pensions.
Founded by Scott Phillips, the company obtained FCA Authorization by 2019 and now partners with some of the UK's biggest pension providers.
INDUSTRY
Fintech
COUNTRY
United Kingdom
SERVICE PROVIDED
Product development, Team augmentation
Challenge
The UK pension system is complex. When employees change jobs, they often lose track of the pension schemes they've paid into over the years. Pension Lab solved this by creating a dashboard that allows users to view all their pension balances in one place.
The platform worked great for signing up individual users. However, when Pension Lab began acquiring customers in large numbers by partnering directly with pension providers, scalability issues emerged as administrators struggled to add the information to the system quickly enough.
What’s more, each new pension provider came with unique requirements. Integrating just one partner took 3 months of custom development work. As more providers signed up, the development team spent all their time on repetitive onboarding tasks instead of building new capabilities.
Key challenges
Manual document processing for each user slowed everything down
Every new partner required extensive custom development
Client onboarding took up to 3 months per pension provider
Developers had no time to work on new features or improvements
The architecture couldn't scale with the business model shift
Growth was blocked by technology limitations
Pension Lab was gaining traction with major UK pension providers, but their technology was becoming a growth bottleneck. Without a solution, they'd have to choose between serving existing clients well or acquiring new ones.
Solution
The Software House approached this as a development productivity problem, not a headcount problem. Instead of throwing more developers at repetitive work, we redesigned the system to work more efficiently.
Our solution included a couple of steps:
1. API work
We aimed to optimize the platform's communication with external services. To that end, we wanted to add new APIs to automate interactions with pension providers and employers, eliminating repetitive tasks.
2. Template-based dashboards
We decided to develop a white-label product for business clients to use as is or customize to their specific needs. The goal was to free developers from repetitive tasks such as building dashboards from scratch.
3. AI enhancements
We also planned to leverage AI-driven automation. The idea was to create a separate app that automatically gathers key information from incoming documents and categorizes it reliably within the system.
"Over the many years of working with The Software House, we were able to find a common language. They know what Pension Lab is trying to achieve and how they can help achieve it.
They use that knowledge to come up with ideas and improvements proactively, and they don’t shy away from debating and voicing their concerns.
I can honestly say that The Software House has contributed to our positive business outcomes, and I believe they are truly proud to have had that kind of impact."
Scott Phillips
Founder & CEO at Pension Lab
Technologies
We worked with the technologies that were both fit for the job and well-known to the client, including:
Process
First, we formed an autonomous team ready to achieve all our objectives. It remained relatively small and largely unchanged throughout the project, enabling individual members to effectively leverage the knowledge of the client’s business they acquired.
Team composition
The team scaled between 3 and 5 specialists and, at different times, included:
-> 3 Backend Developers
-> 1 Frontend Developer
-> 1 DevOps Engineer
-> 1 Project Manager
Development
The Software House implemented a multi-step plan focused on incremental productivity gains:
1. API optimization phase
Where possible, we ensured that third-party platforms could integrate data into our platform. That way, they could do much of their work on their own.
With our API optimization, third parties could now make special requests to create users on our side. Their profile was pre-populated with most of the necessary data, and they could access their dashboard immediately from our side.
2. Template development phase
We designed a simple, scalable React-based dashboard template. The wealth of experience we acquired over the years helped us ensure that it meets most of the typical client’s requirements.
The implementation of the template didn’t compromise the interest of a potential client in any way. They can still expect a fully custom-made dashboard if they want to. The template can be launched extremely quickly, though, allowing the client to become familiar with the system more quickly.
3. Continuous optimization & the future
The team maintained close cooperation with Pension Lab throughout, implementing changes that let both the development and business teams focus on creating value instead of repetitive work.
Each improvement freed up capacity for the next round of enhancements.
This would eventually involve an AI app that would cut client onboarding time by up to 95%.
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With optimized APIs and template-based dashboards, Pension Lab cut client onboarding time from 3 months to 3 days!
Outcome
Thanks to our work, Pension Lab’s development productivity and its ability to acquire new business improved measurably. Benefits included:
→ Business client onboarding time reduced from up to 3 months to 3 days
→ A white-label solution that could be shown to potential clients quickly
→ Developer capacity unlocked by removing repetitive onboarding work
