Fintech startup scales from 50 to 50,000 users on demand

The project

When some of the sharpest minds in the financial industry started a fintech company, they needed a technology partner to provide the tech to their fin. They chose Winmill. The company’s goal was to take the mystery out of quantitative investing, bringing multi-factor and artificial intelligence models to self-directed investors through an intuitive website and mobile app, with proprietary algorithms running on a massive AWS server farm producing buy and sell recommendations.

The challenges

• Massive compute, part-time. The investing algorithms required enormous computing power that quickly overwhelmed the company’s brand-new heavy-duty servers, but the algorithms only ran a few hours a day.
• No IT department. The startup had neither the time nor the money to operate its own IT function.
• A website that had to be a home run. Beautiful, engaging, intuitive, and able to present massive amounts of information without overwhelming the reader.
• A slow data source. The site needed stock information from a major provider, but the APIs were too slow, and the local database alternative exceeded a terabyte.
• Unpredictable traffic. Site traffic could jump from 50 to 50,000 visitors in minutes, so the platform had to scale on demand.

The solution

Winmill built the solution entirely in the cloud on AWS. Massive servers run the algorithms on pay-as-you-go computing, so for the roughly 18 hours a day the algorithms sit idle, the cost is negligible. Multiple indexing and caching strategies optimized access to the terabyte-scale stock database. A serverless architecture scales rapidly with demand, validated through load simulations that identified and eliminated bottlenecks before launch. And application security scanning was built directly into the DevOps pipeline, so security was part of the application from the ground up.

The results

• An award-winning product. The website earned rave reviews and multiple awards for its design and user interface.
• Market traction. The platform received high acclaim in the industry and quickly became a go-to site for self-directed quantitative investors.
• Scaling that just works. New servers spin up automatically at predetermined traffic thresholds.
• The exit. After just 18 months, the company was acquired by one of Wall Street’s most prestigious firms, which is incorporating the platform into its own offerings and planning version 2.0.