Project type: Custom web app, an online portal for finding unclaimed assets, missing wills and shares
Timeline: Version 1 took around four months. A version 2 update, after it had proved successful, took around six weeks.
Tech used: Custom PHP application built on Laravel, with a MySQL database, hosted on the client's own server so they keep full ownership of their data. Integrations including Equifax.
Key result: The portal onboarded over 3,000 accounts and processed over 1.2 million responses from financial institutions, saving thousands of hours of manual admin.
Challenge
Inheritance Data helps solicitors meet their legal duty to search for financial assets belonging to someone who has died, usually during probate. When Bigfork took over the project, it ran on a basic system built by a previous supplier, using a small local database that wasn't built to grow.
Inheritance Data's business was also shifting from face-to-face sign-ups to online ones and needed something that could grow and work properly on the web.
Theplan
Version 1 launched in around four months and proved a real success, running for years and growing steadily. Once it had proved itself, we worked with Inheritance Data on a version 2 update. We spoke with them about how customers used the portal, gathered years of feedback, and ran user testing. That told us the portal didn't explain clearly enough what it did or who it was for, especially since the old face-to-face onboarding was long gone, and that the dashboard was looking dated next to competitors, wasn't built for mobile, and the search forms, while necessarily detailed, were harder to fill in than they needed to be. With clear findings in hand, the version 2 update itself took around six weeks.
Inheritance Data continued to grow on the platform for several more years after that, before being bought by another company.
Theproduct
The portal serves two very different users. A solicitor might log in daily, while someone acting as an executor might only ever use it once.
The version 2 update works for both, with shortcuts for regular users and a clearer, guided route for first-timers. The search form, one of the most important parts of the site, became a single column with plain explanations, clear required fields, and questions that only appear when they're relevant.
Inheritance Data also works with resellers, including solicitors and other companies, who can offer the service under their own name and submit searches without logging in directly. Pricing varies by user type, and the portal has API connections to outside data sources (National Wills Register, Argus Vickers and Equifax) that pull in extra information via APIs.
Results
During the lifetime of the portal over 3,000 accounts carried out nearly 12,000 searches with 1.2m responses from 400 financial institutions.
This volume would’ve been near impossible to keep track of without it, and required thousands of hours of admin.
Nearly 55,000 accounts were found with over half all searches receiving a response in under an hour, making the portal a highly useful and efficient tool for Inheritance Data’s customers.
Bigfork turned a system that couldn't keep up with us into one that scaled with our business for years. When we needed a full overhaul, they worked out exactly where our customers were struggling and fixed it.
Daniel Cane, Operations Manager, Inheritance Data
Readytobuildsomethinglikethis?
If you need a search tool your customers can rely on, whatever their level of experience, projects like this typically start from £20,000 to £25,000. You'll get a dedicated project manager, plain-English updates, and no confusing lock-in contracts. Find out more about how we approach custom web development.
Call Mark Ellaway on 01603 513080 or email mark@bigfork.co.uk to discuss your project.
Bigfork turned a system that couldn't keep up with us into one that scaled with our business for years. When we needed a full overhaul, they worked out exactly where our customers were struggling and fixed it.Daniel Cane, Operations Manager, Inheritance Data
