Pirkx

An affordable platform for employee and employer benefits.

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Ed Tech

Industry

8 Experts

Team size

180 Days

Timeline

Pirkx

Ed Tech

Industry

8 Experts

Team size

180 Days

Timeline

About Idea

A team of serial entrepreneurs from London, UK, wanted to create a platform to manage well-being benefits for everyone irrespective of their employment status and help them save time and money. The idea of creating the “Pirkx” platform is to ensure the wellbeing of employees, companies, and other people. It provides individuals and businesses with various benefits and savings to make their money go further and improve their health. Companies, Associations, Charities, Clubs, and Public Sector bodies can offer their members Pirkx regardless of their employment status. These bodies can join for free and pay for their members or offer access on a self-pay basis. The user's family can access and leverage the benefits through their subscription, too.

Tech Stack

Challenges

Creating a platform like "Pirkx" is complex, and challenges are inevitable. One of the major challenges for us was to create a system that enables the subscribers to access all the onboarded third parties for reward redemption with a single login. To achieve this and make the platform secure, scalable, and comprehensive, our team faced the potential challenges below while implementing and operating such a project.

  • Role management- Integrating AWS Cognito into an existing Rails project with a user authentication system made it difficult to map and manage user roles efficiently.
  • Storing images and generating report links- Ensuring images were stored securely, and report links were accessible to authorized users.
  • Designing surveys- Creating dynamic surveys, implementing authorization mechanisms to control survey access based on user roles and permissions, handling concurrent survey requests, and Collecting, analyzing, and visualizing survey response data to derive meaningful insights was complex.
  • Implementing API gateway- Due to the extensive API structure, integrating and configuring the API gateway, managing security and authorization, setting up proper monitoring and logging, and implementing load balancing and redundancy for high availability was complex, especially for large-scale applications.
  • Complex report generation- Unoptimized database and queries resulted in slow report generation, subsequent performance degradation, and increased server load.

Solutions

Here are potential solutions or approaches to address the challenges previously mentioned.

  • Role management with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)- Thoroughly documented our existing authentication system and created a migration plan for transitioning to Cognito. Used AWS Amplify or AWS SDKs for Rails to simplify integration. We defined clear user management policies and procedures. We used Cognito's user groups and roles to manage access control efficiently.
  • Storing images and generating report links with AWS S3- Implemented AWS S3 access control policies and used AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage permissions. Generated pre-signed URLs for report links with restricted time access. Used AWS S3 SDK to interact with S3 for image upload and retrieval.
  • Improved surveys process- Implemented user authentication using Devise and Cognito for multi-factor authentication. Optimize database queries, use indexing for survey data, and consider caching mechanisms for frequently accessed surveys to ensure scalability. We used reporting and analytics tools to aggregate and visualize survey data for better decision-making.

Results

Initially launched in the UK, Pirkx offers low-cost benefits to self-employed, small, and medium businesses. It has spread its footprint in Australia and other parts of the globe. It seeded over £1m in funding in its first launch year. This platform has improved the overall experience for every user, including.

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5X

Improved Security and Scalability

20%

Enhanced Personalization

30%

Improved UI/UX

25%

Increased User Engagement

Results

5X

Improved Security and Scalability

20%

Enhanced Personalization

30%

Improved UI/UX

25%

Increased User Engagement

Get PDF