Two teams had already tried to replace this platform. The difference the third time wasn’t optimism — it was diagnosis before code.
A national financial services firm (anonymized)
Wealth and financial advisory
Legacy diagnosis, then a serverless rebuild of the advisor compensation platform
The firm’s advisor compensation ran on a legacy commission platform that was quietly falling apart. More than half its pipeline runs were failing, a single run took over 12 hours, and keeping it alive cost north of $300K a year. Two prior attempts to replace it had already failed — so the real problem wasn’t just the technology. It was a program that had lost the organization’s confidence, twice.
We started where the last two attempts didn’t: with the truth of the existing system. We analyzed the architecture, built diagnostics and monitoring, and surfaced exactly where and why it was failing — a 56% failure rate that was trending worse, not better. With that in hand, we rebuilt the platform serverless: new APIs, redesigned ETL pipelines, centralized processing, real testing frameworks, and a clean integration to CaptivateIQ. Then we shipped it.
Compensation runs stabilized. The firm moved off a platform that failed more than it succeeded and onto one that’s flexible to change, cheaper to run, and far easier to maintain. The third attempt is the one that’s still running.
