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Axis Wealthsimple Case · Alex McKenna-Ayres
Director, Advice Innovation & Experience · Case Study

One client.
One system.
Two surfaces.

Axis is an advice OS that puts Wealthsimple's product, the advisor, and the client on the same path.

Wealthsimple already has the surfaces and the data. Axis turns them into a living advice system. A feed that re-orders as life changes, segments that scale the advisor, a membership layer that rewards follow-through.

Same data. Two surfaces. Three motions. One engine.

See the system on both surfaces.

A clickable prototype of Axis. Toggle between client view and advisor view, and watch the same data become two experiences. Built as a single self-contained HTML artifact.

Live · Axis demo

Open the demo
in a new tab.

Best on a laptop. The toggle in the top-right switches between three views: Client (the mobile app the household sees), Advisor (the dashboard the CFP sees the same morning), and Both (side-by-side).

Open the demo

Good morning, Sarah.

Tuesday · April 21
Axis · for you today
You're $8,400 under your TFSA contribution room. Filling it before market open could save your household roughly $1,260 in tax this year.
Your living plan
On track for 2034
94% conf
Net worth
$2.4M
Target by 65
$5.8M

The full answer,
on paper.

The written answer to the three questions in the brief: the end-to-end client journey, AI tools for advisors and service, and which digital advice features to build first. Available as an 8-slide deck or a 2-page leave-behind.

DOC 01

The deck

8 slides · 16:9

The case answer in slides. One per question in the brief: end-to-end client journey, AI tooling for advisors and service, and the top three digital advice features. Designed to walk through in 20 minutes.

DOC 02

The leave-behind

2 pages · A4

The same three answers, written out in full: end-to-end client journey, AI tooling for advisors and service, and the top three digital advice features. Two A4 pages, designed to read in five minutes after the conversation.

DOC 03

The one-pager

1 page · A4 · personal

Ten years of personal investing alongside a 13-year commercial career. The full arc from 2016 to today: first trade on GetStocks, joining Snapchat in 2017, servicing Wealthsimple from London during the 2020 lockdown ramp, scaling SMB EMEA from 7 to 35, a product-facing chapter in Revenue Growth, today running Snapchat's global SMB business, plus Polybacker (a personal trading bot for prediction markets) and why this role.

13 years in tech.
10 years investing.

Why me · the parallel

Performance advertising isn't a sale and a renewal. Neither is wealth advisory.

For the last decade my job hasn't been one-off sales. It's been a relationship that compounds: you grow the customer's results, that builds trust, and trust grows what they put back in. In ads that's media spend. In advisory it's AUM. The next dollar always comes from what you did with the last one.

I placed my first trade in May 2016 on GetStocks. I was 22. Two years of active trading before the platform went under in 2018, but the habit had taken. I don't trade every day (these days it's monthly contributions), but finance is part of my daily routine, whether that's reading, research, or watching markets. More brokerages, more asset classes, more jurisdictions over the years. Crypto in 2018, options in 2020, alts and prediction markets in the last couple of years. Ten years deep and it's still the part of my life I think about most.

Joined Snapchat in 2017 as a Senior Client Partner. In 2020 Wealthsimple became one of my advertiser accounts and I serviced you from London through lockdown as you initially onboarded and scaled paid acquisition on the platform. Won the first-ever Global Sales competition at Snapchat (#1 out of 200+ sellers) during that chapter, and onboarded the largest customer in Snap EMEA history. Moved into management in May 2021 as Manager, SMB EMEA, scaling the team from 7 to 35.

Across 13 years of commercial experience I've managed hundreds of sellers and helped build dedicated sales orgs from scratch across the globe. After scaling SMB EMEA I moved into a product-facing chapter as Manager, Product & Revenue Growth (2022 to 2024), working with Product teams to design and launch products for SMB segments, and shipping multiple AI executions for the team (email outreach agents, meeting-prep agents, and a customer guidance hub powering recommendations in-platform and through Salesforce). Today, as Global Head of SMB, I own Snapchat's global SMB revenue and lead a sales organization of 135+ sellers across 9 offices and 20+ markets, having grown the function 500% since taking it global outside North America.

On the side: built polybacker.com as a personal project, a trading bot for prediction markets. Multi-agent automation in n8n and LangGraph. The Pre-Meeting Brief from Q2 of this case is running as a working prototype after I read the brief. Happy to demo Polybacker live in the interview if useful.

Today that's monthly contributions across UK ISAs, a US 401(k), GIAs at multiple brokerages, and crypto. I'd be a non-traditional hire for an advice role (sales rather than financial services), but the decade of personal investing and the recent product and automation work bridge it.

The chapters
  • MAY 2016
    First trade.
    GetStocks. Age 22. Active for two years.
  • 2017
    Joined Snapchat.
    Revenue side of the business.
  • 2020
    Wealthsimple becomes my client.
    Serviced from London through lockdown as you onboarded and scaled.
  • 2021–22
    Manager, SMB EMEA at Snapchat.
    Scaled the EMEA team from 7 to 35; delivered 100%+ YoY growth.
  • 2022–24
    Manager, Product & Revenue Growth.
    Product-facing chapter: working with Product to design and launch SMB products. AI tooling shipped for the team.
  • 2024–NOW
    Global Head of SMB at Snapchat.
    Own global SMB revenue. Lead 135+ sellers across 9 offices and 20+ markets. Grew the function 500% by taking it global.
  • 2025
    Polybacker.
    Personal project. A trading bot for prediction markets.
  • TODAY
    Why I'm here.
    The loop closes. I am the user.
The big idea

The advised client experience and the advisor's tools should be one product, viewed from two sides. Segment first. Build the system on three clear segments, and every Generation client gets the same caliber of service, regardless of advisor.

By Alex McKenna-Ayres · For Wealthsimple · April 2026