International Fund Admin Firm (confidential)
Building a compliance platform that made economic substance declarations manageable.
A messy, manual compliance process. Now a single, secure platform.
BVI's economic substance regulations meant thousands of companies needed to determine their scope, complete detailed questionnaires, and submit evidence. Our client needed a system that made this process simple for companies, intermediaries, and their own staff. We built it.
Deployed to client's own custom hosting stack
Thousands of companies managed through a single platform
Three user types supported: companies, intermediaries, and internal staff
We chose Laravel for the security and flexibility we knew we'd need. On a platform managing thousands of companies through a regulated process, those choices matter.Luke Oliver
The Challenge
BVI introduced economic substance requirements that affected thousands of registered companies. Each one had to work out whether it fell within the scope of the regulations. If it did, it needed to complete a detailed questionnaire, backed by evidence of its activities.
Our client managed a huge volume of these companies and needed a way to handle the process at scale. The old approach wasn't cutting it. Companies needed a clear path through the declarations. Intermediaries needed to manage submissions on behalf of their clients, and internal staff needed reporting, invoicing, and the ability to push completed submissions through to the BVI FSC via their API.
This wasn't a simple form. It was a multi-party regulatory workflow with real consequences for getting it wrong.
Our Approach
We used PRINCE2 to manage the project, breaking the work into stages, phases, and sprints. That gave us the control you need on a compliance-critical build: early detection of issues, clear scope management, and structured sign-off at each stage.
Before writing a line of code, we created a design system using the client's brand guidelines as the foundation. Colours, typography, form fields, data tables: everything standardised so the application felt consistent and professional from screen to screen.
We built prototypes of the key interfaces and ran them through a series of workshops with the client. Feedback was incorporated before development began, which meant fewer surprises later.
Development was Agile and sprint-based, with work packages assigned across the team by skill and availability. The application was built on Laravel 8.0, chosen for its security and flexibility. Invoice management and reconciliation were handled through Xero API integration. The finished platform was deployed to the client's own custom hosting stack.
A thorough round of QA testing closed the project out. Every piece of functionality was cross-referenced against the original brief and signed off by the client.
The Outcome
The result is a fully bespoke compliance platform that takes a complex regulatory process and makes it manageable.
Companies can determine their scope and complete declarations with clear guidance. Intermediaries can manage submissions across multiple clients. Staff have reporting, invoicing, and direct integration with the BVI FSC's economic substance API.
What was previously a messy, manual process now runs through a single, secure application.
