AWS Is How: Wealthsimple Develops Accessible Financial Solutions for All Canadians

You know you should be investing for the future, but you don’t have much money in reserve, and you’re not even sure where to start. The stock market is complicated, and you don’t fully understand how to get started with investing. And what exactly is cryptocurrency, anyway?

That’s where Wealthsimple comes in. The Canadian financial services company uses technology to build powerful financial tools that anyone can use online or through a mobile device.

Wealthsimple serves over two million customers with five money-management services that are free to set up. By downloading the Wealthsimple app, you can get started with saving, investing, and spending all in one place. That includes any managed investment portfolios that you might have, self-directed stock, exchange-traded funds (ETF), cryptocurrency trading, and savings accounts that you hold with Wealthsimple. Furthermore, you can spend directly from the app with the Wealthsimple card. Outside of the Wealthsimple app, the company also offers tax filing services through Wealthsimple Tax. And if you need help, then expert financial advisors are always available.

Although Wealthsimple’s products are simple for customers, the technology that powers them utilizes advanced solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Since 2014, AWS has helped Wealthsimple develop unique digital financial products that make saving, investing, spending, and tax preparation accessible to all Canadians. AWS even helped Wealthsimple navigate the meme stock craze in 2021, when social media caused certain stocks to skyrocket in price as their companies went viral. Using the scalability of AWS solutions, Wealthsimple had no issues handling a 50% increase in signups on Wealthsimple Trade and double the average trading volume during that time.

Wealthsimple’s client base has grown substantially since March 2020. AWS has helped the company avoid downtime and continue to provide innovative products. Moreover, Wealthsimple’s remote-first workforce, which more than doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic, has worked safely and effectively from home using the secure, reliable access of Amazon WorkSpaces. Furthermore, if you’re wondering how the company’s app can perform so quickly and consistently across many operating systems, it’s because Wealthsimple uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity.

State-of-the-art and effective data utilization helps drive Wealthsimple’s mission. For example, successful investment often depends on your ability to capitalize quickly on market trends. For data operations, the company uses Amazon Redshift, a secure data warehousing service that accelerates the time to insights.

Wealthsimple is also looking to incorporate machine learning (ML) in its offerings using Amazon SageMaker, which builds, trains, and deploys ML quickly in the cloud and at the edge. Wealthsimple plans to use ML to help enhance its security posture through the development of fraud-prevention and credit-adjudication programs. “We look forward to exploring more ways AWS can evolve our operations to meet the needs of our clients and our employees,” says Karney Li, Wealthsimple’s chief technology officer.

You can find out more about how Wealthsimple is using AWS to develop accessible financial services for all Canadians in the new “AWS Is How”. And to find out more about how AWS is helping businesses like Wealthsimple provide secure, innovative financial services, visit here.