Inconsistent experience, a manual burden

For investment clients, the experience of Insight's digital estate was inconsistent. Different portals existed for different user groups, each with its own login, its own interface, and its own limitations. The experience varied depending on which segment a client belonged to, rather than reflecting a consistent standard of service from their investment manager.

For the internal client services team, every client interaction such as instruction submissions, report requests, KYC reviews, was handled manually. The resulting administrative burden constrained the team's capacity and affected their responsiveness to clients.

Manual instructions, manual compliance

Client instruction submission was entirely manual. Clients submitted PDF forms by email; Insight's client services team processed these individually, creating delays and duplication of effort on both sides.

Regulatory KYC periodic reviews were managed manually via email, creating potential compliance risk and risk of missing regulatory deadlines.

Disparate data and regulatory obligations

Data sat in disparate portals. There were different systems for different client groups with no unified experience and limited reporting capability. Clients had no self-service access to real-time portfolio data or reports; every data request was handled manually by the client services team.

Portal data volumes grew significantly beyond original specifications as the user base expanded, causing performance issues that required re-engineering of data caching and query optimisation.

Fund pricing data presented a specific and critical challenge: Insight has a daily regulatory obligation to publish fund prices on its website. The Optimizely Cloud failover model at the time of implementation did not support CMS editing in a failed-over state. Without a solution, Insight could not proceed.

No formal data measurement or analytics framework existed for the portal.

A fragmented estate and accumulated debt

Each client group had its own portal - a fragmented, inconsistent technology estate that created both a poor user experience and a significant management overhead. There was no unified system. Federated authentication added complexity from the outset: the original solution used Ping Federate, which was not natively supported by Optimizely and required custom development in close collaboration with the Optimizely team.

The website front-end codebase had accumulated approximately ten years of technical debt, hindering development speed and quality. Insight was also behind competitors who had more advanced client portals - a competitive vulnerability in an asset management market where client retention depends significantly on the quality of the client experience.