BestInvest is one of the UK's leading online investment platforms, offering ISAs, SIPPs, and investment accounts to hundreds of thousands of self-directed investors. Backed by Evelyn Partners, the platform has been making investing affordable and accessible since 1986. In 2021, Bestinvest chose Cogworks to help them make a significant architectural leap: moving to a headless, API-first platform built to support a major product relaunch and a new generation of digital investment tools.
Year
2021-Present
Industry
Financial Services
A platform ready to grow
BestInvest came to Cogworks with a clear strategic ambition: to transition from a solid but technically constrained platform to a truly modern, headless architecture that could support rapid product development, stronger integrations, and the kind of sophisticated digital tools their investors deserved. The project was part of a wider transformation that would see BestInvest relaunch as a hybrid digital service, combining self-directed investing with free professional coaching, goal-planning tools, and low-cost ready-made portfolios.
Moving to headless architecture does not just change how a site is built. It changes how quickly a product team can move, how reliably third-party services can be integrated, and how confidently a development team can add new capability without creating technical debt. That was the goal, and it shaped every decision in the build.
A genuinely collaborative programme
This was a multi-agency programme from the start. Cogworks led the software development. Hi Mum! Said Dad handled design. Credera were simultaneously building the BestInvest investor portal. Making that work without friction required precise technical planning, shared architectural understanding, and a process that kept all three teams moving in the same direction.
Cogworks translated BestInvest's requirements into detailed technical diagrams and a shared roadmap before a line of code was written. The scoping process uncovered both the hidden complexity of BestInvest's legacy systems and genuine opportunities to improve the experience across the platform. Rebuilding the CMS on Umbraco V10 and Azure, and fitting the front end with React.js, gave the platform the separation of concerns that headless architecture is supposed to deliver: the CMS focused on content governance, leaving the front end free to evolve independently.
18 integrations. Every one scrutinised.
An investment platform lives and dies by the reliability of its data. BestInvest relied on 18 business-critical data streams and services: pricing feeds, fund data, portfolio management systems, and a range of third-party tools that had accumulated over years. Each one needed to work reliably, securely, and in a way that the development team could maintain and adapt without touching the core platform every time something needed updating.
Cogworks audited all 18 integrations, strengthening each one where needed and building a middleware API between the Investment Search and the underlying legacy systems. The middleware layer acts as a clean, secure interface: keeping the Investment Search fast and consistent for users, and giving the BestInvest team the ability to add, remove, or swap underlying services without rebuilding the front-end experience every time.
Leaving the team stronger
Perhaps the most durable outcome of the BestInvest engagement was not any single feature but the state of the development team and codebase at the end of it. Rock-solid documentation, a strengthened development process, and a modular architecture built around composable, swappable integrations gave the BestInvest team the tools and confidence to keep moving fast independently.
The goal was not for BestInvest to rely on Cogworks indefinitely. It was for them to leave with a platform and a development capability genuinely ready for whatever came next.
Got questions? We’ve got answers. Here’s everything you need to know about projects like this one.
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We want to move to a headless architecture but we have a large number of existing integrations. How do you manage the risk?
