With experience from Goldman Sachs to ByteDance/TikTok, learn how Joo Won Lee (Endowus' Chief Technology Officer), and Junxu Lye (Endowus' Chief Product Officer) built Endowus' cutting-edge wealth platform, with end-to-end capabilities to provide advice, generate personalized portfolios, and invest your CPF, SRS & Cash towards your goals.

Learn more about how we use a double ledger system with UOB Kay Hian, Monte Carlo simulators, event sourcing and kubernetes cluster to manage and optimise your investment experience securely.

Joo Won Lee and Junxu Lye will share the workings and intricacies behind the tech platform and how Endowus makes use of historical projections, computing power and simulation algorithms to create a personalised investment experience to help you live easier today for a better tomorrow.

They will also go through the technology infrastructure behind Endowus, including how it is set up and integrated with our partner UOB Kay Hian to ensure that your monies and investments are always held safely in a Trust account under your name where it is only accessible by yourself.

00:00 Introduction

6:17 Joo's and Jx's Introduction

12:14 Agenda of presentation

20:17 Traditional way vs Event sourcing of Data

23:46 Double ledger system with UOB Kay Hian

29:40 QnA

42:17 Endowus platform run-through

55:14 QnA

Extracted QnA from the session

Q: Does your software system have a failover mechanism (29:40)?

Joo: Yes, our backend system is built on the Actor Model and one of the characteristic of this model is the library called Akka One of the advantages of using Akka is auto-recovery to combat any failure in the system. We have resiliency prepared at the software level as well as the infrastructural level because we are running everything on a docker container on top of the Kubernetes clusters.

Q: Are we able to log in to our UOB Kay Hian account since UOB Kay Hian is the brokerage behind Endowus? Does UOB Kay Hian charge custody fees (31:41)?

Jx: We have worked with UOB Kay Hian so that UOB Kay Hian creates an account behind your Endowus account and the only way you will be able to access it is through Endowus.

However, if you would like to open a UOB Kay Hian account on your own, you can do so. One way to confirm that you have a Kay Hian account custodised under your name is that you will receive a paper statement from UOB Kay Hian.

UOB Kay Hian does charge custody fees but all of these fees are borne by Endowus. When you invest with Endowus, all you need to pay is the single platform (access) fee that starts at 0.6% for cash and SRS and it goes down to 0.25% as you invest more and for SRS and CPF its a 0.4% flat fee. The access fee is excluding the fund-level fees depending on the portfolios that you choose.

Q: How are the events on the platform being triggered (34:40)?

Joo: Events are triggered by all sort of different user/platform interactions that happening in our platform for example making investment or redemption requests in our system. Or, some of the events can be triggered by external event searches such as market data update. So, on a daily basis, we update our market data with the external systems market data provider and the new prices that enter the system get propagated into our subsystems as an event. From there, we trigger other work processes such as renewing of account market values and so on. Lastly, events can be triggered by interactions amongst our internal systems.

Q: Will the different goals and allocations be stored in UOB Kay Hian or is this information just stored on the Endowus platform?

Jx: One of the key benefits of using Endowus is that we employ an investment method called goal-based investing, and the benefits of goal-based investing is that at Endowus, you get to create many different goals and invest in different products and allocations based on your risk and comfort levels.

All of these are actually built on Endowus, not UOB Kay Hian. However, what is stored in UOB Kay Hian is all the important things like your total cash balance, total number of units you have on each funds.

Thus, the reason why we have built this entire system based on event sourcing is so that we are able to run all these complicated splits and calculate your performances as well as different stats on your portfolios based on your different goals.