OCF exam app
Practice questions and mock exams on the official question bank for people preparing to become financial advisers.
- Live at
- esameocf.athenaconsulenza.it
- Stack
- Flutter, Python, Node.js
- Area
- Software
Where we started
To become a financial adviser in Italy you have to pass the Italian financial adviser exam (OCF), set by the body that keeps the register. The questions come from an official question bank: 5,000 questions split across 61 PDF files, which the OCF updates twice a year. Studying from PDFs is awkward, and copying out thousands of questions by hand means introducing errors.
Athena SCF wanted a free tool for people preparing for the exam that reproduced the official text without changing a comma.
What we did
The questions were not copied out. A Python script reads the 61 PDFs using the position of the text blocks and interprets nothing. A second, independent script rereads the same PDFs with a different library and looks for every extracted sentence in the original text. The result: 25,000 strings checked, zero differences. The app does not even correct the oddities in the official text.
The app is written in Flutter and works on the web, Android and iOS. The question bank is inside the app, so it works offline and without an account. Anyone who wants to can create an account to pick up their progress on another device.
Since the OCF changes the questions twice a year, the question bank also sits on the server. Each time it starts, the app checks the version and downloads the new one if needed. That way nobody ends up studying answers that are no longer valid because they did not update the app.
Anyone who asks to be contacted goes into Athena’s business platform as a new contact.
How it’s built
- Mock exam as set out in the official notice: 60 questions in 85 minutes, weights by subject, pass mark 80/100
- Practice by topic or by whole subject, with the right answer straight after
- Mistake review, where questions drop out on their own after two correct answers in a row
- Questions saved with a bookmark
- A suggestion on the home screen of what to do next, based on what you have already done
- A daily target worked out from the exam date
- Search across the text of questions and answers
- Average time per question, compared with the time allowed in the exam
- Node.js backend with a PostgreSQL database separate from the business platform
Outcome
The app is live on the web and on Google Play. It contains the 5,000 questions in the 2026 question bank, checked automatically against the official PDFs. When the new question bank comes out, a script reports how many questions are new, removed or rewritten before replacing anything, and the update reaches everyone without going through the app stores.