Janus Capital Group (NYSE: JNS) engaged Crowd Favorite in an expeditious project to build a secure Investors Portal compliant with all U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulations to support their $320 billion Henderson Group (LSE & ASX: HGG) merger.
Janus Capital Group understood the risks of this mission-critical project with a concrete deadline. They needed a trusted, experienced partner like Crowd Favorite with experience in governmental web-presence compliance to lead the project.
Challenge
The complexity of an international merger with multi-government regulatory authorities generates immense pressure to "get it right" the first time. Janus Henderson Investors sought a partnership with an agency that complimented their internal technical teams' abilities and would be responsible for overall data integration and building a robust Content Management System (CMS) capable of delivering technical and legal success.
The complexity of the merger was made only more difficult in the requirements to integrate data from closed and disparate systems spanning the globe. They needed an experience partner that could deliver a secure Investor Portal, in a condensed time period.
Any outside agency had to act as "an extension of the internal team" that could collaborate seamlessly from day one. Furthermore, the final solution needed to be Open Source to ensure portability and interoperability with the news team(s) after the merger. Proprietary knowledge of the final solution was not an option.
Solution
The urgency of this project begets a necessity to start without documenting all knowns and unknowns first. Therefore, Crowd Favorite implemented an agile, collaborative design and build process adapting to quickly changing requirements. These small, iterative sprints ensured Crowd Favorite and Janus' internal team worked in tandem.
Drawing from Crowd Favorite's experience as a trusted partner, the teams were encouraged to have open and frank conversations, with bi-weekly check-ins between the two teams. This approach enabled a divide-and-conquer tactic in which each team focused on their strengths while simultaneously collaborating toward a unified goal.
Crowd Favorite also implemented a "follow the sun" ideology by utilizing our US and European-based teams for the project and delivering a 20-hour workday to Janus. The Janus and Crowd Favorite project managers held twice daily syncs, ensuring work from the European teams was consistently on track.
Results
Working side-by-side, the two teams were able to deliver a SEC compliant, secure investor portal/platform. The resulting centralized platform collates manually entered content, automated funding data, and legal information; reducing multiple sites from two disparate companies into a global site serving investors while meeting strict regulations. They are simultaneously customizing the centralized data into three different sites for Financial Professionals, Individual Investors, or Institutional Investors.
The solution allowed Janus Henderson to greatly improve content changes that previously required twenty-nine steps to a single automated effort.
Crowd Favorite built a complex logic set to automatically display the correct disclaimers, tables, rules, and content based on the needs of the user while managing all content from a single source of truth.
The solution allowed Janus Henderson to greatly improve content changes that previously required twenty-nine steps to a single automated effort.
Within a condensed, four-month, timeframe Janus and Crowd Favorite strategized to develop a flexible and scalable web presence for their investors. At the beginning of the project, Janus was unable to define the ideal result. Crowd Favorite, through the agile sprint process, adapted and adjusted requirements continuously. Crowd Favorite architected the API calls for collecting and integrating data and built error and safety checks to ensure only accurate data moved to the server.
Janus Henderson partnered with Crowd Favorite for a complex project with sensitive data. If you are looking for a digital partner that has experience with complex and sensitive data, or want to learn more about this custom solution, contact us here.
