From Months to Minutes: Wealthsimple Accelerates Machine Learning Model Delivery and Inference

Wealthsimple uses state-of-the-art technology to offer a full suite of simple, sophisticated financial products across managed investing, do-it-yourself trading, cryptocurrency, tax filing, spending, and saving. Their mission is to help everyone achieve financial freedom, no matter who they are or how much they have. However, the Canadian money management platform was confronting a common challenge. Without a standardized AI inference platform, engineering teams were averaging several months to deploy new machine learning models into production, impeding the company's success in delivering ML-enabled investment services to their clients. The company decided to deploy the NVIDIA AI inference platform, resulting in a series of noteworthy achievements.

Today, Wealthsimple, which manages over C$30 billion in assets, supports over 30 AI models that generated over 145 million predictions in the past 12 months. Notably, in the last year and a half since implementing the NVIDIA AI inference platform, the platform engineering organization hasn’t encountered a single IT ticket related to AI inferencing—a testament to the platform’s low maintenance and high reliability.

Recently, the money management platform achieved another milestone. Model developers were able to deploy their first ML model without any engineering support. With the NVIDIA AI inference platform in place, the Wealthsimple engineering organization has seamlessly transitioned to delivering ML as-a-service to other teams, avoiding the diversion of valuable data science resources from critical projects. Following the change, model delivery time has been slashed from months to under 15 minutes—a game-changing advancement for the organization.

ML models play a pivotal role at Wealthsimple, detecting fraud, analyzing suspicious transactions, and optimizing onboarding experiences for new clients. The leading Canadian fintech also uses recommender engines to enhance customer experiences, ensuring top-notch service for new users. The NVIDIA AI inference platform empowers Wealthsimple to deploy models that predict the division, within a particular financial institution, to which an institutional transfer should be sent. This significantly accelerates transaction processes for their clients.

Before adopting the NVIDIA Triton™ Inference Server—part of the NVIDIA AI inference platform—the company experimented with an alternative native AI framework inferencing product and experienced a 95% uptime. This caused delays of up to several weeks for 5% of their clients’ electronic transfers. Triton Inference Server changed the game, delivering an impressive 99.999% uptime. The impact is clear, as every incorrect prediction no longer translates to weeks of delays for clients to access their funds.

Wealthsimple initiated this transformative journey with model experimentation on CPUs, soon evolving to deploy their models on NVIDIA GPUs. This was facilitated by Triton Inference Server with hardware-agnostic capabilities that run on both GPUs and CPUs. Today, Wealthsimple runs models powered by NVIDIA A10G GPUs on the AWS cloud, tapping into the NVIDIA GPU-Optimized AWS Machine Image to drive efficiency and innovation.

Triton Inference Server is available with NVIDIA AI Enterprise, which offers enterprise-grade security, stability, and support. 

Wealthsimple is one of Canada’s fastest growing and most trusted money-management platforms. The company offers a full suite of simple, sophisticated financial products across managed investing, do-it-yourself trading, cryptocurrency, tax filing, spending, and saving. Wealthsimple currently serves 3 million Canadians and holds over $30 billion in assets. The company was founded in 2014 by a team of financial experts and technology entrepreneurs, and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.