Reframing Digital Funding

About the Client

The client is a US-based fintech company that operates a digital investment marketplace, connecting everyday investors with curated local and emerging businesses. As one of the early online platforms to register with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and become a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, it helped widen access to private offerings with investment minimums starting at USD 100. The platform had already deployed more than USD 10 million in capital, funded dozens of businesses, and built momentum in a tightly regulated space.

That growth came with a different kind of pressure. This was not just a digital marketplace scaling traffic. It was a regulated funding platform operating in a market where investor expectations were rising, compliance scrutiny was tightening, and businesses wanted faster onboarding with less friction. For the client, growth depended on balancing trust, speed, and regulatory discipline at the same time.

Business Challenges

The client’s opportunity was clear, but its operating model was not built to support what the market now expected. As a regulated digital investment marketplace, it had to balance growth, investor trust, issuer experience, and strict compliance simultaneously.

That became harder as traffic increased, onboarding expectations rose, and regulators placed greater scrutiny on disclosure, verification, and reporting. What had once been manageable as an early-stage platform was now slowing the business down.

• The legacy platform could not scale with the business: Its CMS-based architecture limited flexibility, slowed page performance, and made new-feature delivery more difficult than it needed to be.
• Compliance-heavy workflows stayed too manual: Campaign creation, business verification, and regulatory filings still followed paper-like processes, which delayed onboarding and lengthened time-to-market.
• Security and compliance carried growing risk: The platform handled money movement, investor data, and sensitive issuer information, which raised the cost of weak controls or operational gaps.
• The experience fell short for both investors and businesses: Limited design flexibility and slower journeys made it harder to create the kind of intuitive, real-time experience the market increasingly expected.
• Data was available, but not usable on a scale: Without a scalable data warehouse or business intelligence layer, product and growth teams lacked the insight needed to make faster, better decisions.

To move forward, the client needed a secure cloud-native architecture, faster automated compliance workflows, modern user experiences, stronger analytics, and operational resilience to release without downtime.

LTM’s Solution

With LTM as its Business Creativity partner, the client redesigned its funding platform on AWS to support regulated growth with more speed, control, and resilience.

LTM replaced the limitations of a legacy CMS-based setup with a cloud-native architecture, then integrated compliance, user journeys, collaboration, analytics, and security into a single operating model built for a digital investment marketplace.

• Cloud-native investment platform foundation: LTM migrated the platform from a CMS-based monolith to a serverless, microservices-based architecture on AWS. The front end was built as a single-page progressive web application using ReactJS, Semantic UI, MobX, and AWS Amplify, delivered through Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3. The API layer used Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and AWS AppSync, with DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Redshift supporting data management.
• Automated compliance workflows: To reduce friction in issuer onboarding and regulatory processes, LTM digitized campaign creation, business verification, and filing workflows. The platform introduced guided experiences, automated validations, and back-office verification, while enabling issuers to build offering pages through drag-and-drop components and supporting downstream compliance checks, form generation, and disbursement logic.
• Reimagined experiences for issuers, investors, and administrators: LTM designed role-based journeys tailored to each participant's needs in the marketplace. This included dashboards, review interfaces, and more streamlined investment flows to make platform interactions clearer and easier to manage throughout each campaign's lifecycle.
• Collaboration hub for deal execution: To improve coordination across campaigns and stakeholders, LTM enabled document authoring, sharing, project management, and notifications within the platform. This gave teams a more structured way to manage deals and operational workflows.
• Analytics and DevSecOps backbone: LTM centralized operational data in Amazon Redshift to support campaign analytics, investor insight, and risk monitoring. It also implemented DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing to enable the platform to evolve through controlled, lower-risk releases.
• Security and compliance controls by design: LTM embedded multi-layered security into the platform through Amazon Cognito for identity management, compliant document storage, and encryption using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). These controls supported the platform’s need to strengthen governance for investors, issuers, and transaction-related data.

Business Benefits

By moving to a cloud-native funding platform on AWS, the client improved cost control, onboarding speed, investor experience, and operational resilience without compromising regulatory discipline.

1. 30% lower platform costs: Reduced platform run costs through serverless architecture and managed AWS services.
2. 25% faster business onboarding: Automated compliance workflows shortened issuer onboarding timelines and reduced friction in campaign setup.
3. 21% shorter investor decision cycles: More intuitive user experience helped investors move through evaluation and investment journeys faster.
4. Zero-downtime releases with stronger resilience: The platform improved release stability while supporting more reliable day-to-day operations.
5. 200% traffic growth without performance disruption: The modernized platform scaled under sharp demand increases while improving web application speed.
6. Better decisions through real-time analytics: Product and growth teams gained timely insight from centralized operational and campaign data.

Conclusion

Regulated growth leaves little room for unoptimized systems and paper-heavy processes. By rebuilding the platform on AWS, LTM helped the client create a funding experience that could move faster without losing control. Issuers are now onboard with less friction, investors move with more confidence, and internal teams have the resilience and insight to support demand spikes and releases, and to oversee risk on the same foundation.

That shift gives the business more than short-term efficiency. It creates a stronger foundation to expand offerings, respond to regulatory changes, and keep improving digital investing journeys in a market where trust and speed must work together.