How Current leveraged Spanner to build a resilient platform for banking services
Trevor Marshall
CTO and co-founder, Current
Editor’s note: In the heart of the fintech revolution, Current is on a mission to transform the financial landscape for millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Founded on the belief that everyone deserves access to modern financial tools, Current is redefining what it means to be a financial institution in the digital age. Central to their success is a cloud-native infrastructure built on Google Cloud, with Spanner, Google's globally distributed database with virtually unlimited scale, serving as the bedrock of their core platform.
More than 100 million Americans struggle to make ends meet, including the 23% of low-income Americans the Federal Reserve estimates do not have a bank account. Current was created to address their needs with a unique business model focused on payments, rather than the deposits and withdrawals of traditional financial institutions. We offer an easily accessible experience designed to make financial services available to all Americans, regardless of age or income.
Our innovative approach — built on proprietary banking core technology with minimal reliance on third-party providers — enables us to rapidly deploy financial solutions tailored to our members' immediate needs. More importantly, these solutions are flexible enough to evolve alongside them in the future.
In our mission to deliver an exceptional experience, one of the biggest challenges we faced was creating a scalable and robust technological foundation for our financial services. To address this, we developed a modern core banking system to power our platform. Central to this core is our user graph service, which manages all member entities — such as users, products, wallets, and gateways.
Many unbanked and disadvantaged Americans lack bank accounts due to a lack of trust in institutions as much as because of any lack of funds. If we were going to win their trust and business, we knew we had to have a secure, seamless, and reliable service.
A cloud-native core with Spanner
Our previous self-hosted graph database solution lacked cloud-native capabilities and horizontal scalability. To address these limitations, we strategically transitioned to managed persistence layers, which significantly improves our risk posture. Features like point-in-time restore and multi-regional redundancy enhanced our resilience, reduced recovery time objectives (RTO) and improved recovery point objectives (RPO). Additionally, push-button scaling optimized our cloud budget and operational efficiency.
This cloud-native platform necessitated a database solution with consistent writes, horizontal scalability, low read latency under load, and multi-region failover. Given our extensive use of Google Cloud, we prioritized its database offerings. Spanner emerged as the ideal solution, fulfilling all our requirements. It offers consistent writes, horizontal scalability, and the ability to maintain low read latency even under heavy load. Its seamless scalability — particularly the decoupling of compute and storage resources — proved invaluable in adapting to our dynamic consumer environment.
This robust and scalable infrastructure empowers Current to deliver reliable and efficient financial services, critical for building and maintaining member trust. We are the primary financial relationship for millions of Americans who are trusting us with their money week after week.Our experience migrating from a third-party database to Spanner proved that transitioning to a globally scalable, highly available database can be easy and seamless. Spanner's unique ability to scale compute and storage independently proved invaluable in managing our dynamic user base.
Our strategic migration to Spanner employed a write-ahead commit log to ensure a seamless transition. By prioritizing the migration of reads and verifying their accuracy before shifting writes, we minimized risk and maximized efficiency. This process resulted in a zero-downtime, zero-loss cutover, where we could first transition reads to Spanner on a service-by-service basis, confirm accuracy, and finally migrate writes.
Ultimately, our Spanner-powered user graph service delivered the consistency, reliability, and scalability essential for our financial platform. We had renewed confidence in our ability to serve our millions of customers with reliable service and new abilities to scale our existing services and future offerings.
Unwavering Reliability and Enhanced Operational Efficiency
Spanner has dramatically improved our resilience, reducing RTO and RPO by more than 10x, cutting times to just one hour. With Spanner's streamlined data restoration process, we can now recover data with a few simple clicks. Offloading operational management has also significantly decreased our team's maintenance burden. With nearly 5,000 transactions per second, we continue to be impressed by Spanner's performance and scalability.
Additionally, since migrating to Spanner, we have reduced our availability-related incidents to zero. Such incidents could disrupt essential banking functions like accessing funds or making payments, leading to customer dissatisfaction and potential churn, as well as increased operational costs for issue resolution. Elimination of these occurrences is critical for building and maintaining member trust, enhancing retention, and improving the developer experience.
Building Financial Resilience with Google Cloud
Looking ahead, we envision a future where our platform continues to evolve, delivering innovative financial solutions that meet the ever-changing needs of our members. With Spanner as the foundation of our core platform — you could call it the core of cores — we are confident in building a resilient and reliable platform that enables millions of more Americans to improve their financial outcomes.
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