Koyfin
An analytics platform providing market insights through dashboards, graphs and other data visualization tools, developing custom solutions from scratch assuming all the roles and responsibilities of a trustworthy tech partner
Koyfin is a New York based FinTech startup offering web-based analytics and visualization platform for investors to track and research investment ideas. The platform focuses on time series analysis, statistics, screening, news/social media and custom indices, and portfolios. The assets they track are stocks, indices, fixed income, foreign exchange (fx), commodities and economic indicators.
1 year and 2 months
After 15 years of working as an analyst at leading banks in the United States, CEO and founder Rob Koyfman saw an unfilled gap in the market of tools for investors between the widely popular Yahoo Finance or Google Finance with generic functionality and professional platforms like Bloomberg and Reuters that cost $25k per year.
He came up with the idea to build a tool that will offer advanced functionality and compelling user interface at a much lower cost and become the go-to platform for high net worth individuals.
Developing Bloomberg-level functionality while staying lean is not an easy task. The technical side posed the biggest challenge. By design, the platform was supposed to be high-performing with a strong data visualization component, able to update interactive charts in real time, and aggregate large amounts of financial data from multiple sources with different API for each data source or no API at all.
Lacking any technical background, Rob Koyfman realized he wouldn’t be able to handle it by himself and made the decision to bring onboard a reliable tech partner to take over the architecture design and development while understanding the financial use cases behind the platform functionality. This is where Ezetech came into the picture.
In a few months Ezetech delivered an MVP with basic functionality. The team employed an iterative development model adding features and integrating the new data sources in alignment with the development progress.
Such an approach presented a challenging task: developing a comprehensive and unified architecture which would be scalable at the same time. After thorough assessment and analysis, the Ezetech team chose an optimal solution: microservices. Each data source was designed as a separate microservice with its own business logic interacting with the database through a unified interface.
After that, the real-time updates coming from the multiple data points had to be processed and stored; structuring a heavy database optimization was the logical next step. To ensure high fault tolerance and guarantee 100% uptime, Ezetech’s DevOps team set up a sophisticated infrastructure.
All this time the GUI was evolving together with the product, becoming more flexible and user-friendly. It went through a few refactoring stages to guarantee great performance and usability.
To cater even better to industry demands, Koyfin has been integrated with Slack messenger and Symphony platform as an analytical tool which is a leading networking platform for over 5000 finance professionals.
At this point the Ezetech job was done and the project was handed over to a newly established Koyfin’s in-house development team. This successful collaboration established solid trust and became the basis for further partnership: currently Ezetech is providing recruiting services to Koyfin.
The Koyfin platform went into production in 2017 and the market has responded to it enthusiastically from the get-go - every month Koyfin is growing its user database.
Technology Stack
Back-end: Node.js
Front-end: React.js, d3.js
Team: Ezetech started the project with a team of two developers which soon grew to include five developers, two QA engineers and a project manager
Duration: Feb 2016 - Dec 2017
Within two years the Ezetech team brought to life a sophisticated product offering highly-customized functionality for professional investors. Here is a list of the major features we’ve developed for Koyfin: Historical stock prices for over 12k companies, Forex data, Economic calendar, Interactive and configurable stock price charts, Slack and Symphony integration, Command line similar to the Bloomberg terminal, Real-time Intraday stock price chart, Fundamental data charts, Correlation graphs, Financial estimates data, Newsfeed and SEC Filings, Portfolio monitoring, Market Scatter.
During the development process the Ezetech team gained a deep understanding of financial market theory and obtained an even higher level of proficiency in development tools available for collecting and processing market data.
The partnership with Koyfin inspired Ezetech to go above and beyond, expanding their horizons and taking the company expertise to the next level.
P.S. At the time of writing, Koyfin is in the user acquisition stage and is available for free with full functionality available.
