Making the Routine Extraordinary
The sponsor of one of the world’s largest ETFs, together with its marketing agent, turned to 542 Digital to redevelop the regulatory website that we had originally built nearly two decades earlier. Over that time the site had become critical infrastructure, relied on daily by investors, internal teams, and third-party vendors alike. But two decades of serial updates had taken their toll: end-of-support software, mounting manual processes, and increasing complexity meant it was time for a full re-platforming.
This was never going to be a simple case of freshening up the design. For a regulatory website of this calibre, three non-negotiables remained paramount throughout the project: data accuracy, uptime, and compliance. Whatever we built had to meet and ideally exceed the standards the original platform had upheld for twenty years, while finally clearing away the technical debt sitting beneath it.
Over the past two decades, the regulatory website had evolved into a highly complex system through serial updates. It ingested and validated daily, intraday and real-time data from multiple sources, before publishing them alongside downloadable files, feeding not only the marketing agent but also internal systems and third-party vendors who depend on its accuracy. The old technical stack, AWS-hosted, with PHP middleware and a MySQL database, still delivered on regulatory accuracy, but at a growing cost in time, human resources, and maintenance overhead.
We recognise that clients are experts in their own domain, but not necessarily in the latest web development technologies. That’s why 542 Digital takes the time to explain every technical decision clearly, ensuring full confidence in the chosen direction before a single line of code is written.
Given the constantly evolving nature of ETF listings and regulatory requirements, we proposed, and delivered, a headless Drupal architecture. Decoupling content from presentation gave the platform superior performance, flexibility, and genuine future-proofing compared to a traditional build, and the benefits showed up almost immediately: because content and presentation were no longer tied together, our front-end team could make design and interaction changes rapidly without ever touching the CMS backend, delivering both speed during development and lasting flexibility for years to come.
Alongside the architecture change, we invested significant effort in building a robust, automated CI/CD pipeline to ensure reliable deployments and minimal risk going forward. On the infrastructure side, we replaced the legacy charting engine with a WASM-based solution capable of visualising enormous datasets without overwhelming the browser, rebuilt the data processing engines from the ground up, and migrated to a new SQL database. We also implemented structured data and a documented API to support AI discovery, allowing the many bots that harvest the site's data to continue doing so in a guided manner, and introduced automated archiving of every published version of the site, exceeding the client's compliance requirements. Together, these upgrades delivered better performance while reducing the client's annual support costs.
This was not a small project. It took several months of hard work to reach the finished product, delivered at a competitive price through tight internal control and frequent, transparent communication with the client. Our Agile approach, guided by Scrum principles, kept development aligned with expectations throughout and allowed rapid, low-cost adaptation whenever requirements evolved.
Design and UX sat at the heart of the build. Each ETF received its own polished microsite, while a consistent, professional look, feel, and functionality was maintained across the platform, visually striking, yet fully compliant with all regulatory requirements. Working closely with the client, we refined the design iteratively until it was something they were proud to share with their stakeholders and partners. The result combines intuitive navigation, beautiful graphics, and rich interactive data displays: a website that is not only attractive and informative but genuinely enjoyable to use, a rare achievement for a regulatory platform.
Behind the scenes, our data team spent weeks meticulously auditing and reconciling years of historical data and archives. The new system not only matched but, in several areas, exceeded the accuracy of the old platform, uncovering and resolving legacy flaws along the way.
We also handled translation and validation of legal documentation into Chinese and Japanese, with our content team working directly with the client’s counsel to ensure complete accuracy at every step.
Since going live, feedback from the client and their stakeholders has been overwhelmingly positive. With a modern, headless Drupal platform in place, the client’s cost of ownership has been drastically reduced, and far less manual intervention is needed to keep the site running. Automated processing and alerting mean that any data issues can now be picked up and resolved as they arise, rather than surfacing only when a user reports them.
Data accuracy, uptime, and compliance were the three non-negotiables set out at the start of this project, and each has held firm: historical data validated and, in places, improved; a live cutover with zero downtime; and a platform built to keep pace with regulatory change for the next twenty years.
Another successful partnership, another happy client!