Modernizing An Investment Analytics Platform

Migrating a complex, actively maintained desktop analytics application to the web is one of the hardest engineering challenges a software company can face. This is how Fraction did it for an investment analytics provider — on budget, with a single senior engineer, and without pausing ongoing development on the legacy system.

What was the legacy platform problem?

Fraction received interest from an investment analytics software provider that needed to modernize their aging software. The analytics platform was originally built in the early 2000s using Microsoft Visual Studio and C++. It was designed as a purely desktop application that periodically downloaded equities and index data from the internet.

Many advanced analytics applications genuinely strained browser-based environments at the time of its creation. Building locally was the right call in 2002. By the 2020s, it had become a liability. Users were stuck installing updates manually, data refreshes required periodic downloads, and the company faced a growing competitive disadvantage against web-native alternatives that offered always-current, zero-install experiences.

Why is rebuilding a live legacy app so hard?

The core difficulty with the existing application was its fundamental design. It was a desktop application in a world where users increasingly expect web-based experiences. Requiring manual update installation is a constant friction point — web applications are always on the latest version from the user’s perspective.

But the harder problem was the rewrite constraint. The legacy application was not frozen — it was actively being enhanced. Any rewrite had to catch up to a moving target, not a static one. A new feature shipped in the old system was debt accumulating in the new one.

The client also needed to execute within a compact budget. Senior engineers with fifteen or more years of experience and deep investment finance knowledge can command two to four times standard market salaries in a full-time hiring context. The economics of a traditional senior hire simply did not fit.

How did Fraction solve the talent challenge?

Fraction brought a senior full-stack developer with CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) level experience to the team, enabling rapid design and development by a single engineer.

The fractional model made this possible. Fraction was founded to help startups and growing companies access the best developers in the United States by engaging them in long-term, part-time fractional positions. This approach opens a talent pool roughly 50 times larger than the active job market, because it includes experienced engineers who are not looking for full-time roles.

In this case, Fraction identified a developer who had passed CFA Level I and possessed the React and Python stack knowledge the client required. Critically, the engineer also had deep .NET knowledge — enabling him to read the existing C++ application code and transfer business logic accurately rather than reconstructing it from documentation alone. That combination would have been extremely difficult to source at standard market rates. Fraction delivered it through the standard Build plan pricing of $8,000 per month.

What was the rewrite process?

Fraction engaged with the client’s product team to devise a plan of attack. Since key users wanted to maintain the existing user experience, it made sense to start from the UI — rapidly building out lightweight React-based versions of every major application screen.

Taking a top-down approach first, and touching every screen before building a new backend, allowed the team to identify all the data entities the application actually needed. This avoided the common failure mode where backend work begins before the full scope of UI requirements is understood, resulting in data model revisions late in the project.

That top-down pass enabled an intermediate second step: building out the data schema as a bottom-up exercise, informed by every screen. With both the UI and the database structure defined, work could proceed rapidly on the application’s business logic — wiring together screens, data flows, and the more complex analytics computations that were the product’s core value.

Leveraging this approach and the developer’s investment software expertise, Fraction rapidly closed the capability gap between the new application and the legacy system. AWS Lambda provided an elegant solution for scheduled services, automating equity and index data feed processing that had previously required manual user action.

What were the outcomes?

Prior to engaging Fraction, the client had planned to update their system to the .NET framework but otherwise keep it as a desktop-only application. Users would have continued with manual update installation and periodic data downloads — a modest improvement that left the fundamental competitive disadvantage in place.

Fraction proposed a modern architecture for the rewrite that provides users with a full web-based experience while retaining the interactive charting and analysis depth of the original desktop application. The web architecture meant users gained always-current software with no installation overhead, while retaining every analytical capability they depended on.

Fraction also delivered the talent on budget — a senior engineer with all the right skillsets at a cost that would have been impossible to match through conventional full-time hiring. As the client moves into ongoing maintenance, Fraction provides cost-effective ongoing bug support and maintenance, backed by the same project management and software architecture guidance as every engagement.

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