For those interested in how Wealthsimple manages its services from an engineering perspective, you can subscribe to the Wealthsimple Engineering blog: https://engineering.wealthsimple.com/ You'll also find that Wealthsimple is hosted on one of the Big 4 hyperscalers — Amazon AWS. According to AWS, Wealthsimple has deployed its financial services on AWS since 2014. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/aws-is-how-wealthsimple-develops-accessible-financial-solutions-for-all-canadians/ Which AWS services does Wealthsimple use? Below are some of the most important AWS services deployed by Wealthsimple. Amazon EC2: Used to deploy virtual servers. EC2 hosts applications and provides computing power, offering the flexibility to select CPU, memory, networking, and storage configurations. Amazon Redshift: A data warehouse designed to store petabytes of data and run SQL queries for analytical purposes. Redshift is a powerful large-scale analytics platform where market data, customer data, and transactions are consolidated to perform reporting, detect fraud, and run financial and AI-driven analyses. Amazon WorkSpaces: Wealthsimple employees use WorkSpaces as a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). It is essentially a secure remote workstation accessible via a browser on Windows, Mac, iPhone, or Android, allowing everything to be stored and processed remotely. For comparison, WorkSpaces is equivalent to Citrix VDI, Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, or VMware Horizon. Amazon SageMaker: SageMaker is AWS's machine learning and AI platform. This is where Wealthsimple can build, train, and deploy its own models. Note: don't confuse SageMaker with AWS Bedrock, which is Amazon's answer to Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, or OpenAI's ChatGPT. Potential use cases for SageMaker include: Fraud detection — automated detection of suspicious activity KYC (Know Your Customer) — flagging risky behaviors such as logins from suspicious locations, unusual devices, or abnormal operation frequencies; identifying and flagging risky accounts and unexpected transactions Business operations — forecasting withdrawals and deposits, analyzing business performance, predicting product demand, forecasting growth, and suggesting products All in all, a very powerful tool !! Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL: An AWS-managed relational database for transactional workloads. Aurora is AWS's optimized version of PostgreSQL, offering improved performance, resilience, and availability. What is Aurora's role? This is where Wealthsimple stores client data, including: Account information Financial transactions (buy/sell orders) Portfolio details KYC data User profiles and session management For Wealthsimple, Aurora is arguably the most critical and sensitive service, as it contains millions of customers' information. Wealthsimple is hosted on an AWS-native, cloud-based infrastructure, enabling the rapid deployment of modern services to customers without the burden of managing the underlying infrastructure.
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Le Corb@lecorb · 18h
@ambessa thanks for posting and providing some technical insights into Wealthsimple’s platform. Our family over the years (don’t ask me why) have/had banking and investing accounts with every major and upcoming financial institution except BMO and National Bank. Meaning A LOT! And recently I examined and tested security, 2FA, ability to use authenticators, make transfers, etc. Head and shoulders Wealthsimple’s technology and security protocols came out head and shoulders above everyone for ease, convenience, seamlessness, graphical user interfaces that are simple, elegant and plain language without nonsense, administrative bureaucracy and headaches. I can’t say how good or secure the platform is to hacking, but for front door entry fraud and customer security it is simply modern. Scotia iTrade for example has 2 instances of their website platform. Both suck wind immensely. To make an RIF withdrawal, get this, you have to fill out a form by ink and fax it to a number and never know it is received until a week later when you get your money! None of the chartered banks even use and authenticator or encryption key. And still rely heavily on SMS codes. For over a year TD can’t figure out how to make their own authenticator work and customers overseas are furious that they can’t 2FA access their banking and investing accounts. The chartered banks spend billions on their technology. But I believe all legacy technology is a hairy ball of archaic code trying to be interconnected. Better off scrapping it all and starting fresh. Would love to hear your perspective on this.
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