Balanced IRA: A Retirement Account in Your Pocket
Challenge
Opening an IRA meant paperwork. Forms printed, signed, scanned, mailed — and then weeks of not knowing where the money was. Once the account existed, there was nowhere for a client to look: no balance, no transaction history, no way to make this year’s contribution without a phone call. The constraints were unusually hard, too. A retirement account cannot be opened without verifying who the customer is, so the app had to collect a Social Security number and a government ID, hold none of it loosely, and still clear review at both app stores as a financial-services product.
Solution
We built the client app for X² Capital as a single cross-platform codebase — iOS and Android, a native feel on both. Guided onboarding walks a new client through profile, identity verification, and account preferences one step at a time, and picks up where they left off if they stop partway. From the dashboard they contribute by ACH and choose the tax year it counts toward, roll over a 401(k), 403(b), or an IRA held at another institution, link the bank accounts they fund from, follow every transaction through to completion, and request a distribution. The architecture keeps the phone out of the privileged path: the app holds no direct access to the database or the payments rail, it hands its session token to our backend, and the server performs every read, write, and money movement on the client’s behalf.
Key Features
