Accelerating fintech success with seamless Cloud Migration

Technology that got us here, won't get us there; constrained by traditional infrastructure

Wealthify had become a victim of it’s own success. Having recently secured a major new partnership with Aviva Plc, it faced the daunting challenge of ensuring its digital savings & investments platform could scale to meet new demands. With over 10,000 active customers and significant growth planned Chief Technology Officer of Wealthify, Michael Ashford recognised he could not rely on physical infrastructure to build, deploy and host new products and features. “Without having the ability to bring new services to market rapidly, Wealthify’s customers could easily resort to using competing products.”, said Ashford.

Having outgrown the technology that proved successful in launching its products, Wealthify now needed to find an alternative infrastructure solution that could enable it to scale. It needed to streamline the software delivery process and use technology to keep costs down, which it would pass onto customers through lower fees. As a fast-growing scale-up, Wealthify sought to find a technology partner they believed understood its fintech culture and who could enable its experienced development teams to focus on building great products. Ashford also recognised a need for the organisation to swiftly scale out its 24/7 technology support, ensuring its platforms were always available to its rapidly growing customer base.

Migrating to the cloud and maximising technology ROI

Wealthify appointed DevOpsGroup who quickly established that a cloud environment would be the best solution to meet new increased demand from users and handle its growth plans. DevOpsGroups’ Cloud Adoption Assessment, selected Microsoft Azure as the most suitable provider as it aligned closely to the existing development stack used for Wealthifys’ core application set, and Azures’ constantly evolving feature set gives organisations the capability to rapidly respond to business challenges.

DevOpsGroup’s experienced cloud engineers worked with the organisations’ development teams to better understand the existing application architecture and infrastructure environments. Cloud migration plans were created, which would ensure Wealthify’s data and services could be moved quickly and with minimal disruption to users. “DevOpsGroup has played a pivotal role in helping us rebuild our cloud infrastructure to respond to growing demand from customers and bring new applications to market at speed.” Said Ashford.

A DevOps approach to migration ensured infrastructure build and deployments were automated using configuration as code and existing automated deployments were upgraded. To maximise the ROI of migrating to the cloud, DevOpsGroup engineers migrated databases into Microsofts’ Cloud Database as a service, Azure SQL and enabled Wealthify’s development teams to utilise Platform as a service environments to accelerate development and deployment. Impressed with the solutions delivered, Wealthify selected to use DevOpsGroup for Cloud Operations services to help support the infrastructure and applications around the clock, ensuring the platform is always available for customers.

DevOpsGroup has played a pivotal role in helping us rebuild our cloud infrastructure to respond to growing demand from customers and bring new applications to market at speed.

Developing and deploying innovative services at speed and scale

With the backing of Aviva, Wealthify’s investment platform could potentially attract millions of customers. Azure will provide Wealthify with the means to cater for increasing demand from consumers.
As Wealthify takes on more customers and continues to operate in a competitive marketplace, it can keep developing and deploying innovative services at speed and scale.

The fintech firm now has the infrastructure and capacity to focus mindshare on building great products that customers want. Performance across the board – both internal and external – has been accelerated. Before moving over to Azure, SQL jobs could take two hours for the Wealthify team to complete. This has been reduced to 30 minutes.

Instead of spending money on heating, cooling, powering and updating physical servers, Wealthify can focus its time, attention and resources on developing amazing products for its growing customer base. The cloud platform delivers Wealthify access to rapid feedback loops with its customers, meaning it can continue to refine the product and user experience and disrupt a highly competitive marketplace.
“An innovative, experimental culture is critical to our success as a fast-growing fintech company, and we now have the means to build, deploy and host new products and features as we continue to grow,” said Michael Ashford, Chief Technology Officer of Wealthify.

As a high-growth technology company, Wealthify has the cloud infrastructure to respond to increasing demand from customers and to transform the financial services market.