Overview

When Fidelity needed to redesign and modernize the Fidelity PlanExam application, a staple of the company's 401k sales efforts for nearly fifteen years, they reached out to Cantina's Financial Services team, a longtime design and development partner.

The PlanExam helps Fidelity's account executives conduct consultative sales sessions with prospective plan sponsors. First, the PlanExam helps the account executive gather detailed plan information from prospective plan sponsors, such as a breakdown of participants, current investment lineup offerings, plan costs, and company matching. Next, to facilitate the plan comparison, the experience maps to a proposed Fidelity lineup, complete with detailed cost and investment return projections. Once armed with this information, the PlanExam integrates with a number of back-end microsystems and external data sources to present dozens of visuals comparing Fidelity's offering to that of the prospect's existing provider.

To Fidelity account executives, the PlanExam is considered a “Swiss Army knife” as it contains talking points and relevant data for every component of a 401(k) plan, ensuring the account executive is never without compelling talking points and objective data to support Fidelity's offering.

The most recent redesign and upgrade of PlanExam aimed to bolster the application's technical infrastructure and enhance its user experience, notably to:

• Refresh the look and feel of the digital experience with a new visual design
• Build an app-wide design system for design efficiencies in the future
• Revamp the data visuals that articulate Fidelity's competitive advantages
• Replace an outdated technical infrastructure that would lead to cost savings going forward
• Convert the application to Salesforce for integration into Fidelity's workplace experience

Design System and Data Visualization

Fidelity engaged Cantina to lead the overall redesign effort, which included creating a design system as well as enhancing several existing visuals that illustrate Fidelity's strengths to prospects.

During the initial phase of the project, Cantina presented design options for Fidelity's consideration, each one aimed at enhancing the app's digital experience and working within the Salesforce platform. Once a visual design path was selected, Cantina created and implemented a design system that could be applied consistently across screens in Salesforce, allowing for more time-/cost-efficient updates in the future. This joint design effort between Cantina and the Salesforce vendor took 8 weeks, with weekly review sessions and consistent input from the client.

Overlapping the design system effort, Cantina began to strategize improvements to the data visuals within the application. With nearly 20 years of experience creating data visualizations for industry leaders, Cantina's Financial Services team focused on identifying business areas and data points crucial to the decision-making process for prospective plan sponsors. In the case of the PlanExam, Fidelity's robust plan offering and diversified fund lineup give it a unique competitive advantage that allows for a number of compelling data visuals in the sales experience.

Technical Infrastructure

On the technical side, Cantina modernized an aging technical LAMP (Linux, Apachi, MySQL, PHP) infrastructure and integrated the application into Salesforce. This extensive effort required tight coordination between Cantina, Fidelity, and a Salesforce vendor throughout the process. The Cantina team worked on refactoring the application's PHP code to Node.js, and replaced the aging LAMP infrastructure with a completely new cloud-based platform. To facilitate the plan comparison within the PlanExam, Cantina used AWS Lambda, RDS, and API Gateway to create microservices that implement cost calculations, fund comparisons, and benchmark comparisons for use in the app. The technical effort ran concurrently with the design team's work, ensuring Fidelity's targeted timeline for completion could be met.

Business Outcomes

After months of close collaboration and extensive efforts from the engineering and design teams, the new version of the PlanExam was released in early 2020. Notable business benefits of the new PlanExam include:

• A new technical infrastructure that is less expensive and more maintainable, scalable, reliable, and performant
• Numerous infographics and data visuals intended to articulate the cost, performance better, and plan participation benefits of Fidelity's 401k offering
• A new design system including navigation, buttons, and chart components that will make future versions of the application more cost-effective to scale

Cantina and its Financial Services practice are proud to have a relationship with Fidelity that spans nearly 20 years.