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Project Overview
HL Live for iPad is a customisable live investment trading app with real-time news and financial information about stocks, shares and markets. HL Live for iPad is the most comprehensive personal investment mobile app available. The app provides Hargreaves Lansdown customers with the ability to manage their accounts, as well as place share and fund trades quickly and easily. HL Live for iPad has been the top free investment trading app in the App Store since launching in December 2013.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Founded in Spring 2009, Mubaloo is an award-winning enterprise mobility firm specialising in mobile consultancy and mobile app development. Mubaloo's team delivers end-to-end enterprise and consumer solutions.
Mubaloo focuses on business process re-engineering, helping businesses plan, develop and deploy apps within a wider mobile ecosystem, providing inspiration and building intelligent business solutions. These app solutions help drive new opportunities to improve the way business is done, reduce costs, improve field maintenance operations and create powerful tools for employees, consumers, investors and other key stakeholders.
Working at a strategic and operational level, the in-house team delivers iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and HTML apps that embrace the power of mobile.
Mubaloo has worked with a number of organisations worldwide to produce apps across many different verticals. Clients include: Aviva, Canon, Eircom, The Met Office, RAC, EE, Scania, William Hill, UNITE, Experian, Laing O’Rourke, Schroders, and Hargreaves Lansdown.
Working at both a strategic & tactical level, Mubaloo has seen a shift from requests for an individual app, to the exploration of the wider mobile ecosystem.
From the creative concepting & development of an app or website, to commercial roadmapping & system integration, the team delivers high quality user centered solutions.
Mubaloo is well recognised for delivering intelligent, engaging solutions for large enterprise clients, many of whom are looking to transform their internal processes & communications for both internal & external audiences.
Over the last 12 months, Mubaloo has received international recognition through SourcingLine, after being selected as the top consumer and enterprise app developer outside of the US, in both 2013 and 2014. In 2014, Mubaloo was recognised as a Red Herring top 100 European firms, in addition to receiving a SMARTA Breakthrough 50 award.
Project Brief
Hargreaves Lansdown launched the UK’s first share and fund trading app for Android and iPhone in 2011. The decision to build for iPad was based on web analytics & customer feedback, as visits to the HL website from iPads had increased more than 17-fold in the last two years. Following further analysis, a clear pattern of usage was discovered.
The iPhone & Android app was peaking in the morning, while people were on the move and on their way to work, while the desktop website was being used during the day when people were at work. HL wanted the iPad app to ‘fill the gap’ between the desktop website and smartphones apps.
The key objective of the HL iPad app was to enable customers to trade as quickly and efficiently as possible. The app needed to be beautifully designed, easy-to-use and customisable. The original HL Live app was built for iPhone & Android smartphones and therefore Hargreaves Lansdown wanted to extend their offering to by building a native iPad app.
Project Need
Since the launch of its iPhone and Android app in 2011, Hargreaves Lansdown has seen a 17-fold increase in traffic to its website from iPad. Initially, the desktop site was deemed suitable enough to provide iPad users with what they needed to do. Over time though, the amount of traffic meant that the iPad was quickly becoming a popular channel to manage portfolios. The decision to create an iPad app was driven as a way to compliment existing online and mobile channels but also provide a beautiful new, easy to use experience.
In the first week of going live, HL Live for iPad topped the free finance apps on the Apple App Store and accounted for 2.3% of all trades. The app has remained in the top 10 of the App Store free finance apps since being released in December 2013.
User Experience
By bringing together information from so many different sources, it was important that the app didn’t become too hard to use. A lot of time went into thinking about how a user could quickly and easily get to the information they need.
The iPad app needed to be beautifully presented, yet easy-to-use, to enable customers to trade as quickly and efficiently as possible. HL Live for iPad is a customisable live investment-trading app that enables users to manage their accounts, as well as place share and fund trades quickly, easily and securely.
The user experience is built around customisable tiles that display relevant information to users. Tiles define the journey, bringing together information about shares and funds, investment ideas and expert comments, to provide a snapshot view of activity. Users are also given the option to add shares and funds to different watchlists, where they can track and monitor how their selected investments are performing.
Prototypes of the app were created to test the UI and UX with target users to ensure it was easy and engaging to use. This has resulted in a financial trading app that is as beautiful as it is functional.
Project Marketing
HL Live for iPad was released in December 2013 and promoted to Hargreaves Lansdown customers via a special page on their website and with emails to clients and utilising social media channels. With no advertising, cross promotion or other traditional marketing activity, outside of Hargreaves Lansdown’s direct customer base, the app topped the free finance apps on the App Store with 27,500 downloads in the first week. Since then, app downloads have remained steady, keeping the app in the top 10 throughout 2014.
The only financial apps ahead of HL Live for iPad, remain personal banking apps such as Santander, HSBC or Barclays. The app has received consistently high reviews from users, helping to organically grow the user base over the past few months. This has had a positive impact on helping Hargreaves Lansdown to reach a wider customer base. By creating an app that has a huge amount of investor news, with interactive graphs and other features, such as customisable dashboards for free to users; Hargreaves has been able to show potential account holders that it is the go-to place for financial information.
In 2014, HL Live for iPad won Best Financial Services Campaign at the MOMA awards by The Drum magazine.
Project Privacy
HL Live for iPad is built around privacy and security. Any sensitive information (principally, the users’ portfolio and account details) is held in an in-memory store, meaning that it is never written to storage on the device. When the app is quit, or the user logs out, the information is removed. A period of inactivity in the app will cause the user to be logged out automatically.
The app never asks for any information from the user, besides their username and password. Personal data is requested when setting up an account via the app, but this is done via captive web views and is never stored on the device. All data transferred over the web uses industry standard security. Financial transactions are all handled through captive web views in the app, which allows the tried and tested security, developed for web trading, to be used within the app.
Mobile Trading Platforms
This category recognises applications that provide market trading platforms on the mobile platform.
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