Multilateral & Development Organizations
The Inter-American Development Bank since 2014, across several divisions, and other institutions of the inter-American system more recently. Some of what we built there we still maintain today.
With the Inter-American Development Bank since 2014, across education, trade and integration, and the office that runs its business community.
ConnectAmericas is the IDB’s business community for the region. At that size, finding a relevant counterpart had come down to filters and keyword search. ADA reads business intent from a conversation, matches on meaning rather than attributes, and returns a plain-language reason for every suggestion a person can read, disagree with and overrule.
ConnectAmericas (IDB). Conversational AI and semantic search, with an explainability layer.
The Bank contracted the analysis, design and build of two apps for public tenders: one for technology, one for consulting. The terms of reference asked us to establish whether one or two were the right answer. The work said one. Build for the Americas is published in both app stores.
CIMA holds harmonised education indicators for the Bank’s twenty-six borrowing countries, in three languages, disaggregated by sex, socioeconomic level and geography. We ran the heuristic and accessibility diagnosis, benchmarked five comparable portals, and redesigned the indicator screen as a report: data, methodology, metadata, academic citation and a table view in one place.
Monitoring a sovereign lending portfolio means indicators that each depend on a different operational system inside the Bank. Smart Portfolio consolidates them into a single real-time view, with role-based access and reporting aligned to institutional standards. It was handed to an internal team and is still running and evolving there.
Two consecutive contracts cover support, maintenance and the backend migration of the ConnectAmericas ecosystem: a Drupal core on AWS, eleven government and trade-bloc white labels hanging off it, an academy, mobile apps, the web services layer other systems consume, and BIDFA. The current work completes the move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 underneath all of it, without the service stopping.
An institution financed by its member countries carries obligations a company does not, and three of them land directly on the build.
Inside an institution that answers to its members, “the model ranked it highest” is not a usable answer. A suggestion has to arrive with a reason a person can read, disagree with and overrule. On ADA that is an explainability layer decided at the start, not an interface added at the end.
Consolidating information across an institution means every source system has an owner, an access rule and a reason it works the way it does. On Smart Portfolio, who could see which slice of the portfolio was settled before the indicators were built, because reversing it afterwards means rebuilding them.
Smart Portfolio was handed to an internal team at the Bank and is still evolving there. The ConnectAmericas ecosystem went the other way: we built pieces of it and we are still maintaining it three years on, migrating the backend underneath a platform that stays up. Both routes are the same requirement.
Two mobile applications for the IDB’s business community, so that companies in the region could find public tenders financed by the Bank: one for technology tenders, one for consulting. Analysis, design and development of both, in five months.
They asked us to establish whether one or two applications should be developed, depending on what added the most value to the business sector. It was a validation written into the contract, not a question we introduced.
One UX lead across both applications instead of one per app, working them in parallel under a single view, with interviews with the companies that would use them. Seen together, the two tools were answering one question for one person.
Build for the Americas: one application, with its own brand and design system, published in the App Store and on Google Play. The discarded option is the one in the contract, and anyone can check what shipped.
In a 45-minute working session we’ll go through which systems hold the information, who owns each of them, and what the first usable version could look like. Bring the report someone still assembles by hand.