Purple Onboarding Zone

🐣 Onboarding Zone? Who needs onboarding in Purple?

Purple is all about trading, Forex, finance, and tech. One of the main jobs of our software development teams is to deliver apps to our clients — Forex brokers and other financial institutions. One of the brokers we build for is Purple Trading (PT). And this post is exactly about the development, background, problems, and challenges of onboarding clients into PT.

It’s not just a simple registration form. It’s a place where PT gets to know its future clients. And they get to know PT. Before a customer even gets to the typical ID/address verification, they go through a set of important questions, ending with a little test, like:

👉 Do they have any previous experience with trading?
👉 Do they understand what ETFs are and what they involve?
👉 Do they get the risks that come with Forex trading?

The point is to protect the client – so they don’t end up doing something they don’t understand. And to protect the broker too. Thanks to this process, PT has a clarification about their potential customer: Do they know what they’re signing up for? Only then is everything ready for the customer to enter the platform.

🔧 And now the fun part: What’s under the hood and how does the app work?

Anyone (who follows us even a little) already knows, that we love AWS and serverless step functions. The frontend runs on React, the backend on Node.js. Cognito is a big help with managing clients and checking login risk, and DynamoDB is our master database.

Thanks to step functions in the Serverless framework, we’ve managed to tune everything so that:

• the app runs fast — top priority!
• users can return to where they left off
• relevant teams can see exact step where someone got stuck
• our dev team can track which steps take users the longest, so they can keep optimizing
• and of course, the broker meets all regulatory requirements

“The zone is fully up and running, but more development is coming. There’s some tech debt, a switch to the SST framework (open source for dev and deployment) is in the air, the investment questionnaire needs a facelift, and some onboarding steps could use automation. And we’re on it.” – Martin Kubíček, Tech Lead.

Oh, and... everything is built in-house. No third-party stuff.