Energise Africa is now live on a fully rebuilt frontend. The original site dated to 2017 and had served the platform well across nine years and many millions of pounds of investment into clean energy access. It was time for a rebuild, and the new site is something we are properly pleased with. Have a look.
A few notes on what went into it, for anyone thinking about the same question for their own platform.
Lighthouse: 95 accessibility, 100 best practices, 100 performance
These are not vanity numbers. Accessibility scores translate into who can actually use the site — investors with screen readers, investors on older devices, investors with motor impairments using keyboard navigation. We treat anything below the mid-nineties on accessibility as a defect to fix, not a target to aim for. The previous site sat materially lower across all three.
Performance moved similarly. Initial load is now [X] seconds faster on a mid-tier mobile connection, which matters more than it sounds: a noticeable share of investor traffic — and a larger share of prospect traffic — arrives on a phone, often on patchy connectivity. A site that takes eight seconds to become interactive loses people who would otherwise have invested.
Open Banking funding
We integrated Open Banking funding directly into the investment journey. Investors can fund an investment from their bank account in a single flow, without leaving the platform, without manual reference numbers, and without waiting for a transfer to clear before their commitment is confirmed.
The detail that takes time to get right is not the API integration. It is the journey design around it: handling failed authorisations gracefully, managing the gap between authorisation and settlement, communicating clearly when something needs the investor's attention, and keeping all of this readable on a phone screen at the moment someone is committing money. That is where most Open Banking implementations fall short and where most of our build effort went.
Mobile-first transactional flows
Investment journeys on regulated platforms have historically been designed for desktop and reluctantly adapted for mobile. We took the opposite approach. The investment flow, the ISA subscription flow, the funding flow, and the account management screens were all designed for a phone first, then expanded to desktop.
The forced discipline this creates is good for everyone. If a flow works on a phone — with one column of attention, a thumb-sized tap target, and limited screen real estate for explanatory text — it almost always works better on desktop too. Risk warnings are clearer. Decisions are more discrete. Mistakes are harder to make.
Accessibility as a build constraint, not a checklist
Most regulated platforms treat accessibility as something the QA team checks before launch. We treat it as a constraint that shapes the design from the outset: semantic HTML throughout, form labels and error messages built into the component layer rather than retrofitted, focus management on every interactive element, colour contrast verified at the design token level so it cannot drift over time.
The practical consequence is that an accessibility fix made for any one client flows through to every site on the system. An improvement to error message handling that came out of a recent ISA journey review is now part of the form components Energise Africa uses too. Energise Africa benefits from work commissioned by other clients, and other clients will benefit from work commissioned by Energise Africa. This is the part of platform infrastructure that is genuinely difficult to replicate as a single-tenant build.
What this took
A full frontend rebuild on a regulated platform with ISA functionality, Open Banking, and an active investor base is not a small piece of work. It involves migration planning, parallel testing, regulatory review of every customer-facing flow, and careful coordination with the operations team handling live investors throughout. We are grateful to the Energise Africa team for being good partners through it.
If you operate a regulated investment platform and the frontend is starting to feel its age — or if you are evaluating platform infrastructure for something new — we would be happy to talk. The Energise Africa site is a fair representation of what we build now.