Smart Pension: Scaling a Leading UK Pension and Investments Platform

About the Client

Smart Pension is a global workplace pension provider offering their clients digital-first pension and investments platform with contribution master trust.

Smart’s pension platform technology offers a solution for employees and employers.

Employees facing solutions – digital-first member experience makes it easy for employees to stay close to their pension data giving them control of withdrawing or adding additional funds to their pension.

Employers solutions – Smart technology makes it easier for employers to set up and run their workplace pension with simple, automated ongoing processes.

Smart Pension is one of the fastest-growing financial technology companies in the UK.

Q has built a dedicated team of developers, QA engineers and Product Owners to help and support Smart Pension with their fast growth over the last 6 years. Engineers employed by Q have become the cornerstone of Smart’s continous efforts to revolutionise the pensions industry. Working in various teams across different verticals within Smart, they proved their worth and contributed greatly to Smart’s overall success.

Discovery

Reliable and senior developers are hard to find generally. That’s why Smart Pension came to Q looking for a partner. Q immediately started an immense workshop routine in Zagreb where the Head of Engineering discussed the client’s delicate setup with the team.

Since they established an exceptional process of finding and hiring new talent, Q started to build a flexible and knowledgeable team covering Ruby, JavaScript and QA Automation. The team was scaled and ready before the initial deadline, following a 2-week onboarding in London where it adequately integrated with the London Smart Pension team.

Design

All of design was done from the client’s side.

Development

The development team at the height of its power consisted of 18 Ruby Engineers, 3 QA Engineers & 2 Product Owners. Due to some organisational changes within Smart, Q currently provides 10 Engineers to work on the projects.

Handling sensitive financial data is something that isn’t lightly taken into account. Q secured all the necessary equipment, including the security lock and security camera for the Smart Pension team.

Q teams are mostly responsible for charging the engine. This is a complex machine implemented in Ruby with the usage of sidekiq. Some of the main responsibilities of charging the engine are:

• Fetch eligible employees and employers
• Calculate fees
• Disinvest money deducted by fees from employees’ and employers’ accounts
• Provide reporting and configuration options for CRM users

All of these actions are executed for millions of employees which provides an intricate and significant challenge for Q due to performance complexity.

End Result

The features implemented by Q are:

• Implementation of CRM with the following functionalities like Mapping and management for charge configs to employers, fees management, employees management
• Implementation of AUM Fee calculator
• Implementation of Regulatory Fee calculator
• Implementation of Contribution Fee calculator
• Implementation of Flat Fee calculator
• Implementation of Policy Fee calculator
• Implementation of Transfer In Fee calculator
• Testing fee calculators on a big amount of data
• Improvements for Calastone integration
• Improvements for Gocardless integration
• Introducing retry mechanism for payments
• Moving monolith parts of charging engine to microservice
• Bulk import for employers charge obligations and adviser exclusions