One of Canada’s leading fintechs, Wealthsimple, is revolutionizing how Canadians interact with their finances, using advanced cloud services such as AWS machine learning and security offerings

SEATTLE, April 19, 2022 – Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Wealthsimple, the company behind some of Canada's leading digital financial products, is pursuing its mission of helping Canadians achieve financial freedom by using the breadth of cloud services from AWS, the world’s leading cloud. Wealthsimple, a “born-in-the-cloud” unicorn, began using AWS in 2014, and the company has grown to make saving, investing, spending, and tax preparation simple, low-cost, and accessible to Canadians. Today, Wealthsimple is recognized for being agile, creative, and innovative—quickly developing unique financial products and continually improving them as their more than 2 million users’ needs evolve.

Since March 2020, Wealthsimple’s client base has grown sevenfold, and AWS’s elasticity has helped the company quickly scale its capacity and avoid downtime. This rapid response to customer demand, enabled by the cloud, contributed to Wealthsimple’s ability to remain operational during the 2021 meme stock craze, when some companies saw their share prices rise dramatically after becoming popular with investors on social media platforms and online forums. During this time, Wealthsimple saw a 50% increase in sign-ups on its do-it-yourself trading platform, Wealthsimple Trade, and more than double the average trading volume. In addition, Amazon WorkSpaces (AWS’s secure, reliable, and scalable desktop virtualization service) enabled Wealthsimple’s remote-first employee team, which more than doubled during the pandemic, to continue working safely and effectively across North America.

Wealthsimple uses several AWS services to support its growing user base and provide a consistent customer experience. For example, Wealthsimple uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity and Amazon Redshift (AWS’s secure cloud data warehousing service) for data operations, allowing Wealthsimple to make accurate and data-driven business decisions and mobilize quickly based on market trends. The company is also exploring potential applications for incorporating machine learning (ML) into its product offerings with Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service for building, training, and deploying ML models quickly in the cloud and at the edge), such as developing fraud prevention and credit adjudication programs.

“The agility, scale, security, and financial services expertise that AWS offers has allowed us to more effectively support our rapidly growing team, focus on finding new experiences and ways to serve our clients, and continue scaling our offerings at a competitive rate,” said Karney Li, chief technology officer, Wealthsimple. “We look forward to exploring more ways AWS can evolve our operations to meet the needs of our clients and our employees.”

“Wealthsimple has established itself as a transformational organization in Canada’s financial sector,” said Eric Gales, country manager for Amazon Web Services in Canada. “Its ongoing relationship with AWS will help drive innovative solutions for its customers and support its continued growth as a leading consumer finance brand in Canada.”

About Amazon Web Services

For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic regions, with announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Wealthsimple

Wealthsimple is a new kind of financial company. Canadians can invest, trade, save, spend, and file taxes in a low-cost, transparent and simple way. Using smart technology to make powerful financial tools, Wealthsimple is on a mission to help everyone achieve financial freedom, no matter who they are or how much they have. The company was founded by a team of financial experts and technology entrepreneurs, and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. To learn more, visit our website.

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