Our client needed a solution to ensure that the thousands of companies on its books complied with BVI’s economic substance requirements.

In order to comply with these requirements, a company must first determine whether it carries out any activities that put it within the scope of the economic substance regulation. If the company is in scope, then it would need to complete a questionnaire backed with evidence of it's activities where required.

The application that we developed simplified this process, making it easy for companies and their intermediaries to submit economic substance information, which was then pushed through to BVI FSC via their economic substance API.

Our client's staff, its companies and intermediaries also required various features including submission management, reporting and invoicing.

We delivered the project using a PRINCE2 project management approach. This segmented the work into stages, phases and sprints to ensure close management and early detection of issues, risks and change. The project consisted of five high level stages: design, development, QA, refinement and deployment. 

Once the application architecture was agreed we created a design system using the company brand guidelines as a foundation. The design system included colours, typography, form fields and data table styles that would be used across the application for a consistent look and feel. Using the design system we built up prototypes of key interfaces, replicating the finished app as closely as possible. Through a series of workshops our client provided feedback on the prototypes so we could refine as much as possible before moving into development.

The development stage was managed using an Agile, sprint based approach, with work packages delegated across the team based on skill and availability.

The application was built with security in mind using the Laravel 8.0 development framework. Integration with the Xero API was used for invoice management and reconciliation and the application was deployed to the client's own, custom hosting stack.

Finally, an in depth round of Quality Assurance testing (QA) took place, with any issues resolved and re-tested as required. Content structure and functionality was cross referenced against the original brief and approved by our client.