Today, Endowus is Asia’s leading fee-only digital wealth platform, featuring access to superior investment products, personalized advice, and lower costs on a seamless digital investment platform for all investors. Licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the company was the first digital advisor to span private investment accounts along with Singapore’s public pension and retirement savings accounts. Endowus has reported total client assets exceeding US$7 billion in 2025.

The challenge

From the start, Endowus sought to put customers first and understand them more holistically through data. To lay this foundation, Endowus built a cloud-native platform based on an event sourcing pattern with a microservices architecture (MSA) in which all applications run on containers.

This architecture records every interaction between the company’s platform and its customers, including the transactions between internal microservices, as an event in Endowus’ Apache Cassandra® database. Events can be triggered, for example, by a customer clicking a button on the company’s website or mobile app, making a deposit or withdrawal, or selecting an investment within the platform.

“The event sourcing approach that we chose produces tons of data that is always flowing and accumulating, so we had to be very mindful about the workload requirements in terms of database write performance and read performance. Because of this, from our earliest days, we started relying heavily on proven open source technologies such as Cassandra,” says Deepak Sarda, CTO, Endowus. The Cassandra database enables Endowus to store exponentially growing volumes of unstructured data, deferring data structuring decisions to more flexibly meet evolving business requirements over time.

Initially, the company hosted its own Cassandra environment, but as Endowus’ business grew, the tech team looked for additional support. “Cassandra scales beautifully, but the infrastructure management burden became a challenge for our team of engineers, who are always busy developing better, data-intensive applications to make personalized investing more accessible, affordable, and convenient,” says Sarda.

The solution

Endowus turned to DataStax to outsource the management of its Cassandra database environment. Built on Kubernetes, DataStax Astra DB provides Endowus enterprise-grade features for its Cassandra environment and the efficiency and flexibility of a cloud-agnostic managed database service. The solution offers security for data at rest and in motion, role-based access control, single sign-on, configurable auditing, log scanning, and filtering to help prevent and detect potential breaches. The Astra DB pay-as-you-go pricing model enables Endowus to pay by reads, writes, and storage to align costs with the growth of the business.

The solution leverages DataStax contributions to the Stargate Data API Gateway, eliminating drivers and Endowus' developers' need to learn Cassandra Query Language (CQL). With Stargate, the team can use a unified gateway and modern APIs, including schemaless JSON, REST, and GraphQL for streamlined development. The Endowus team can also use the open source Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) for Cassandra, which was developed by DataStax. Based on the gRPC framework created by Google, the gRPC API enables a cloud-native design pattern and supports advanced features of HTTP/2 for improved performance.

“The managed nature of Astra DB was exactly what we needed. It completely offloaded the operational burden, allowing us to scale effortlessly as we expanded. The ability to scale databases horizontally and vertically without downtime was crucial to our growth,” says Deepak Sarda, CTO, Endowus.

The results

Sarda said he’s gratified that his team can now spend more time developing customer-centric services and less time worrying about supporting infrastructure. “Since we’ve expanded quickly, we appreciate being able to rely on services like DataStax’s Astra DB to alleviate the administrative burden of our database,” says Sarda. “Also, we value the resiliency of DataStax and Cassandra. We have to ensure very high availability for our customers, as mandated by our regulator.”

The benefits of faster data have become clear: Endowus’ developers provide far better customer experiences.

“We have an agile development culture with a sophisticated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) pipeline. With the DataStax platform and the synergies of the APIs with our microservices architecture, we can analyze results and iterate quickly on areas that need improvement and more effectively capitalize on success,” Sarda explains.

Data insights fuel explanatory analysis to help Endowus understand the hows and the whys of various milestones in its customers’ journeys, from exploration of its investment services to onboarding and engagement over time. “We can closely track various customer groups based on descriptive data to quickly examine the impacts of particular programs or investments. For example, we used explanatory analysis to find out at which stage of the onboarding process our customers were most likely to drop or get stuck. We could then focus our efforts on improving that part of the customer journey,” Sarda says.

“It is extremely important that we minimize the time to data-driven business decisions by accelerating data collection and analysis that generate actionable operational insights. This is what gives us a competitive advantage in this market. Faster data is critical to that,” he adds.

Expansion beyond Singapore

As Endowus rapidly expanded beyond Singapore, Astra DB's scalability was crucial. “We decided to expand into Hong Kong a couple of years ago. This required a whole new database setup because we chose to segregate the data stored in Singapore from the data stored for our clients in Hong Kong. Astra DB made this process incredibly easy by offering us the flexibility to quickly scale and implement a reliable database solution in the Hong Kong region without any downtime,” says Sarda.

The ability to seamlessly add new regions and scale horizontally has helped Endowus accelerate its time to market in Hong Kong and set the foundation for further international expansion. “This level of scalability has been key in supporting our growth into new markets, and Astra DB's managed service has been critical in maintaining high operational efficiency across regions,” says Sarda.

Another key development in Endowus' database strategy was migrating from the traditional Astra DB offering to Astra DB Serverless. “Astra DB Serverless is a game-changer for us. The serverless offering is particularly well-suited for our business needs. It allows us to scale even more efficiently and only pay for the resources we use. Serverless technology has been a big differentiator for us in terms of flexibility and cost-effectiveness,” says Sarda.

Future vision with generative AI

Looking forward, Endowus is investing heavily in GenAI to enhance customer experiences further. “We believe GenAI can disrupt how we help clients navigate financial markets. Our first GenAI-powered support bot went live in mid-2023 and has yielded incredible results. We’re continually expanding its use cases with the aim of providing clients with better education and more effective investment options,” Sarda says.

“With Astra DB, we’re able to easily scale and manage the data required for our GenAI journey. This aligns perfectly with our mission to help our clients invest better to live better.”