Fair Place Finance (FPF) offers users a range of investment options via its WealthSeed mobile app. Using WealthSeed, customers can open free accounts in key currencies, access low foreign exchange rates, and trade stocks and funds from all around the world. FPF wanted to provide comprehensive investment options through WealthSeed that are usually available only on dedicated platforms.

Based in Poland, FPF began developing its app in 2018 on cloud-native architecture. The company migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2021 when faced with its previous provider’s inflexible pricing and limited out-of-the-box services.

Using AWS, FPF secured the app’s sensitive information and satisfied the financial regulatory guidelines required in Poland and the European Union (EU). WealthSeed can now scale to meet growing demand so the team can focus on product development and global growth.

To launch the WealthSeed app, the company needed to be sure it adhered to strict financial and data privacy regulations. This includes specific requirements set out by the Polish Finance Supervision Commission, MiFID II, and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which includes robust requirements that raise and harmonize standards for data protection, security, and compliance.

Using AWS, FPF obtained the required licenses and can now adhere to the necessary regulations. “There is a lot of fear among financial services companies dealing with regulators, especially for small, young businesses like ours,” says Piotr Gawron, founder at FPF. “We’ve shown it’s possible to quickly build and launch a cloud-native financial app on AWS that’s secure and fully compliant.”

WealthSeed now offers a broad range of brokerage services in the EU, including access to 550 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in more than 2,500 companies, mutual funds, investment wallets, crypto, and other payment services. Its customer base is expected to increase 30 times by March 2023.

The app is built on a collection of services from AWS that provide the high levels of security stipulated by regulations and expected by customers for financial transactions. WealthSeed uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), to help FPF easily create and control the keys used to encrypt or digitally sign data. To monitor its AWS accounts for malicious or suspicious activity, it uses Amazon GuardDuty, an intelligent threat detection service. For additional protection against software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure, FPF uses Amazon Inspector, an automated vulnerability management service.

Combining these services helps the WealthSeed platform adhere to standards that regulate financial institutions. “With just a few clicks, AWS covers our requirements for security, backup, and encryption,” says Gawron. “It’s easy to use and saves our IT team time and hassle.”

With security and compliance taken care of, WealthSeed developers can focus on creating new features and product updates. The team can quickly duplicate production environments on AWS that make the testing and release processes more efficient. The total time for developing updates and improvements has fallen by 30 percent using AWS.

Before its migration to AWS, FPF introduced a new feature in 2019 that provided customers access to investment teams over video chat. Unfortunately, lag time for users in Southeast Asia was several seconds, which made the feature unusable until FPF started using the global infrastructure of AWS, which solved the problem. “On AWS we quickly created a copy of our platform and located it in Asia, so now customers in that location can use our video chat with minimal latency,” says Gawron.

Financial markets are unpredictable and breaking news or world events can cause trading activity on WealthSeed to skyrocket. Using AWS on-demand serverless computing, the IT team can quickly and cost effectively scale resources to provide a reliable and responsive customer experience for its services.

To ensure the app runs reliably and responsively, even when customer demand is high, WealthSeed uses Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service.

FPF connects to the ICE network, a global trading infrastructure used by the finance industry, using AWS. This means WealthSeed customers can trade stocks, securities, or cryptocurrencies in near real time. “Prices can change very quickly and the AWS connection to ICE enables trading in milliseconds, not seconds,” says Gawron. “That short time can make all the difference to their profits.”

Using AWS, FPF has a system that satisfies the regulators, responds to variable demand, and offers its developers a base for future growth. “We launched the WealthSeed app quickly, securely, and in line with regulations,” says Gawron. “Using AWS we now we have a solid foundation for the next stage in its evolution.”