Kota Platform: 2025 in Review
It was an eventful team for the team working on Kota's platforms for employers and employees. We've grown to 9 people working across three main platforms while adding dozens of improvements and 6 new large integrations.
An improved experience for account administrators
Customer Interviews
Working closely with our Customer Success Lead, Joana, we set up 6 interviews with six key administrators across UK and Ireland. We obtained the confidence that their experience is positive and validated our product direction for the first half of the year.
Homescreen / Dashboard
Early in the year, we shipped a Homescreen focused on reducing the time to the main jobs to be done. Account admins now have immediate access to downloading payroll and invoices and better snapshots into employee stats, finance, and active benefits.
Inviting employees to different benefit categories/tiers
By adding UK to our health coverage, we realised our customers' need to add employees to different contribution tiers. Now, they can easily pick and choose the contribution level a new joiner receives.
Flow improvements to benefit creation in Ireland
We learned that part of our customers of them had no idea how much they should contribute to their employees in Ireland. We brought more visibility into common contribution packages for Health & Pension. Flexibility and clarity were key here so Employers feel assured about the decision they make.
Sending pension documents to authorised person
As we onboarded more customers with larger departments, one process that caused delay was signing the pension documents required by the providers. So rather than requiring the authorised person to sign inside Kota's platform, they can now easily do it via email and we automatically activate their pension policy.
Single Sign On
With larger customers, demands on security increase. We've integrated with Okta to ease the secure sign in process while laying the ground for more developments in this direction for 2026.
Adding employees in bulk
As most customers connect their HR provider with Kota to keep information in sync, we neglected the ability to add employees in bulk. This was a flow that posed many issues for customers that wanted to use it. Now, we've fixed most issues making it more straightforward and friendlier for Admins.
People page improvements (paused)
We designed an improved screen for the People page where account admins get a clearer snapshot of employees and their benefits.
Integrations and big features
Auto Enrolment Acquisition
While we were scoping an Auto Enrolment solution for the web platform, a flow created was built to explain how Kota works and capture leads at the top of the funnel. Unfortunately, the results haven't met our initial hopes.
Auto Enrolment in Ireland
Auto Enrolment was the biggest talking point for anything pension-related in Ireland. For Kota, this represented one of the largest opportunities. We shipped an improved flow for setting up a Pension in Ireland based on trust and clarity. This resulted in lower cost and admin time for Employers and more flexibility for Employees' retirement fund.
Bupa UK
This was a huge project in terms of importance and scope, but the team managed to have it built and shipped within 6 weeks. GTM needed this integration so we can address a wider market in UK and offer optionality along Vitality, our first health provider in UK.
Zurich Pension
Similar to Bupa in UK, our team needed to address to more customers in Ireland. This resulted in a big engineering effort to integrate with one of Ireland's most popular pension providers.
Cards (a.k.a Allowance / Spend Cards)
One of the biggest projects this year. We're now allowing companies to set up spending budgets for their employees. With debit cards powered by Stripe, employees receive their own unique card to spend on learning, travel, wellness, and more.
Benefits builder
A huge effort from engineering to standardise adding new providers and integrating benefits preferred by prospects. This goal of this project was to decrease the time to add a new benefit to our platform from 8+ weeks with research, design, and engineering to ~2 weeks end-to-end.
Employee experience title
Employee Web
A web platform, not only a mobile app, where employees could view and manage their benefits became a need from our customers. What started as a UK-specific effort, has now grew to accommodate all employees across Ireland and the UK.
Vulnerable customers
To align with European directives, we now allow our mobile users to flag themselves as vulnerable customers. In that case, our team offers guidance and assistance to help them make the best decisions.
Mobile app reskin
The mobile experience had fallen behind our standards. We iterated quickly on the web, yet mobile had significantly less work and the disconnect between these experiences grew larger. So we hit reset and built a new mobile app, aligning it to the new brand and putting a foundation in place for the years to come.
Setting a new design standard for our experiences
Colour and text system
Over this year, the Kota's web platform design has changed massively. It all started early in the year by setting up a new colour palette and text system. This became the backbone of our new design language and patterns.
New info architecture for Kota's Web Platform
This is when the other design decisions started to all work in unison. With this improvement, the Employer Platform
Aligning design and code
Around summer, we started to see how divergent the shipped features look from designs. We kicked off an effort to align design and code more and make sure we keep our apps’ experience consistent while scaling as a company and growing as a team.
Conclusion tbw