Ten years of trade started with two years of building

In late 2014, Nui's trading platform could do three things. You could log in, reset your password, and look at a list of orders on a single screen.

"That was the product," says Dion, now Nui's Platform Director, who joined that year to take over the build from the contractor who had started it. "It was a prototype in the honest sense of the word."

Nui was founded in 2012, but its first trade was still almost two years away. Bianca, now Nui's Quality Analyst, joined in September 2015, part-time at first, and between them they have seen every version of the platform since. Their story starts well before the ten years of trade Nui recently celebrated.

The early team was small: Kevin and Bruce, a couple of developers, and very little process. "If something needed doing, you did it, and if you broke something, you fixed it," Dion says. Much of his first year went into deciding what the platform actually was, including unpicking assumptions baked in early, like code that understood countries when the business cared about ports.

Bianca arrived to find no documentation at all. She learned the business and the platform by working through them, building the knowledge base as she went, while the team focused on a core product they could sell. "It was very exciting to get our first customer in 2016 and actually start trading," she says.

What came next was shaped as much by customers as by any roadmap. The platform Bianca tests today carries customer-specific functionality, with pricing and freight options that vary from one solution to the next. "It is very customisable to suit each customer's business strategies," she says.

Tendering is the clearest example. "Tendered trading honestly isn't what we set out to build," Dion says. It started as "a way of doing one thing slightly differently," a small variation on an existing order type. More than 1,800 tenders have run since customers first started using them, and tendering is now a huge part of how Nui platform users trade.

The way people use the platform is constantly evolving. Bianca has been part of customer support since that first customer, and in the early years the questions were often the most basic ones a new user can ask.

"Initially there was a lot of uncertainty and hesitation about what would happen if they clicked a button or traded," she says. "We don't see those kinds of support issues any more." Customers now want data and reports instead.

Dion doesn't sit in front of customers, but he sees the same shift in what they ask the platform to do. Early requests were about reassurance: mirroring what people already did on the phone and in spreadsheets, with a way back out if it didn't work. That was a sensible way to approach something new in an industry built on long relationships. Today customers ask for more sophisticated ways to structure trades, work with their own customers and negotiate on the platform itself.

Neither of them points to a particular platform feature when asked what they're proudest of. For both, it comes back to what customers experience. For Dion, it's that customers trade every day and it very rarely goes wrong for them. "That isn't luck, and it isn't that nothing ever breaks. We just tend to find it first." Part of the reason, he says, is "a tester who has been finding our mistakes for as long as we've been making them."

That tester is Bianca, and keeping a complex platform stable while business rules and customer requirements have multiplied is what she is proudest of. "I'm quite proud of continuing to sustain this with minimal issues and disruption to customers," she says.

Better testing and deployment tools have helped. Dion now writes more code in a couple of months than he did in his whole first year, without the "quiet weekend and crossed fingers" that big changes once required.

Both have been there since the platform's infancy. Today it carries tenders, index-linked trades and multi-market offers, configured around each customer's strategy, and customers ask harder questions of it every year.

What has kept Bianca and Dion at Nui since the start is the culture. "The team has a really good understanding of their role and responsibilities," Bianca says, and within that, people are trusted to get on with it. "There's no layer between deciding something should happen and it happening," Dion says. "That's rarer than it sounds, and it's the main reason a team this size can move as quickly as it does."

The developer who shaped the platform's first version and the tester who has checked every release since are still at Nui, making sure it has the answers. They may have fancier titles, and hopefully bigger paycheques, but they’re still doing the same thing - delivering the best platform possible to agriproduct traders around the globe.