dailyVest Empowers 401(k) Plans for Seven Million Plan Participants with Fastboards and Real-Time Analytics from SingleStore

dailyVest empowers 401(k) plan sponsors, financial services firms, and plan participants with a white-label tool that integrates customized content and big data analytics within the sponsor or participant web portal. It surfaces key performance metrics for employer-sponsored retirement plans and calculates the personal rate of return for individual participants.

Challenges/Goals  

dailyVest had originally used Microsoft SQL Server, then expanded its platform’s capabilities by moving to the cloud, but ran into performance and cost issues on Azure SQL as the transaction volume increased. It needed a new database solution that would: 

• Speed up data ingestion and batch processing performance: Most of the data on dailyVest’s platform was processed at the beginning of the month. The Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes and batch data analysis took longer than the team wanted. 
• Support a growing customer portfolio: The platform’s transactions were growing at a rate of 36 percent per year. The new database would need to scale with an ever-increasing data volume to allow dailyVest to grow its customer base. 
• Reduce costs: The platform’s operating costs grew at a substantial rate as it scaled up. The long-term recovery backup expenses were particularly high.

Technology Requirements

Gerry Morgan, Lead Developer, and the dailyVest team evaluated many cloud databases to find the best match for its fintech platform. The most important requirement was remaining on the Microsoft Azure cloud. dailyVest's customers, such as Charles Schwab, already approved this platform’s security, and moving away from Azure would result in a massive disruption to its business.

dailyVest also wanted a database that supported SQL and C#. The company’s developers were already familiar with these languages, and that support would reduce the code that needed to be rewritten following a migration. 

The database also needed to offer columnstore for better compression and read performance, along with supporting complex queries that generate large amounts of data.

Why SingleStore

To try to resolve the data limitations that were holding it back, dailyVest tried a number of solutions, including:

• AWS Redshift
• ClickHouse
• (HPE) Vertica
• Infobright
• KDB+
• MariaDB
• MonetDB
• PostgreSQL

Some of the specific challenges the team encountered were:

MariaDB: dailyVest was already committed to Microsoft’s Azure cloud, and MariaDB did not support it.

Vertica: nested queries were not available.

AWS Redshift: stored procedures were not supported at that time, and it underperformed compared to Vertica.

Meeting all of its technology requirements, overcoming the limitations of AzureSQL, and overcoming the shortcomings of other database providers led dailyVest to SingleStore. 

SingleStore’s unified database is designed for fast analytics and ultra-fast ingest. With support for billions of events per second, millions of real-time queries, and petabytes of data, dailyVest could easily scale to meet the demands of a growing customer base.

SingleStore's cloud-first approach means it is engineered to run:

• On Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and other public clouds
• In private cloud environments
• Different workloads across clouds to implement a multi-cloud strategy
• Some workloads in the cloud and some on-prem to implement a hybrid data strategy

So dailyVest had flexibility it did not have with other databases such as MariaDB: the freedom to run anywhere.

SingleStore is also a Translytical or HTAP data platform combining the best of both row-based and columnar storage — plus vector, and management of all other relevant data types including document, time series, geo, and more — in a single database. This eliminates unnecessary data movement, complexity and cost and delivers real-time performance for both transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) workloads. By contrast, MariaDB relies on a traditional row-based storage model that does not provide the same level of performance for analytical queries.

In short, dailyVest selected SingleStore Helios to spend less time administering the database and more time analyzing 401(k) data.

Solution

This fully managed, on-demand, and elastic cloud database solution was simple to deploy and manage in Azure cloud. dailyVest didn’t even need to leave its current data center. While dailyVest had the in-house talent to manage its own databases, it saved one full-time employee equivalent and was able to better allocate its technical resources.

“SingleStore is consistently faster for us than Azure SQL. I was really blown away. I waited an hour for 12 months of cached financials with one plan to run in Azure SQL. Then I ran it in SingleStore and it was done in three minutes." Gerry Morgan, Lead Developer, dailyVest

Outcomes

dailyVest, powered by SingleStore, now empowers plan participants to make better decisions for their financial future. The customized experience dailyVest provides helps employees choose age-appropriate investments, learn more about retirement planning, and understand their personal rate of return. More broadly, the benefits of moving to SingleStore accrue to both dailyVest, its customers, and their end users:

35% Reduction in TCO and 1 FTE Savings

With SingleStore, dailyVest is achieving a 35% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) and is saving the equivalent of 1 F/T employee on database administration, enabling it to redeploy resources to more strategic actions adding value to the company.

Radically Upgraded its Data Platform with Minimal Disruption to Users

Due to SingleStore's migration capabilties, and because with SingleStore, dailyVest was able to maintain its data operations in the same cloud and data center, dailyVest customers faced little to no disruption to their services. Financial services firms are particularly security-minded due to the sensitive data they work with, so remaining in a trusted and approved environment was important. 

Improved Monthly KPI Generation 27%

Every month, dailyVest analyzes 16,200 employer-sponsored retirement plans and generates key performance metrics. The platform outputs these metrics onto webpage tiles as a convenient big data visualization. After moving to SingleStore Helios, completing the batch process dropped from 4 hours and 12 minutes to 3 hours and 5 minutes, a 26.6% improvement.  

Plan Sponsors Can Benchmark Performance Against Others

The health of an employer-sponsored retirement plan involves many factors, so it can be difficult for plan sponsors to know if they need to make changes for better performance and participation. dailyVest’s platform leverages data to allow plan sponsors, such as Boeing, to compare their plans against similar offerings.

See what dailyVest said about the role SingleStore played in its its most recent annual results

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