Leading Fintech Company Funding Circle Uses PagerDuty to Help Scale Growth

Overview

As the leading small business loans platform in the U.K., U.S., Germany, and the Netherlands, no one knows the challenges of managing digital operations to deliver innovation and a great customer experience in a highly regulated industry better than Funding Circle.

Despite these challenges, Funding Circle has grown at an impressive rate. With over £4.5 billion in loans facilitated to more than 45,000 businesses to date, the company is highly focused on providing the best customer experience. This translates into hiring top engineering talent and working hard to keep them engaged and focused so that they can deliver innovative features while ensuring software quality and performance.

With Fast Growth Comes More Complexity

Currently, Funding Circle has hundreds of engineers dispersed throughout the U.K., U.S., and Germany, and expects to expand its global engineering function by another 30 percent in 2018 alone. But with that growth comes more complexity—the larger the teams, the more challenging it becomes to coordinate resources and schedules. For Funding Circle, ensuring consistent quality for rapid product releases and sharing knowledge, accountability, and ownership of code across teams require the ability to scale and automate as much as possible.

In addition to providing application infrastructure, Funding Circle’s Agile-centric engineering division is responsible for ensuring platform availability, with an eye on achieving 99.8 percent uptime (which translates to only about 17 seconds of planned downtime daily).

To meet this goal, Funding Circle implemented PagerDuty. Today, the company has roughly 33 engineering teams as well as non-technical personnel using the PagerDuty platform.

Measuring Performance and Leveraging Real-Time Visibility

As part of Funding Circle’s focus on delivering a great customer experience, understanding how its software is performing is critical. The company uses PagerDuty to look at key performance metrics (KPIs) from both a development point of view (which includes the number of failed deployments and mean time to resolution) and business point of view (which includes overall uptime and number of incidents per quarter)—and then automates the reporting of those numbers to its board of directors and other key stakeholders.

Automation was a simple task: Funding Circle easily integrated the monitoring tools for its applications and infrastructure with PagerDuty, enabling the company to leverage PagerDuty’s reporting and analytics to track overall operational performance with accuracy and clarity. The engineering teams can now focus on improving code quality so that they can respond faster when potential issues arise.

“Leveraging metrics within PagerDuty to accurately capture and report KPIs is a key way to establish whether we’re actually improving as a business,” shared Whyte. “We move incredibly quickly here and PagerDuty helps us clarify and balance many different priorities.”

“PagerDuty is the industry standard for every company I’ve ever worked in.”

– Paul Whyte, Engineering Manager, Funding Circle UK

Reducing Burnout and Increasing Retention

Funding Circle traditionally struggled to create accurate schedules for its global workforce. By applying PagerDuty’s easy-to-use escalation and scheduling features, the company can now quickly identify and contact the right people when an incident occurs. “People were being woken up at two or three o’clock in the morning,” Whyte shared. “By implementing PagerDuty and follow-the-sun on-call scheduling, those middle-of-the-night phone calls stopped practically overnight.”

“PagerDuty has significantly improved our performance in dealing with incidents, and faster fixes mean we have happier customers,” he added.

As successful as the PagerDuty deployment has been, Funding Circle has only scratched the surface of the platform’s functionality. The company plans to explore new visibility and incident management features, as well as PagerDuty’s integration with Slack.

To learn more about how PagerDuty is helping FinTech companies with digital operations management both in the U.S. and abroad, visit www.pagerduty.com for more information.