Accedia

Who is Alexforbes?

Alexforbes is a diversified financial services company founded in 1935, offering a broad range of employee benefit solutions, retirement, healthcare, and sustainability consulting, as well as investment and wealth management services. 

Over the years, Accedia has worked closely with Alexforbes across multiple platforms and services, combining efforts to drive digital transformation, support regulatory compliance, and enhance operational performance. Accedia has contributed to many projects, integrating Engineering Managers, Software Development and QA Consultants, UI/UX Designers, and more.

The Two Pot System: A Major Change in Retirement Savings

In September 2024, South Africa introduced the Two Pot Retirement System, restructuring how retirement savings are managed. Instead of locking all funds until retirement, contributions are now divided into two parts: one-third goes into a savings pot, which can be withdrawn once per year, while the remaining two-thirds go into a retirement pot, which stays locked until retirement. For financial institutions like Alexforbes, implementing the Two Pot regulation meant adapting a vast network of interconnected systems to track contributions, enforce withdrawal rules, and ensure compliance. Many of these systems—spanning both customer-facing platforms and internal processes—required modifications, with Accedia playing a role in supporting some key updates.

Preparing Alexforbes for the Two Pot System

As part of this large-scale transition, Accedia collaborated closely with Alexforbes to ensure the successful alignment of their platforms with the new regulatory requirements. Among these platforms were the core system for managing pensions, investments, and insurance policies, and the core financial services management hub.

The first one needed updates so customers could easily see how their funds were divided across the savings, retirement, and vested pots, while backend changes ensured that withdrawal rules were properly enforced and data remained consistent across interconnected systems. At the same time, the centralized hub for extensive financial resources and services had to be adapted to handle real-time updates to retirement savings while maintaining compliance and ease of use. Beyond these platforms, numerous other systems across Alexforbes also required adjustments. Accedia was involved in optimizations to the company’s primary mobile application, the retirement fund management platform, and several shared services used across the company. Given the scale of the project, close coordination between teams was essential to ensure a frictionless regulatory rollout.

Challenges During the Regulatory Transformation

• Coordinating Across Multiple Teams and Systems

With so many interconnected applications and stakeholders involved, ensuring consistency in financial data processing was a significant challenge. Multiple teams involving both Alexforbes and Accedia developers worked side by side, each with their own roadmaps and priorities, yet all updates needed to align with the overarching regulatory requirements. Collaboration across teams was critical to ensure that no discrepancies arose in the processing of retirement contributions and withdrawals.

• Adapting to Changing Regulatory Timelines

The South African Reserve Bank adjusted the implementation deadlines several times, prompting development teams to revise their plans on short notice. This meant compliance requirements were evolving even as development was underway. To stay aligned, close collaboration between compliance specialists, business analysts, and technology teams was essential.

• Managing a Complex, High-Stakes Deployment

The final deployment of the Two Pot system was a highly coordinated effort led by Alexforbes involving dozens of teams across both organizations. With numerous interdependent systems, the rollout required months of meticulous planning to ensure each update was implemented in the correct sequence. Multiple dress rehearsals were conducted to refine the process, identify potential issues, and minimize risks before the final implementation.

Each team followed a precisely planned schedule to deploy, validate, and integrate their changes while carefully managing dependencies across platforms. Extensive crossfunctional alignment was critical to ensuring a successful transition, with contingency plans in place for any unexpected issues. Following deployment, Accedia also participated in the post-launch hyper-care phase, monitoring system performance and resolving any arising issues. This period was critical in stabilizing the updates, diagnosing unexpected system behaviors, and optimizing functionality.

Business Impact

Implementing the Two Pot system marked a major milestone for Alexforbes, ensuring full compliance with one of the most impactful legislative changes in South Africa’s retirement landscape. The successful rollout reinforced the company’s reputation as a trusted financial partner, agile in responding to shifts in policy across the African markets it serves.

Technology

The technical solution employed a robust stack, utilizing Microsoft .NET for the back end and Angular for the front end to ensure a dynamic and responsive user interface. SQL Server databases were hosted on Azure, providing the scalability, security, and reliability needed for enterprise-grade financial systems.

About Vet-AI

Vet-AI is disrupting the £100 billion veterinary market by offering a solution that provides pet owners with access to professional veterinary advice and treatment in just a few taps. Committed to reshaping pet healthcare by making it accessible, affordable, and convenient for all pet owners, Vet-AI combines advanced technology with veterinary expertise. Their goal is to deliver reliable, real-time pet care solutions, placing quality clinical advice directly into the pockets of pet owners.

Joii Pet Care Application: Automated, Accurate Clinical Guidance

Joii Pet Care blends telemedicine with purpose-built AI to reshape veterinary care. Pet owners can connect with licensed vets via video or chat anytime, making expert care more accessible and affordable. An AI symptom checker, built on 165 vet-authored algorithms, triages the most common conditions in seconds and recommends seeing a vet, speaking to a vet, or caring at home. Behind the scenes, the large language model draws on a proprietary dataset of more than 400,000 labelled consultations and 4 billion data points, giving the solution a clinical accuracy score of 81%, outperforming Gemini (69%) and ChatGPT (50%) during blinded testing. With over 60% of UK pet owners searching online for care advice and nearly 80% of vets reporting high stress levels, this rapid, targeted rollout helps owners get reliable guidance and eases pressure on clinicians.

Powering Vet-AI: The Engineering Backbone Behind Smarter Pet Care

By the end of 2023, Vet-AI faced a critical inflection point typical of scaling startups: its existing technology stack had become complex, unstable, and increasingly incompatible with essential platforms like Shopify and key partner integrations. With pressure to accelerate growth and secure new investment, the company recognized an urgent need for a complete rebuild. Vet-AI had just four months to deliver a robust, scalable, and stable platform. To meet this challenge, the company needed deep technical expertise and rapid execution.

Accedia quickly built a dedicated team of nearly twenty engineers, spanning front-end and back-end development, DevOps, and mobile engineers. Together with Vet-AI, we replaced the legacy system under a tight deadline and built and stabilized the new platform. Thanks to the production-ready foundation, Vet-AI saw a twenty-fold increase in release velocity, going from quarterly rollouts to shipping multiple feature updates every week.

Once the core of the solution was secured, the team started introducing new features and enhancements. They integrated the symptom-checker APIs, streamlined diagnostic workflows, and upgraded the trial-management system so Vet-AI’s data science and clinical functionalities could run reliably for every user.

• Streamlined Clinical Trials with an Integrated Management System

 A key component we worked on was Vet-AI’s Trial Management System (TMS), the hub that keeps clinical research running. The TMS lets Vet-AI recruit up to a thousand participants in just six weeks, track each pet’s progress in real time, and keep trial data structured from day one.

Smarter, automated workflows eliminate most manual hand-offs, cutting trial costs by 40%. Because reminders and insurance checks now run inside the same system, owner drop-off stays below 3% after onboarding. By weaving insurer APIs and clinic schedules directly into the platform, Accedia helped Vet-AI turn emails and spreadsheets into a single, organized data pipeline. Veterinarians, owners, and researchers now see the same up-to-date information, making each study faster, cheaper, and easier to scale.

• Technical Challenges 

During the development phase, Vet-AI encountered a few technical challenges that often arise in fast-moving product environments. One issue involved delayed appointment notifications on both web and mobile, which could have led to missed bookings and idle time for clinicians during internal testing. To address this early, Accedia helped redesign the notification logic and introduced intelligent scheduling, allowing unused slots to be automatically reassigned, improving the platform’s efficiency before launch.

Integrating the Joii Pet Care application with supplier systems via Shopify also presented challenges. Slow responses and lagging supplier APIs created dependencies that risked impacting project timelines. By proactively managing communication between Vet-AI and its suppliers, Accedia ensured clarity, minimized delays, and successfully completed the integration, enabling development teams to smoothly continue their work without interruption.

Business Impact

As Vet-AI scaled its operations, bringing in external development capacity helped the team meet growing technical demands and accelerate delivery. The platform has already supported 400,000 consultations and 850,000 symptom-checker sessions, making Joii Pet Care one of the UK’s most trusted pet healthcare applications. The solution’s modular design also lets Vet-AI onboard new partners in just hours, whether integrating with clinics, insurers, or international marketplaces, accelerating expansion into new geographies without re-architecting core systems. 

About Castle Trust Bank

Castle Trust Bank has been a key player in the UK’s financial sector since its establishment in 2012. Initially focused on investment products and specialist mortgage finance, they expanded their operations with the acquisition of Omni Capital Retail Finance in 2017, adding point-of-sale finance to its suite of services.

The Challenge: Scaling Operations While Maintaining Efficiency and Security

As Castle Trust expanded its financial offerings, it faced challenges that needed to be addressed to ensure operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, as well as expand their core offering and provide a seamless user experience throughout. With a growing network of more than 2,000 retailers, the bank required a robust, scalable solution to streamline its lending processes and fraud prevention measures while maintaining high customer satisfaction.

The Solution: OmniPort – A Comprehensive Lending Platform

To address these challenges, Accedia engineered and continuously optimizes OmniPort – a personal loan origination system that underpins the bank’s retail finance operations. Over the past ten years, the partnership between Accedia and Castle Trust has resulted in a solution that meets evolving business needs, security threats, and customer needs while integrating seamlessly with existing processes. Throughout the years, our work has spread through various aspects of the solution – from automation and cyber security to customer management, third-party system integrations, and yet, there is so much more to come.

• Automated Credit Decisioning

OmniPort automates credit decision-making, leveraging data-rich algorithms and seamless integrations with third parties (e.g. credit bureaus). Thе enhancement allows Castle Trust to process loan applications in minutes, handling over 200,000 lending decisions per year while maintaining low fraud and arrears rates. The system ensures that loan approvals are both rapid and reliable, offering customers a frictionless borrowing experience.

• Fraud Prevention and Identity Verification

Recognizing the importance of security in financial transactions, Accedia worked on the integration with an AI-powered Identity Verification solution to improve OmniPort’s fraud prevention and KYC compliance capabilities. The system seamlessly verifies customer identities using computer vision technology, introducing rigorous checks to prevent fraudulent activities. Additionally, we created a Proof of Concept (PoC) for an advanced AI-driven fraud detection system, utilizing predictive analytics to identify and mitigate fraudulent transactions in real time.

• Retailer Integrations

With Castle Trust working with a vast network of retailers, Accedia ensured that OmniPort provided multiple integration options tailored to different business needs. Whether through API-based integrations for full customization or out-of-the-box interfaces and widgets for quick deployment, Accedia guaranteed seamless onboarding and operational efficiency. This flexibility allowed Castle Trust’s retail partners to effortlessly incorporate digital financing solutions into their sales processes, enhancing both merchant and customer satisfaction.

• Customer Satisfaction Management

To improve both customer and retailer experience, Accedia developed a fully automated solution for validating order fulfilment and customer satisfaction, increasing accuracy and reliability, and significantly streamlining the previous manual process. The system provides configurable communications and detailed Management Information (MI) reporting, replacing previously manual processes with an efficient, reliable solution.

• New Load Product Offerings

As market trends shifted, Castle Trust sought to introduce Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) financial products. Accedia played a crucial role in crafting a new customer journey, featuring an intuitive interface, detailed communications, and advanced credit calculations tailored to the complexity of BNPL financing. This innovation positioned Castle Trust at the forefront of flexible payment solutions.

• Regulatory Compliance

Our partnership also involved several regulation-driven transformations, ensuring that OmniPort remained fully aligned with evolving financial regulations. This included the implementation of the Consumer Duty standards mandated by the FCA, requiring significant updates to customer journeys and communication touchpoints. By embedding compliance into the core of OmniPort’s operations, Accedia helped Castle Trust meet legal requirements while also reinforcing its commitment to ethical and transparent lending practices.

Technology

The technical solution was developed using the .NET framework (ASP.NET, .NET Core) with C# for backend development, MySQL for efficient database management, and ASP.NET MVC for a dynamic frontend. Hosted on Azure, the project utilizes Azure Virtual Machines, Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Active Directory, and Azure DevOps/Visual Studio Online for streamlined CI/CD.

Business Impact

OmniPort’s automation capabilities have significantly improved operational efficiency, enabling Castle Trust to offer swift and secure digital credit approvals. Today, approximately 80% of customers receive a fully automated loan decision within minutes, a testament to the platform’s advanced technology.

According to Castle Trust’s latest report, by 2024, its Omni (Castle Trust’s consumer credit business) assets were estimated at £210 million, through a network of more than 2,000 retailers.