Reinventing the ION Treasury and Risk Management User Experience

ION, formerly known as Reval, is a leading global provider of cloud treasury software. Their SaaS solution helps more than 650 companies around the world to manage cash, liquidity, financial risk and hedge accounting.

ION wanted to create an analytics and reporting tool to allow C-levels to better manage their assets. Their clients must be able to understand the tool and really want to use it. Offering adaptive complexity levels for people like CEOs and Chief Analysts, depending on their specific needs, was essential. Above all, it needed to add real value.

Parkside Interactive was presented with a variety of objectives to fulfill, including the creation of the design and UX concept as well as the frontend development. In addition, we were tasked with helping ION modernize their development stack, evaluating and implementing cutting edge technologies and training their technical staff.

To understand their software as well as the field of treasury and risk management itself, we took part in a series of workshops with the ION team. After that, our design and development teams were gradually introduced to the project.

At the beginning, ION asked us to provide a series of simple custom designs for their white label software solution. What we created was well-received, opening up a surprising assignment: they needed our outside perspective and we were given carte blanche to work on their software. We were relied upon to devise a revolutionary and innovative solution.

“One of the most significant challenges for our UX team was to make something so complicated look simple.”

Approaching the complexity of ION Inside step by step, we started out by plotting the entirety of the software’s capabilities on an enormous online whiteboard together with the ION team. That gave us an overview and some initial hints as to where to improve the software. At the same time, we applied personas as a methodology to get a feeling about the actual users of the software and their specific needs. The development of so-called personas – the representation of properties, goals and user behavior through a concrete but hypothetical group of users – was crucial to finding solutions to improve the user experience.

After going through iterative analytics sessions, we started wireframing the new Reval Inside software. Working in an ongoing iterative feedback and improvement mode eventually led us to the next stage: creating mood designs. At that point, ION’s primary expectation was that we create something outstanding, beautiful and audacious for the financial sector.

In the next phase, we ran workshops to evaluate relevant technological options and define the future development stack for Reval Inside and the responsible business unit. Angular, a modern JavaScript framework, turned out to be the most fitting option. In order to fast-track the engineering of Reval Inside, we took over the frontend development for the first iteration of the new software. Concurrently, we ran a series of Angular training sessions covering the new stack to gradually get the ION team on board. We furthermore assisted the ION team in key decisions concerning their API design.

Together with the client’s team we developed and introduced a new product: Reval Inside. We modernized the frontend development stack and modernized the UX/UI design. We made their platform fully responsive, introduced internationalization and white label functionality. We also developed new features, such as SSO login, cash management & forecasting, intercompany loans, etc.