About the Client
Wealthify is an online investing service focused on making investing easy, accessible and affordable for anyone. This fast growing fintech was established in 2016 then backed by leading financial services brand Aviva in 2017, with Aviva taking full ownership in 2020.
Wealthify’s transition from start-up to scale-up meant the underlying infrastructure had to evolve to support business growth. Our cloud engineering support ensured the core platform had the necessary scalability. We work closely with the Wealthify team to prioritise areas for ongoing improvement as business and IT requirements change.
Challenge: Steep Growth Curve Demands Scalable IT
Wealthify’s swift progression from fintech start-up to a scale-up with backing from Aviva called for rapid and effective IT infrastructure changes. We aided its transition from on-premise infrastructure to Azure’s cloud-based environment. But this was just the start of the journey.
Providing reliable customer experiences and meeting regulatory requirements was essential. However, balancing this with ongoing innovation for the online investment market wasn’t going to be easy. To keep its increasing number of customers satisfied, Wealthify needed to be at the forefront of cloud best practice. That meant leveraging all the advantages of the evolving Azure platform via targeted management and maintenance activity.
Following the migration to Azure, we were appointed cloud platform support partner and we continue driving Wealthify’s IT infrastructure development as the business grows.
“Trusting [the team] to monitor and optimise our cloud infrastructure allows us to focus our energy on delivering new products and features to our customers at pace. We can be safe in the knowledge that as the number of savers we inspire to invest with us grows, our underlying platform will scale with us.”
Michael Ashford
Chief Technology Officer, Wealthify
Solution: Enabling Growth with Cloud Platform Support
Security, reliability and overall platform performance were high on Wealthify’s agenda as it prepared for long-term growth. Optimising costs in the Azure environment was also paramount. Naturally, this needed to be achieved without compromising the innovation and speed that sets Wealthify apart from other players in the online investment industry.
Appointing us to manage cloud platform operations meant Wealthify’s in-house technology team could focus on the delivery of products and features for its web and app platforms. Since the migration to Azure, our experienced cloud engineers have handled infrastructure monitoring, management, and maintenance. Wealthify has direct access to a dedicated squad of engineers who play an integral role in reactive and proactive operations support.
In addition to 24/7 cover, our service includes ‘Kaizen’ time. So continual improvement comes as standard. This enables Wealthify to benefit from ongoing platform optimisation in line with its changing needs. We apply Well-Architected principles to guide decisions for specific workloads and take full advantage of newly released Azure technologies and tools when appropriate. So, when Azure announced its support for transport layer security (TLS) 1.2 we quickly took advantage of this and set ciphers to enhance security further.
Outcome: From Rapid Response to Deeper Remediation
When incidents occur, we address them before they escalate. Then we conduct root cause analysis to determine whether further work is needed.
For instance, our database specialists have conducted extensive work to ensure Wealthify’s core platform can handle heightened demand. This includes optimising database indexes and ensuring that tables’ statistics are updated on a regular basis. As the business grows, this enables the platform to continue performing reliably, handling increased user traffic with ease.
Strategic, timely use of Wealthify’s Kaizen allocation ensures we prioritise improvements that make a tangible difference to IT and business performance. An example of this is our testing and implementation of archiving pipelines using Azure Data Factory to optimise the Azure SQL database for production. Archiving for specific database tables now happens daily and we’ve slashed space requirements by 25%, saving hundreds of pounds.
Wealthify continues to go from strength to strength. Since we were appointed, its active customer base has grown eightfold, and the platform underpinning the service continues to adapt and scale in line with changing business needs. Wealthify’s strategic balance between innovation and platform stability puts it in a strong position to thrive. Recent developments include a partnership with TSB which promotes Wealthify’s services to the bank’s five million customers.
This case study is based on work completed by DevOpsGroup before the team joined forces with Sourced Group, an Amdocs company.
