Wave's choice to use best-in-class CI/CD pays dividends at every stage of growth

• Problem: Wave Financial, a subsidiary of H&R Block, is a rapidly scaling fintech company that provides accounting, invoicing, payroll, and payments for small businesses. After their 2019 acquisition by H&R Block, Wave needed to meet the new feature delivery, efficiency, and compliance hurdles of a publicly traded company.

• Solution: The DevOps team at Wave had worked with CircleCI since their startup days, and their choice to use best-in-class CI/CD over all-in-one has paid dividends at every stage of their growth. They leveraged CircleCI’s extensible cloud during their hypergrowth stage, config policy management to satisfy strict compliance requirements when they entered the public realm, and now they rely on Insights to plan for their evolving needs into the future.

Wave Financial, a Toronto-based finance company, entered the small business accounting market in 2010 and quickly earned their place as a disrupter to watch, proving their mettle against Goliaths like Quickbooks and Zoho. They quickly ascended in the market thanks to relentless focus on their customers and their investment in technology as a competitive differentiator.

That success led to their acquisition by accounting heavyweight H&R Block in 2019 — a feather in the cap for any startup. However, this meteoric rise brought with it new challenges for Wave’s engineering teams: stricter compliance standards, a more demanding feature delivery cadence, and higher reliability expectations to uphold for the 2.5M business owners they have served across the US and Canada.

During this time period, Wave was undergoing a migration to Kubernetes, and they investigated their options for managing more sophisticated deployments. With a keen interest in operational efficiency and effectiveness, the DevOps team at Wave chose to double down on their use of CircleCI, which had been part of their journey since before their acquisition.

The gold standard for reliability

“CircleCI is a battle-tested tool,” says Tarun Singh, Senior Software Engineer on Wave’s DevOps team. “We wanted to make sure that whatever system we used was actually reliable. If the system is down and we can’t build our images, we’re blocked from being able to deploy or even roll back to an older version of our software. And so reliability was definitely a big deal for us.”

Singh spent time in the tool selection process assessing downtime of CircleCI as well as other tools such as GitHub Actions. After calculating minutes down because of incidents, CircleCI emerged from Singh’s research with the most uptime compared to any other CI/CD provider. “We were already happily using CircleCI for many years, and extending our use of it to build Docker images made sense to us. As we transitioned our Docker builds from self-hosted to SaaS, we wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t significantly affect our CD pipeline reliability. [CircleCI’s uptime results] meant we were confident going with Circle.”

The importance of reliability extends beyond the engineering team, to Wave’s customer base of millions of customers transacting billions of dollars in payments, and expectations for product reliability have only risen with Wave’s continued success. “Now that our product is paid, there’s definitely a higher expectation for us to be reliable, with less downtime, and issues fixed as soon as possible,” says Singh. “We not only rely on CircleCI for deploys but also to roll back our software. Being able to do that quickly is critical – the more quickly we can get ourselves out of a bad state, the less our customers are affected.”

Cost control

Reliability was not the only factor that influenced their decision, however. The DevOps team at Wave also relies on CircleCI Insights to manage their team’s resources strategically.

“We’re always looking for ways to improve operational efficiency,” says Singh, “so we look at every potential savings opportunity from our end to allow our company to achieve that goal.”

This kind of analysis enables the Wave DevOps team to find greater efficiencies, especially important as each advantage gets multiplied over thousands of pipelines run every day. “We look at the Insights page to understand which pipelines get executed more often, which burn more credit, and how we can reduce build time. This helps a lot to provide visibility into our utilization.”

Automating compliance

The visibility of a publicly traded company necessitates an unwavering focus on security to protect the business and meet stringent compliance standards. Says Singh, “Security compliance is among one of the highest priorities for Wave.” For that reason, automating compliance through the CI/CD system is a strategic investment. This approach ensures the team is always operating by the book, and also delivers confidence to the leadership team: both technical and business leadership know that the team isn’t leaving their adherence to industry regulations to chance.

The Wave team relies on CircleCI for the granular role-based permissions, automated security and vulnerability scans, and audit logs that will support them in achieving their SOC-II compliance. Meeting elite industry standards is a make-or-break for regulated industries such as finance.

Pave the golden path to let developers keep innovating

The business wins when developers have tools that help them move faster and keep focused on shipping great work.

Says Singh, “With CircleCI, there’s so much information… but it’s easy to read and very accessible to any of our engineers.” adding, “It’s just so easy for our developers to get fast feedback. Running all of our tests inside of CircleCI means we can ship our code with more confidence.”

The DevOps team at Wave knows that the job of a good platform engineer is to abstract the complexity and let developers do what they do best. “As long as they know how to commit their code,” says Singh, “I would rather have our CI/CD process take care of the rest.”

The DevOps team at Wave trusts CircleCI every step of the way

Since early on in their journey, Wave has leaned on CircleCI to power their team in building small business financial management solutions that customers love. At every milestone, from raising funding rounds, to scaling, to major acquisition, Wave has relied on CircleCI as a flexible, future-proof solution to keep their team building and innovating.

As a nimble startup needing to ship fast iterations and find product market fit, to a publicly traded company under intense scrutiny and high delivery demands, CircleCI has worked for Singh and the Wave DevOps team. And based on this track record of success, they are confident there isn’t a future challenge they can’t tackle: “CircleCI is critical for the success of our business.”