Customer Stories / Insurance / Poland

2022
Fair Place Finance

Fair Place Finance Launches Secure and Compliant Financial Investment App on AWS

Using AWS has allowed Fair Place Finance (FPF) to secure sensitive information and adhere to Polish and EU financial regulations required to launch the app. WealthSeed can now scale to meet growing demand and focus on product development to build a foundation for global growth.

EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance

Scales

to meet spiky demand for customer trading

30%

reduction in product development updates

30x

customer growth and supports global expansion

Overview

Fair Place Finance (FPF) wanted to provide comprehensive investing options that are usually only available on dedicated platforms via an easy-to-use mobile app. Based in Poland, FPF began developing its WealthSeed app on a cloud-native architecture. The company migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) when it was faced with its previous provider’s inflexible pricing and limited out-of-the-box services.

Fair Place Finance Launches Secure and Compliant Financial Investment App on AWS

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.

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We’ve shown it’s possible to quickly build and launch a cloud-native financial app on AWS that’s secure and fully compliant.”

Piotr Gawron
Founder, Fair Place Finance SA

Launching an App in the Highly Regulated Finance Market

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.”

Providing High Levels of Security to Meet Worldwide Standards

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.”

Speeding Up Development Process by 30%

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.

Scaling to Meet Trading Spikes and Going Global on AWS

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.”

About Company

Fair Place Finance (FPF), a Polish company established in 2013, develops digital wealth management platforms. In 2021 it launched a mobile investment app called WealthSeed and is expanding its financial services offerings throughout the EU and the world.

AWS Services Used

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch collects and visualizes real-time logs, metrics, and event data in automated dashboards to streamline your infrastructure and application maintenance.

Learn more »

Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation.

Learn more »

Amazon Inspector

Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.

Learn more »

AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) lets you create, manage, and control cryptographic keys across your applications and more than 100 AWS services.

Learn more »

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