A review of 2020
I suppose 2020 was a year quite different than any of us could have imagined — but looking back it is fantastic to see what we could nevertheless accomplish as a team in the past 12 months, and how every single one of our now over 150 team members pulled through and gave their absolute best to bring StashAway to where we are today!
The big stuff 🎉
The most significant achievement above all was the launch of StashAway in Dubai, now proudly serving the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region. Notably, we achieved this operating out of Singapore where for the most part of 2020 borders were closed and building a team in Dubai remotely — we have yet to get to know our Dubai team members in person!
The second huge undertaking of 2020 was the launch of an entirely new product line, StashAway WorkPlace. With WorkPlace we now offer a corporate pension plan product for companies who want to incentivise their employees to save for their retirement. It has been over a year in the making and we are immensely proud to bring this innovative solution to the market.
New Investment Products
Aside of the major product launches above we also brought several new investment products to the market in 2020.
Domestic Ringgit Borrowing
In Malaysia, we launched a new set of portfolios for clients who fall under the rules of the so-called “Domestic Ringgit Borrowing”. These clients are not allowed for regulatory reasons to invest into our standard portfolios, so we went out of our way to provide a customised portfolio offering for them that consists of >50% Shariah-compliant ETFs.
StashAway Simple goes international
Additionally, we launched our cash management product StashAway Simple in two more currencies, Malaysian Ringgit (for Malaysia) and Dirham (for Dubai).
Archived Portfolios
We also improved the way we handle cases where customers have closed portfolios, but those portfolios then at a later point in time receive dividends or withholding tax reimbursements. We want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to decide what to do with the additional funds that they have received inside their account.
Education of our clients
If you are a StashAway client you already know that we continuously strive to provide relevant content to guide you along your investing journey with us. In 2020 we launched two new initiatives to push the boundaries even further.
Podcast — “In Your Best Interest”
We launched a Podcast on Personal Finance related topics, run by our Head of Personal Finance, Philipp Muedder. It’s called “In Your Best Interest” and you can find more information about it on our Podcast page or just search for it in your favourite Podcast app. At the time of writing there are already 18 episodes for your enjoyment and education on a large variety of topics. Tune in!
Academy “in-app”
In a timely anticipation for a year dominated by working from home we launched our Academy events that used to be held in person in our offices as video courses inside our app itself. We cover a large range of material across the different aspects of financial planning, investing, and wealth management. We continue to host online seminars to which you can subscribe via the app as well.
Continuous Improvements
A lot of our product and engineering team’s work goes into fine-tuning of the product to make the experience for our clients as smooth and pleasant as possible. It would be impossible to list all the things we’ve done here, but the following is a summary of some of the more noticeable changes.
Document Upload Centre
We want to give our customers the maximum amount of flexibility during their onboarding process as clients with us as possible. We thus kicked off the first use-case for our document upload centre where customers who are Accredited Investors (AI) can upload the supporting documents for their AI status instead of having to go back and forth with our client engagement team via email or WhatsApp to send the documents. In the future we are planning to automate other workflows that require the submission of documents inside the document upload centre.
Recurring Transfers from StashAway Simple
We always recommend our clients to do Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) when investing a larger lump sum of money in order to reduce the risk of unfortunate market timing. We therefore made it possible to put such a lump sum of money into StashAway Simple and then schedule a recurring transfer from Simple into one or multiple investment portfolios.
Deposit Status Communication
One of the more frequently asked questions that customers have after they have sent the money to us is how long it will take until the money gets invested. We now show a screen with a lot of details to explain which money we have already received and by which date it will be invested.
Design
Also on the design side of things we make constant changes to improve consistency and make StashAway more user-friendly and beautiful. Two recent examples are the introduction of an iPad layout as well as the beautiful AMOLED dark mode which is just objectively awesome.
Backend
On the opposite end of “recognisability” of design sits the work that our backend and operations teams are doing. I’d like to highlight some of the amazing things that we’ve rolled out over the past 12 months that allow us to scale the company for the years to come.
Order Netting
This one seems like a no-brainer — instead of going to the market with a buy and a sell order, you take only the difference and go to the market with that (might be a buy, or might be a sell order). The result is (significant) cost savings in the form of lower trading costs. It also makes investing more economical for our clients as the bid-ask spread gets cut out of the equation. While it looks straightforward at first glance it is a wildly complex topic with uncountable edge-cases that all must be tested out in depth before rolling out such a significant change to our order management system. In order to be confident enough that the changes are working correctly we implemented property-based testing and ran the new version of the order service in parallel to the existing version on production for several weeks to verify the results match up 100%. Once we were satisfied with the results we gradually phased in the order netting feature security by security until a full rollout was completed.
EKS and Istio
Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is essentially a hosted version of Kubernetes. As it is a relatively new AWS product we were previously hosting our own Kubernetes cluster on EC2 but migrated our stack entirely to EKS and Istio which provides us with much deeper insights and control into what our services and pods are doing on a network level. The latest addition to the StashAway world-map, Dubai, has been launched on EKS. The plan is to now also migrate the already existing countries, Singapore and Malaysia, to EKS as well.
Marketing Tech
Last but not least we also completely revamped the tech stack of our marketing website. The previous version was built with Wagtail and Gatsby and the culprit of frequent complaints by the marketing team. The lack of a preview mode and poor usability of the CMS were painful, but not painful enough to justify a replacement. However, with further upcoming country launches the need for translation and localisation became a major concern for the team. As it would have required significant work to integrate a translation process into the existing stack, the team decided to instead switch to a more modern stack comprising of Contentful and Next.js. Additionally, we are using Lokalise to facilitate translation work in the various countries.
Organisational Changes
With the rapid growth in team size that we experienced in the last few quarters it became apparent in the beginning of 2020 that we’d need to introduce a new structure into our product and engineering teams to be able to scale and execute on multiple larger strategic initiatives in parallel.
Born was the idea of introducing Squads and Tech Guilds. A Squad is typically composed of a product manager, a product designer, and a handful of engineers who work autonomously on solving a particular customer problem. For example, we have Squads around Investment Products, Deposits, WorkPlace, etc. Ideally, all Squads have all resources required to execute independently on their own roadmap. To ensure that we also address technological challenges, for example clearing out of tech debt, we also formed Tech Guilds who are assembled around a particular technology, for example Mobile Technologies, Databases, or Service Communication. Most recently, we also introduced Tribes which aggregate several Squads to create a higher level organisational unit which can also introduce new roles for engineers to grow into along their career path.
2020 has been a year full of unexpected challenges for all of us, but I am thankful that as a team we have been able to exceed all of our expectations and deliver on our promise to provide the ultimate experience in wealth management to our clients.
We wish everybody a great start into 2021 and stay tuned for some exciting product launches this year!
As usual we are still recruiting, so do checkout our careers page if you are interested and want to become part of a team that transforms the wealth management industry.
