A review of 2021
“Better late than never”
This year around I was somehow missing the mental space and time for properly reflecting on 2021 and writing our usual summary in proper punctual German style on the 1st of January. But nevertheless we managed to move mountains again over the course of those turbulent 12 months, and with this I will share some of the big achievements of the year!
First off, as you can see from the Zoom screenshot above (which I had to manually stitch together — our employees can no longer fit onto a single Zoom window) the team has grown massively over the year! We have added many more team members in our local country offices Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Dubai, as well as more and more fully remote people working all across the globe! Most team members unfortunately we still haven’t managed to meet in person, as COVID-19 continues to make travel very difficult, and in many cases even prevented people to come to the office for the majority of the year.
On a more positive note, speaking of countries — as you see from the list of offices above, we have also finally managed to bring StashAway to even more customers in Asia: Hong Kong and Thailand! These were also the first countries where we decided to offer both English as well as the official local language for our customers to choose from:
These launches were a monumental effort — there were more hurdles to clear than you can imagine — and I am very proud of what we have achieved as a team here, bringing our wealth management offering to a total of five countries in Asia!
🎉 New product launches
But that’s not the only thing our team has worked on. We have also launched several new products to get us closer to our vision of becoming a truly holistic wealth management partner for our clients.
Planning for your retirement
First off, in Singapore, we launched a completely new product, StashAway Plan, which helps our customers better plan for their retirement. The product is still in its early stages and we have much larger plans for where this will take us. Stay tuned for further releases!
StashAway Plan is also interesting from a product and technical perspective, because it is a lot more interaction-heavy as compared to the rest of our product which follows more of a “set and forget” type of approach. This means we need to iterate more rapidly, gather customer feedback in a different way, and work out optimal micro-interactions.
Thematic Portfolios
In order to broaden the investment universe for our customers we also released our Thematic Portfolios in the second half of the year, allowing customers to express preferences towards a certain “theme” they personally believe in. The available themes range from Healthcare to Technology Enablers and everything in between.
Responsible Investing
We also included a theme focused around Environment and Cleantech, which gives customers the choice to opt for a more “responsible” investment strategy using ESG-friendly asset classes inside the portfolio. The idea behind this product is similar — giving customers more choice and letting them personalize their investment strategy further.
♻️ Continuous Improvements
When looking at all the big milestones we have achieved in 2021 it is easy to overlook all the smaller improvements that the team has managed to push out in parallel, to ensure that we provide a steadily improving product experience to our customers. The following is not a comprehensive list, but showcases some highlights of the things we’ve done.
Inbox
As a StashAway customer you will have noticed that we have rolled out a more organized way of viewing current and past messages that we’ve sent you — which previously was simply managed with banners on the homepage. This got a bit messy over time and so with this new feature things should become easier to find, and also allows us to establish a stronger communication channel with you as a customer.
Historical performance
If you are a customer who has been with StashAway for a longer period of time, you will have built a solid understanding that the investment portfolios in your account, depending on the risk level you selected, are not usually going up in a straight line. As the market is reacting to news and adjusting to the economic environment, our portfolios can move in either direction in the short-term. While in the long-term the returns become rather predictable, in the short-term there can be these sometimes scary ups-and-downs, and if you enter at the wrong point in time as a customer you may not have a whole lot of context to make sense of the numbers you see.
It is important to select the right risk-level as a customer to be prepared to withstand potential movements in the markets, but for additional support we are now also showing the historical performance of our portfolios in the app. This is to put in context where your portfolio is today, and giving you the confidence that’s needed to achieve long-term success in investing by weathering potentially difficult market conditions and staying put with your investment strategy.
Privacy Mode
A neat little feature (that I could just now perfectly use myself!) is the privacy mode in the app. Below is a screenshot of my actual StashAway account, and I wouldn’t have wanted to show the total value of my portfolios, in which case clients usually put ugly black bars on top of numbers when posting screenshots. The view below arguably looks a lot cleaner and also allows you to show the app to a friend on your phone, without letting them peek into your personal financial situation.
🥷 Under the hood
In order to enable all the new features our customer-facing teams have built, a lot of work has also gone into things that are not really visible to the customer — many times not even visible to most people working at StashAway. Those are incredibly important though, as they provide the backbone for everything else that’s built on top.
A shoutout at this point towards everyone who’s working on these invisible things — the company could not exist without you! 🙏
The following is again just a really minor excerpt of the things the team has worked on over the course of the year:
Trading on HKEX
Some of our newer investment portfolios have assets that are traded on the HK stock exchange (HKEX). As trading happens in a very different timezone from most other asset classes that are traded in the US, the process of rebalancing a portfolio becomes a lot more complicated. We nevertheless felt it is of utmost importance to allow our investment team to choose from a wider range of investment products for our customers, and thus enabled our trading system to include assets from this part of the world.
Near real-time settlement
Another topic rather closely related to the execution of trades is the settlement process. Previously, we have relied on the so-called “end-of-day files” shared by our broker to understand which trades have been settled and at what price which securities have been purchased or sold. The downside of this process is that these files sometimes arrive with a significant delay on our side — the culprit here again is the TradFi world with its legacy systems that are not built for requirements that a company like StashAway has.
Our team has however found an alternate way of settling these trades with information from our broker that arrives in near real-time to the actual execution. As you can imagine, this is a very crucial piece of our infrastructure, and absolutely no mistakes can happen at this place. The team therefore spent quite some time testing and ensuring this new settlement flow works as expected before finally switching things over, resulting in a much more predictable processing time and refresh of numbers for our customers in the app.
EKS migration completed
As we are getting more technical, we’ve also performed some of the largest migrations of our product in the history of the company as we switched from our self-hosted Kubernetes infrastructure to a managed setup with EKS on AWS. While the new countries were already launched on EKS, we still had to migrate Singapore and Malaysia to the new setup. This involved a short downtime during the night during which we had to move all data from some servers to others and bring up the cluster in a new environment. The benefits are a more managed infrastructure setup that lowers the maintenance burden on our own teams, as well as additional layers such as Istio that we’ve rolled out at the same time.
Workflows
If you are following our engineering blog you may already know that we are heavily investing into Workflow technology. We have since switched to Temporal which is a fork from Cadence by its own founders. Almost any new service or feature will rely on workflows in some form, as they make it very convenient to orchestrate longer running business processes across a number of microservices. The number of workflows is constantly growing and we are investing more and more into the infrastructure to make sure they run smoothly as we are scaling up the amount of business logic we run with them. Stay tuned for more sharing on workflows on this blog!
🏡 Organizational Stuff
As the organization continues to grow we have to also evolve the way we work together and structure communication and domain boundaries.
Tribes and Chapters
If you refer back to the review of 2020 you can see that we introduced Squads and Tech Guilds already while ago. With the number of Squads growing, the next logical step was to introduce the concept of Tribes into our organizational design. A Tribe basically groups several Squads together around a common domain or set of metrics, and has additional management functions such as a Lead Product Manager and an Engineering Manager to tie things together. We have already gone through several rounds of learning how to best form new Tribes and Squads, how to align and communicate with stakeholders, and how to ensure we can continue to improve and build products at a rapid pace.
Additionally, in a more recent move, we also introduced Chapters as a horizontal technical layer cutting across all teams, in charge of certain technology platforms such as Mobile. The Mobile Chapter for example maintains core mobile technology pieces such as CI/CD, the release process, defines code quality standards, upgrades core libraries, but also acts as an enabling team to ensure other teams can efficiently contribute to the shared mobile repository.
Career progression framework
Over the course of 2021 we have also spent quite a lot of time detailing our career progression framework for engineers. We have defined in detail how the various seniority levels are stacking up, what’s expected from engineers at the respective levels, how to “level up”, what’s the difference between a managerial and an IC career path, what skills are required, and how all of this information is used in our performance reviews that happen twice a year.
This level of growth enablement for our engineers is very important, as we treat all of our employees as the greatest asset of all, and we want to make sure we can help everyone as best as we can on their personal growth journey. Ping me on LinkedIn if you wanna learn more about how we develop engineering talent in a systematic way.
Remote work
As 2021 continued to be a difficult year for socializing and the return to the office was postponed further and further, we decided to take some more proactive measures and prepare for the future of work — going forward, every employee can decide how much time they want to spend in the office, ranging from going to the office every day, to working from home entirely. This rule was setup considering a post-COVID world where we believe working-from-home will for many people become a preferred choice when weighing off factors such as spending time with family, commuting, or having a more personalizable work environment.
Asynchronous Fridays
Last but not least, we embarked on a large scale experiment in the middle of the year, introducing Asynchronous Fridays. Meetings are generally avoided and discouraged on Fridays, to allow everybody some time for deep work. How that looks like for each individual can be different: you may decide to read a book as part of your L&D program, you may decide to hash out some code, or have some more casual knowledge sharing sessions or hack-days with your colleagues. The experiment was very successful and so we decided to keep Asynchronous Fridays for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for reaching this far, I wish you a successful and happy 2022!
More than ever we continue adding amazing people to our team every week, so do checkout our careers page if you are interested and want to join us on our growth journey!
