The Challenges of the Project, and How We Met Them
What is The Vault? Who uses it?
The Vault is a SaaS application that helps businesses, banks and professionals with end-to-end investor relations.
At its core is an investor relations engine, and the suite also includes a media relations app and an investor communications app. Together they cover every part of managing investor relationships.
Today, more than 80 of South Africa’s top listed companies trust The Vault. These include FirstRand, Standard Bank, Sibanye-Stillwater, Bidcorp, AngloGold Ashanti, Discovery, Pepkor, Bidvest, Aspen, Woolworths and Pick n Pay, among others.
Those are the companies. Counted by the people using it, the platform has onboarded more than 50,000 users across them.
The Vault has become a go-to platform for South Africa’s investor relations and communications executives. It offers access to a curated audience of over 25,000 analysts, fund managers, retail investors and executives, as well as the full spectrum of local and international business journalists.
What Did The Vault Need?
When The Vault approached Provis, the SaaS investor relations platform had two main goals.
An investor website content management system
Designated group administrators needed to upload, edit and delete the information shareholders care about, such as news releases, reports, calendar dates, shareholder analysis, directors’ details and events.
Stakeholder database management
The platform had to include the following:
- Once registered on The Vault, subscribers should be able to join multiple company groups.
- Subscribers can join a group, or be added to one, in several different ways.
- Subscribers should be able to edit their own profile details, as can the group administrators.
- Branded alerts and invitations should reach a group’s subscribers with a single click.
What Were the Challenges?
The critical challenge was to build an application that takes data from the stock exchange and delivers it to subscribers.
This meant developing and integrating a number of APIs. The data was likely to be large and complex, so the solution had to scale.
Once the data feed was working, it would also need active maintenance and support.
Real-Time Exchange Data
Real-Time CMS Alerts
Multiple Data APIs
Scalable for Large Data
Real-Time Exchange Data
Real-Time CMS Alerts
Multiple Data APIs
Scalable for Large Data
Our Approach
Provis started with a detailed audit of what the SaaS platform had to do and how stakeholders and their subscribers would use it.
Our first step was to understand the details of the client’s requirements. The second was to design and build an investor relations application that would be feature-rich, powerful and scalable.
Large SaaS applications have many interlinked features, so we planned a separate feature list for every development phase and version of the application.
We concentrated on a strong backend and database, because that is where the ability to handle bulk data and high traffic comes from. On the frontend, we designed the customer-facing experience around the needs of each target audience so that the application is easy to use.
What the Platform Delivers
The platform we built for The Vault now serves more than 1,000 companies. Among its capabilities:
- 20,000 investment professionals, media and retail investors are able to receive alerts.
- Over 3 million alerts issued to date.
- More than 60 top issuers use the service on a daily basis, with more added all the time.
- Organizations are able to de-risk their investor communications.
- The application helps businesses and professionals improve their standing with the investor community.
- Stakeholders are able to rely on and communicate with a 100% accurate database.
- Organizations are easily able to manage events as well as one-to-ones with their investor audiences.
- The application also enhances the ability to discover new investors.
- With the level of system efficiency we have built in, we have cut out time-wasting and created a speedy-response application.
What the Client Says
We value the long-term relationship we have built with The Vault.
“Working with Provis Technologies is an absolute pleasure! I am just impressed by their service quality and working strategy. They satisfied me to the full by delivering the exceptional solution.”
Director, The Vault
James Hammerton 5.0
Director, The VaultVideo: James Hammerton of The Vault on working with Provis
The Application in Action
Screens from the platform: a subscriber’s announcements dashboard, the list of company groups they can join, and a listed company’s announcements and reports pages.
