East Capital Group

At UKAD, we had the pleasure of working with East Capital Group, an international financial company based in Sweden specializing in asset management and identifying attractive investment opportunities. East Capital Group comprises several companies, including East Capital, Espiria, Adrigo, and East Capital Real Estate.

East Capital Group faced significant challenges due to its reliance on multiple legacy web applications developed using different technologies and hosted on various platforms. This inconsistency hampered their ability to manage their web presence smoothly and efficiently.

Based on strong references and our extensive experience working in the Swedish market, East Capital Group chose UKAD to streamline its operations by migrating all web applications to a single, unified platform. Despite the differing designs of these applications, their similar functionality provided a clear path for our proposed solution. We committed to developing a component-based solution, adhering to UKAD's best practices.

Our project began in early 2021 with a clear need to define project goals and the technical stack required to meet them. This assessment helped us build the project roadmap, gauge the scope of work and the necessary team composition. It included backend and front-end developers, a part-time tech lead, a project manager, and quality assurance specialists who worked closely with designers and the product owner.

East Capital Group's subsidiaries, including East Capital, Espiria, Adrigo, and East Capital Real Estate, were hosted on different CMS platforms (WordPress and Optimizely), leading to numerous difficulties. Content managers had to navigate multiple admin panels, each with different functionality and UI, which increased the time spent on content management. The fragmented environment also increased long-term maintenance efforts and made future platform evolution more difficult.

Our challenge was to propose and implement a solution that would make the user experience seamless and user-centered while addressing the following needs:

• Enable the creation of new pages and websites without developer involvement

• Ease the reuse of content blocks across different web applications

• Simplify the onboarding process for new content editors and managers unfamiliar with CMS systems

• Easily integrate data from third-party sources

• Simplify technical support to increase efficiency and reduce complexity

• Decrease overall licensing and hosting costs

To address this, we developed a comprehensive solution that enables the creation of new websites and pages without developer involvement. We began by migrating all web applications to a single CMS platform, choosing Umbraco CMS for its flexibility and scalability. Our developers, proficient in .NET, leveraged their extensive experience with Umbraco to execute this migration and create a unified CMS environment designed for long-term scalability. Specifically, we transitioned their system from Optimizely CMS and WordPress to Umbraco CMS, resulting in substantial license cost savings. The new solution also simplified content management across all brands by providing a consistent editorial experience.

Our task included redeveloping the existing page block designs for all five websites. Despite their visual differences, the blocks shared similar functionality, enabling us to build a component library. Together with the implementation of UI themes, this library allows editors to use the same components across different web applications, significantly reducing development costs and time to publish content. The reusable architecture also made it easier to introduce new functionality consistently across all websites.

The unified Umbraco admin panel enables editors to smoothly switch between brands, such as Espiria and Adrigo, thereby decreasing the onboarding time for new content editors.

We also centralized hosting on a single server within one ecosystem. Prioritizing security, scalability, flexibility, and availability, we selected Azure. Authentication was integrated with the company's Azure Active Directory, ensuring secure access control, and all web application services were hosted within the Azure ecosystem, enhancing security at the infrastructure level. The consolidated infrastructure reduced operational complexity and made ongoing platform management more efficient.

As an experienced Umbraco Partner, UKAD delivered a structured migration approach that minimized disruption while establishing a reliable foundation for continued platform development.

As part of the platform unification process, UKAD also provided Accessibility Optimization services to ensure that all East Capital Group websites meet the latest accessibility standards. Our team conducted a WCAG 2.2-based accessibility audit and implemented key improvements across UI components and web content. This included enhanced proper color contrast, semantic HTML, ARIA attributes, clear navigation, and more. By incorporating accessibility optimization, we enabled East Capital Group to establish a consistent, compliant, and user-friendly experience across all web applications. Such a consistent approach aligns with global WCAG guidelines and meets the regional expectations in Sweden, making the East Capital Group websites accessible to everyone, particularly those with disabilities and users on various devices.

The UKAD team successfully met several key objectives and overcame numerous challenges. The main achievements of our collaboration with East Capital Group include:

• Major license cost savings by migrating from Optimizely CMS to Umbraco CMS;

• Hosting Cost optimization by consolidating five platforms into one;

• Substantial development cost savings by sharing blocks and UI elements across five websites;

• Reduced cost for the internal IT department to support one platform instead of five;

• Time savings for content editors in creating pages and onboarding new editors;

• Smooth integration of data from third-party sources;

• Improved accessibility and inclusiveness across all websites through WCAG 2.2-compliant design and development, supporting better usability and a consistent user experience for a wide range of visitors.

A true indicator of successful collaboration is our long-term partnership with East Capital Group. Since 2021, we have continued to support and evolve the platform through ongoing improvements, version upgrades, and platform maintenance, helping keep it secure, reliable, and aligned with changing business needs.

Why Choose UKAD?

At UKAD, we help organizations build, modernize, and support Umbraco solutions throughout their entire lifecycle. Our expertise covers CMS migrations, multi-site implementations, cloud hosting, and ongoing platform maintenance, delivered by certified .NET developers and Umbraco engineers.

Whether you need a new Umbraco solution, improvements to an existing platform, or additional engineering capacity, we deliver reliable solutions focused on long-term business value.