Market data API showcase app to boost sales team engagement

The goal of the project was to enhance the SIX API portal with interactive sales tools for the SIX team to help streamline understanding and engagement with customer prospects.

Industry

Finance, Wealth Management

Solution Customer validationDesignDevelopmentProduct design sprint Year

2024

Challenges

SIX operates the infrastructure for the Swiss and Spanish financial centers, catering to a broad international client base. SIX provides services in the securities, payments business as well as financial information. As a global financial data provider SIX focuses on innovation, offering high-quality reference, pricing, corporate action, and regulatory data. By partnering with SIX, businesses can access cutting-edge financial data solutions to inform their decision-making and gain a competitive advantage in their industries.

Approach

To achieve their goals, the product, UX and sales teams of SIX collaborated with Windmill on solution design through a short but intense discovery and design sprint resulting in a working, testable prototype. Windmill then moved to agile development, with ongoing validation, and solution deployment.

“Windmill was a trusted and professional partner throughout. Their ability to translate our vision into a tangible, user-friendly showcase app in an agile manner exceeded our expectations.”

Robin Wickli Head of Customer Experience & Design, SIX

Discovery

Based on some initial interviews Windmill quickly came up with a series of visual concepts to share with SIX stakeholders. These were then taken into a workshop where the team collaborated to produce the following:

• Personas & Empathy Maps

  Visualized and understood target audience’s needs, experiences, and motivations, enabling more user-centred design.

• Customer Segments & Demo Use Cases

  Identified distinct groups within the market and illustrated how the solution meets their specific needs through practical scenarios.

• Sales Journey

  Showed the step-by-step process customers go through, from initial awareness to final purchase, highlighting key interactions and decision points.

• Storyboard

  Outlined a narrative, showing the sequence of events or interactions through illustrations.

• Scoping and prioritisation

  Defined the essential features and functionalities that needed to be developed for the minimum viable product.

The Discovery phase helped us validate and refine initial assumptions , defining key successes and a comprehensive sales interactive demo app with live data, enabling sales staff to readily illustrate real-world use cases in an engaging way while also educating their audience on the simplicity of API adoption by showing both query and response data for key API calls for the app.

Delivery

The product, design and technology team adopted an agile approach, focusing on iterative progress through a series of sprints, leveraging Windmill’s Topaz toolkit to accelerate development. Each two week sprint, was meticulously planned with specific goals aligned with the project’s overarching objectives and with an emphasis placed on flexibility and responsiveness, allowing the team to adapt to new insights or changes in project direction.

The development work was underpinned by rigorous testing, including automated unit tests, integration tests, and user acceptance testing, to ensure high quality and reliability of the app and indeed of the new API itself. This comprehensive testing strategy was instrumental in identifying and resolving issues early in the development cycle.

As the project progressed, the developers continuously refined their approach, incorporating lessons learned from each sprint. This iterative process allowed the team to progressively enhance not just the demo app but also the SIX API itself.

The delivery timeline was aggressive, with a key milestone being the unveiling of the project and initial demo as part of the annual sales conference, so not being ready was not an option!

Wealth management portfolio use case

An imaginary wealth management firm, Regalia Wealth, was created along with a theoretical investment portfolio for a client, the valuation for which was calculated using SIX market data.

Deep dive into asset classes and instruments

Users can navigate to and browse asset class views of the portfolio and into the underlying financial instruments themselves, everything being driven by live market data from SIX.

Showing the “How” as well as the “What”

For each view it is possible to show or hide the underlying technical API calls that the app actually makes to the API, and the detail of the data returned and displayed by the app. This shows the power of the API and where the app is combining or calculating data before rendering.

Impact

The app is available at https://www.six-api-portal.online/ and has been promoted widely within SIX as a new sales enablement tool for front-line teams. Feedback has been excellent and management is excited to see the impact on API sales. The app will be continually updated as new API datasets come online, and new illustrative use cases are in the pipeline so that sales have a range of compelling examples with which to engage with prospects.