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Built around your desk

Your process,
not somebody else’s

Most desks bend themselves to fit their software. This one goes the other way — configured, extended or built new around the way you already work.

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  • 100%White label
  • 6+Platforms it talks to
  • 4Portals to extend
  • 24/7Support desk

How custom work runs

Four stages, and a written scope

The two in the middle are ours. Nothing gets built before the second one is signed, which is the whole reason these projects land where they said they would.

  1. Stage 01

    Watch you work

    We sit with the people who use the system all day and find out what they actually do, which is rarely what the process document says they do.

  2. Stage 02

    Write it down

    Screens, rules, edge cases and what is explicitly out of scope, with a price and a date against it. You sign this before anybody writes code.

  3. Stage 03

    Build in the open

    Work lands on a staging environment as it is finished rather than at the end, so what you see is the thing itself and not a progress report about it.

  4. Stage 04

    Hand it over

    Released, documented and trained, and then maintained as part of the platform — not left as a fork somebody has to remember at upgrade time.

Three depths

Not everything needs building

A good half of what desks arrive asking to have built already exists as a setting. It is worth finding that out before paying for it twice.

  • Configure

    Roles, fields, approval rules, account types, commission plans, email templates and the KYC requirement set are all settings. No code, no release, and it can be changed again on a Tuesday when the desk decides it had it wrong.

    • Live the same day
    • Reversible in a minute
    • No upgrade cost, ever
    • Your own team can do it
  • Most work

    Extend

    A screen your desk needs that nobody else does, a report shaped the way your board reads, a rule engine that knows something specific about your market. Built onto the platform rather than beside it, and carried forward with every upgrade.

    • Scoped and priced up front
    • Maintained with the platform
    • Survives every upgrade
    • Uses the same audit trail

  • Build new

    Something the platform has no opinion about at all — a settlement process peculiar to your region, an internal tool, an integration with a system only you run. Written against the API, on your infrastructure or ours.

    • Written against the open API
    • Reads the same client record
    • Your infrastructure or ours
    • Yours to take with you

What desks actually change

Six things
nobody asks for twice

After enough of these projects the same six requests keep arriving, worded differently each time.

  1. The screen the desk lives on

    Every brokerage has one view its team opens first and never closes. Which columns, which order, which filters and what counts as urgent are specific to how you work, and getting that one screen right does more for a desk than any other change on this list.

  2. Commission that matches the deal

    Standard rebate models cover most partners and never cover the three biggest ones. Tiered, capped, blended or time-limited arrangements get built into the rule engine so they run on every trade instead of being reconciled by hand each month.

  3. Approval chains with your shape

    Who signs off what, at which amount, with which second pair of eyes, and what happens when that person is on leave. Every desk answers this differently and every desk is confident its answer is the obvious one.

  4. Onboarding for your regulator

    Which documents, in which order, with which extra questions for which countries, and what a rejection has to record. This is usually the first thing an incoming compliance officer wants changed and the easiest thing to get wrong generically.

  5. Reports your board already reads

    Not a report builder, but the actual report, in the layout the people who read it are used to. A figure that arrives in an unfamiliar shape gets checked against the old spreadsheet, which means the old spreadsheet never dies.

  6. The system nobody replaces

    There is always one — an accounting package, a dialler, a regional reporting tool, something written in-house a decade ago. It gets connected over the API rather than argued with, because it is usually not going anywhere.

Custom, not bespoke

Shaped to you, upgraded with everyone

Work is built onto the platform rather than forked off it, so a desk with heavy customisation still gets every release the others do.

  • Scoped before it is built
  • Never a stranded fork
  • Open API underneath
  • Your data, exportable
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A customised VAST CRM console open on a laptop with the mobile app beside it

Questions about custom work

Before you commission anything

What people ask before paying somebody to change software they do not own.

  • Not the way we build it. Custom work goes onto the platform through its own extension points rather than by editing the core, so your deployment stays on the same release line as everyone else and gets every upgrade they get. That is the difference between customisation and a fork: a fork saves time on the first project and costs it back on every release afterwards, until a desk is three years behind and quoted a migration to get current. If something genuinely cannot be built without changing the core, we say so before you commission it.

  • Against a written scope, agreed before anything is built. The scope lists the screens, the rules, the edge cases and — more usefully — what is explicitly not included, with a price and a date. Changes after that are quoted as changes rather than absorbed quietly and then argued about at the end. We would rather spend an extra week on the scope than deliver on time against a description neither side actually read the same way.

  • Yes, and it happens often. A good share of what arrives as a development request is already a setting — a role, an approval rule, a commission plan, a template, a field on a form. Configuration is live the same day, costs nothing at upgrade time and can be undone when the desk changes its mind, so it is worth exhausting before anyone writes code. Being told that is cheaper for you and better for us than a project neither party needed.

  • That is what the API is for. Clients, accounts, payments and partners are all reachable over REST, events arrive as signed webhooks, and there is a sandbox to build against. Plenty of desks do the parts closest to their own business themselves and leave the platform work to us. Keys are scoped like operator roles, so a team can be given exactly the access their project needs and no more.

  • Worth settling in writing before the first invoice rather than after the last one, and we will put it in the contract either way. Ask specifically about three things: whether the work is exclusive to you or may be offered to other brokers, whether it keeps running if you move off the platform, and whether your data exports in full including whatever the custom work created. Any vendor who is vague on those three is telling you something.