Forest System’s proprietary financial software includes two main products: Forest Enter and Forest View. The Forest Enter application is designed mainly for data entry and recording transactions. In coordination, clients log-in to the web application Forest View to generate reports and analytics based on their investments. 

After a change in leadership, Forest committed to expanding its market, enhance functionality, and addressing technical debt. 

Faced with a backlog of development and testing tasks, Forest came to Quoin looking for our technology expertise and additional support. We provided a technical lead and three developers to help Forest’s internal development team stabilize the codebase and improve the platform’s long-term feasibility. We also evaluated their systems, suggested feature improvements, and recommended changes that put Forest on the leading edge of security best practices. 

One of the major initiatives of our collaboration was updating Forest’s technology stack, which used C#/.NET. Like many of our clients, Forest had not kept “up-to-date” with their technology stack, and was using an extremely old and therefore unsupported version of .NET. This is a common, yet serious business risk. Since most technology vendors (such as Microsoft) only support a few versions back, this meant that if Forest developed a critical defect, they would be helpless. Our team helped Forest upgrade their technology stack to the latest version of .NET - a complex task that involved correcting outstanding defects - along with all the third party libraries - thus helping the company avert potential disasters.

Quoin was instrumental in helping Forest implement state-of-the-art security enhancements, both at the software and infrastructure levels. These include the following.

• We enabled enforcement of the browser-based Content Security Policy to help protect against XSS attacks. While widely supported by modern browsers, very few sites have started enforcing this standard, making Forest ahead of the game.
• We modernized the HTTP server stack to enforce and use best practices for SSL certificates.
• We added extra security checks to the code via the .NET stack upgrade.
• We re-enabled all of the continuous integration tests that smoke out errors, thus preventing potential security issues.

Forest has also relied on our team to enhance their reporting and analytics capabilities. Forest’s financial clients have long requested a number of complex analytics and reporting features on KPIs such as account balances and portfolio distribution. Quoin technologists have therefore been deeply involved in the Forest View development required to deliver these features to the clients who demand them. Finally, we have been working with Forest’s IT staff to integrate their system with one of the leading vendors in the financial reporting industry.

In all of these initiatives, Forest has known that it could rely on Quoin not only to simply provide extra hands on-deck, but also to lend forward-thinking guidance on issues such as maintainability, security, and scalability for the long-term.