gohenry: Fulfilling a mission to make every child good with money
About gohenry
gohenry is the next-gen family money app that helps children learn how to earn, save, spend, and give. It’s Europe’s ninth fastest-growing financial service brand (FT1000, 2020), and one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech businesses (Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100).
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About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology™ is the multi-cloud solutions expert across applications, data, and security.
gohenry's prepaid Visa debit card and app empowers young people to learn about money with accounts ready to make payments whenever, wherever they’re needed, with scalable Google Cloud infrastructure.
Google Cloud results
- Supports a 24/7 family banking app for 1,000,000+ customers across the US and UK
- Helps keep customers’ financial data confidential with granular access settings on Cloud Identity and Identity and Access Management
- Helps customers find what they really need by acting on customer experience insights gained through Cloud Composer
- Enables customers to enjoy a fast application with multiple data centers available closer to them, lowering latency times
Doubles client base in two years to 1 million customers
Giving bank cards to six-year-old children was a startling idea when gohenry launched in 2012. “It was unheard of,” says Jeff Faubel, CTO at the UK company. “But we created a whole new category of service. gohenry is a way for parents to educate their children about money and responsibility that goes beyond a small allowance or earning money for chores. With an account, kids from six to 18-years old can save for something special, store the money they earn through tasks set by their parents, control their own spending, and even make donations to charity.”
That range of services has made gohenry a market leader in a competitive field, used by more than one million parents and children in the UK and US. “We created a new category in the finance space when we launched in 2012. We've since attracted record-breaking crowdfunding rounds and doubled our customer base in the last two years,” says Jeff, referring to a 2016 crowdfunding initiative, where gohenry broke records for the largest equity crowdfunding in the world on Crowdcube. The company raised £4 million during the initiative, of which more than £1 million came from its own customers.
“If a child forgets their packed lunch or needs to access money securely on a school trip abroad, they can use gohenry to easily buy something at their school canteen or on their trip, with no FX fees. As we scale, our Google Cloud infrastructure makes that constant availability possible.”
—Jeff Faubel, CTO, gohenryTo make such growth possible, gohenry needed infrastructure that would scale fast, without compromising on security, so that children and their parents could access their accounts and make payments at any time, from anywhere. That’s why gohenry worked with Google Cloud Premier Partner Rackspace Technology™ to migrate to a microservices architecture on Google Cloud.
“Our services need to run 24/7,” says Jeff. “If a child forgets their packed lunch or needs to access money securely on a school trip abroad, they can use gohenry to easily buy something at their school canteen or on their trip, with no FX fees. As we scale, our Google Cloud infrastructure makes that constant availability possible.”
Making customer accounts available 24/7
In the banking world, account holders expect to have access to their money and account status at any time, so card providers need to provide sufficient server capacity around the clock. But account holders aren’t accessing their accounts all the time; there are peaks and troughs in demand. At gohenry, automated pocket money payments are typically made early in the morning, often at the beginning or end of a week, leading to large spikes in activity. Meeting those peaks in demand means either over-supplying servers, which will stand idle for most of the time, or building an infrastructure ready to scale up and down at speed.
“When we started out, we just had a couple of servers,” says Jeff. “As things picked up, we wanted more security, more computing power. We didn’t have a DevOps team, so we wanted a company that could support us 24/7. We moved to a cloud provider in 2015, and that worked well for a while, but our growth kept accelerating, and we needed to add extra servers every month. So we decided to build something that would scale, however much we grew.”
The gohenry team compared public cloud providers and made the decision to go with Google Cloud. “We were particularly impressed that the Google Cloud team really listened to our requirements and drilled down into what we wanted to do,” says Jeff. “More than selling services to us, the team really wanted to be part of the journey and to help architect the solution. That remains the case three years on from the migration. If we want advice, we let our account manager know, and we’re put in touch with someone who can discuss things in depth.”
“With Google’s operations tools, we can really understand what’s happening in our infrastructure and applications. We can anticipate and prevent outages ahead of time, and when we do a release of new code, close monitoring makes us confident that we will detect instabilities before they cause problems.”
—Frédéric Abrioux, Development and Program Manager, gohenryRackspace Technology supported gohenry throughout the migration to ensure a smooth journey from the private cloud environment to public cloud. Because Rackspace Technology hosted gohenry’s infrastructure since 2016, the two teams were able to quickly transition gohenry’s services onto Google Cloud over the course of a few months.
With support from Rackspace Technology, gohenry developed a microservices architecture based on Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud SQL. “Thanks to replication and failover capacity, the combination of Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud SQL brings strong scalability and resilience to our infrastructure,” says Frédéric Abrioux, Development and Program Manager at gohenry. And with the infrastructure coded into Terraform, gohenry is ready to deploy its solution on new servers at any time, whether expanding into new regions, or as part of disaster recovery.
“Now, if our services need more power, a new server will be created automatically,” says Frédéric. “Because we know we can rely on auto-scaling, we don't have to be close to our infrastructure all the time. When we need capacity, Google Cloud will provide it automatically.” And with accessible, real-time monitoring tools, gohenry combines that hands-off approach with detailed insights into the running of the infrastructure.
“With Google’s operations tools, we can really understand what’s happening in our infrastructure and applications,” says Frédéric. “We can anticipate and prevent outages ahead of time, and when we do a release of new code, close monitoring makes us confident that we will detect instabilities before they cause problems.”
Enhancing security for children’s data and financial information
Security is topmost in the minds of anybody working in fintech and, for companies that work with children, keeping data safe is even more important. “We feel that Google Cloud is designed to provide security throughout the platform,” says Jeff. “That runs all the way from security in deploying and managing services, to the security of data storage and security in the communications between services and customers. We know that data in the database is encrypted and Google Cloud is PCI compliant, which is essential for passing along payment information.”
As Google Workspace users, the gohenry team benefits from a unified system of access management. “We protect our back office system and our test environment through Cloud Identity and Access Management,” says Jeff. “The way that links up with Google Workspace is very, very useful for us, because we can control access to all of our systems at the click of a button.”
“Our back office system is a web app,” adds Frédéric. “We can use the Google credential of each employee to access it, with two-factor authentication. We can choose who will have access to the databases. It's really granular. It’s one identity and access management solution for mail and documents and infrastructure. It's really, really convenient for setting up new employees and controlling data security when teams change.”
Improving the quality of services with customer data
As the company’s customer base grows, it produces an ever-increasing quantity of customer data, which gohenry uses to make insights into behavior and develop new functionalities. “You might think that the amount of data we produce is proportional to the number of users, but it’s more of an exponential relationship,” says Frédéric. “As account holders get older, they use more features and make more transactions. We’re modernizing our data infrastructure to make the best use of that information and ensure that our services exceed the needs of our young customers and their parents.”
To gain the insights that help it to serve customers better, gohenry relies on a combination of Cloud Composer, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. “Our goal is to empower our employees to understand our customers better through data. By making insights broader and more accessible, we’re giving our team the opportunity to make a difference in every customer’s experience."
“We don't want to stop at a million customers; we want to grow to the next million, and the next. With Google Cloud, we’re confident that we can scale alongside our architecture. We’re well ahead of our business needs, and that’s a promising sign for our future.”
—Jeff Faubel, CTO, gohenryEnsuring availability for customers with architecture that stays ahead of growth
Since migrating 99% of its services to Google Cloud, gohenry has grown fast. Not only did the company double its customer base between 2018 and 2020, it sharply increased its revenue year-on-year with the latest reports showing an annual turnover of £13 million in 2019 as families increasingly look to cashless solutions to help children become skilled in money management. Building on this success, gohenry continues to focus its efforts on growing the brand in the US, where it launched at the end of 2018. The company also plans to expand its offering, with the launch of new products including a card for teenagers. “We’ve had such a positive experience from our UK customers, young and old,” shares Jeff, “but there’s plenty more work to be done.”
By migrating to Google Cloud, with support from Rackspace Technology, gohenry has gained the flexibility and security it needed for its ambitious growth plans in an increasingly cashless society. The company is also safeguarding that growth by optimizing its costs in the cloud.
Rackspace Technology continues to provide gohenry with 24-hour support, seven days a week. Monitoring its infrastructure and services, the team ensures that gohenry can provide its customers with around-the-clock availability.
“The real achievement here is that we don’t need to do anything else to prepare our business for growth,” he adds. “We’re automatically growth-ready in the cloud.” With scalable, reliable microservices architecture, gohenry is all set to provide peace of mind to even more parents and make sure that children get the most out of their first experience with using money in the digital world.
“We don't want to stop at a million customers; we want to grow to the next million, and the next,” says Jeff. “With Google Cloud, we’re confident that we can scale alongside our architecture. We’re well ahead of our business needs, and that’s a promising sign for our future.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About gohenry
gohenry is the next-gen family money app that helps children learn how to earn, save, spend, and give. It’s Europe’s ninth fastest-growing financial service brand (FT1000, 2020), and one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech businesses (Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100).
About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology™ is the multi-cloud solutions expert across applications, data, and security.