Connect Financial Weekly Update

Welcome back everyone to the Weekly update, it’s felt like longer than just two weeks since our last update and we have a bit to go through.

We recently announced our invites to User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for the client portal. This is a big step for us as it’ll be the first look at the client portal for anyone outside of the organization and the next step towards our full product launch.

The initial testers will begin to be invited this week in a controlled environment. What that means is that:

1. User information maybe reset periodically as we make any final changes to the database, or want to force users back through any on boarding processes.
2. Only testnet funds will be allowed on the site, we will set up faucets and a request channel for testers to ask for testnet funds to be sent to their deposit address(es).
3. Certain functionality or components maybe turned on/off as we direct testing at certain pieces. In example, the button to buy/sell/swap crypto maybe greyed out and unclickable if we want to focus on only interwallet and external withdraw/transfers. Or if we are making changes to the code and need to take it offline while we relaunch that module.

If you missed the link to request access as a tester you can find it here:

“https://forms.gle/TFmZtEqE99z8JZPfA”

“Wen Cards”

This is obviously something that is a very important topic for everyone at Connect, as it is the flagship product for us and any words or response that we put out for it is dissected and analyzed. Here is our official standing:

“As of right now we have our order placed with the factory for our initial supply of cards, all contracts are signed, sealed and delivered along with the necessary deposits.

This unfortunately does mean we will not make our last projected Q3 release timeframe as we do not have our physical products. There have been unexpected, unavoidable delays that pushed us past our projection, even with contingency time frames built in.

We continue to push towards that day though, with a multitude of checklist items getting completed every week.

Our technology itself is also nearing completion, with the user testing going live this week. The Client Portal being fully operational is necessary to the product launch also, and it has been a large task to tackle. Which also precludes us from being able to issue virtual cards at this time. Once the client portal is fully tested and deemed production ready we will revisit virtual being issued, but wholly expect to have all physical in stock at that time regardless.

All together, while our projections skew towards the aggressive side, we’ve built some phenomenal software to support Connect Financial and its users and we are very proud of its performance to date.

We will continue to keep our communities up to date with our progress with weekly updates”

One community question that I’ve been asked a lot recently in some private conversations is how big is our team?

Currently, we have eight core members. This includes Project Management, Marketing, Executive Team, Community Manager, Compliance, and technology leads.

There are another eight developers on staff solely working on the client portal plus two developers on the contract/ethereum team.

The compliance team is backed by another roughly dozen members.

Then we have our non-staff contract entities, which fill certain critical roles for us either on a retainer, or per project basis and is hard to quantify a number of employees as it fluctuates based on the assigned task(s). This includes things like graphic artists, packaging design teams, swag design/fulfillment etc.

Then our customer support team which is being filled as we speak has another three to five to start with.

Thank you all for your continued contributions to the community and we look forward to the next few weeks of getting user feedback on the site, and the weeks after that with delivery of our products!