Integrations and APIs

As Docupace has been built to be the driving backbone for digital operations, the company accepts requests for integrations from both customers and partners. There are several kinds of integrations, as follows:

  • a shelf product, which is a third-party partner that has a business around delivering a particular kind of product;
  • the STP integration with clearing houses, custodians, or product manufactures like mutual fund companies or insurance carriers.

Among the products the company integrates with are Salesforce, Redtail, Smart Office, Envestnet, AnnuityNet, MorningStar, Caesar, M&O and number of others. On a STP integration side Docupace works with Pershing, NFS, TD, American Funds to name a few.

“Now, the reality is we get more requests for the popular products and fewer requests for the niche products, but there are AI investment-platform products and other things that can be integrated on request.”

The company don’t necessarily publish their APIs or put them on a website for anybody to write into it. Instead, they cooperate with clients and integration partners to deliver best user experience via the integration before providing them with the API.

Team structure

The team structure of Docupace consists of over 100 employees, and has numerous branches:

  • Product organization, which consists of an outward-looking team that determines the value proposition, the use case, the critical compliance elements, the experience that they are trying to deliver, etc., and an internally oriented team that takes those specifications and converts them into engineering sprints.
  • An engineering team, which conducts business analysis and development.
  • An architectural team, which is focused on defining the fundamental base architecture of the platform.
  • Site Reliability team, which loads these products into a test environment and then into production to maintain the highest level of reliability and availability of the platform.
  • The platform organization, which is responsible for all of the hardware and network infrastructure that is used to deliver the service and capabilities to the customers—servers, internet connection, security products, failover, redundancy, database, and so on.
  • The marketing team. The team is responsible for communications and demand generation.
  • The sales organization, which looks for direct sales. This contains a sub-team dedicated to building partnerships and arranging integrations.
  • A professional services team, which is responsible for smooth delivery and configuration of the platform for new and existing customers.

“Lots of the stuff is not building new code. It’s turning knobs in the configuration because the broker-dealers have prided themselves in many cases on having a unique twist on a common process.”

  • The customer care team, which provides quick responses to customers.
  • The finance team, which manages payroll, collects invoices, and pays the bills.

Architecture and tech stack

Mark says that in the architecture they don’t have any components that nobody wants. They are a Java shop using containers and RedHat for their management. Also, they use Oracle databases, EMC storage, and virtualization.

“Architecturally, we were always built to engage integration. So we do that as a matter of design. So you don’t have one monolithic mountain of code that has no entry points and you have to constantly be building onto it.”

Product management

In addition to their own leadership, Docupace asks clients to give feedback and suggestions.

“No one wants to give up on performance enhancements and no one says, ‘Hey, you can’t outsource your leadership to us.’”

Among their competitive advantages in design thinking are vertical knowledge about the industry, and persona modeling.

In terms of deployment, they are agile and practice Scrum. They decided to move to a tri-annual release schedule.

Future plans

According to Mark, small companies often struggle to both make a profit as broker-dealers and support the advisors, this is why digitizing their back-office could have been quite profitable for both these 35,000 companies and Docupace.

“That target market looks like an iceberg. That’s the piece of the iceberg that’s at the top and above the water—that’s only 100 of those firms. Beneath them, there are another 100–900 broker-dealers, which have somewhere [around] 50 to a 1,000 advisors under their umbrella. […] Then the next layer down is small broker-dealer[s] with three to five to ten [advisors]—that’s the most fluent one.”

Also, they strive to work on compelling offerings that promote advisor adoption such as ease of user enhancements, product capabilities for them to conduct business in a simplified fashion.