Truelayer is a data and payment startup focused on open banking, allowing companies to securely pull financial data from one source into another and allowing the initiation of payments over the open banking infrastructure.
Founded in 2016, they already have offices in the UK, Europe and Australia and a 200 strong product engineering team developing its platform and APIs.
With a rapidly expanding team, and operating in a highly regulated industry across two different financial jurisdictions, having clear processes and communication when things go wrong is essential.
The challenge
Before using incident.io TrueLayer handled incidents manually in Slack and Jira. Despite having some basic Slack bot automations in place, the process still felt incoherent and inconsistent. A large amount of manual effort was required to make sure that incidents were managed and followed-up on effectively - this was time consuming and ineffective.
I don't think I'm bringing much value to the company if I'm chasing engineers to fill in a postmortem document. That's really a huge waste of time.
What were they looking for in an incident management tool?
- A solution that is easy to adopt and implement
- Something to minimise the cognitive load of running an incident process
- A way to automate incident response, to enable a consistent approach
The solution
Creating a transparent and consistent process
incident.io standardises and automates the way the incidents are created and run. Truelayer found that this significantly reduced the level of admin required of people responding to incidents. The intuitive nature of the tool also made it very easy to adopt widely and rapidly through the organization. As a result, Truelayer has seen increased consistency and transparency in its incident management process
People are inherently going to take the path of least resistance, but if you can provide tooling that enables them to easily follow process, they're going to follow the process. incident.io brings delight for engineers because they hate managing these processes, and it just makes it easy for them.
Improved communications
Ensuring that the right people have access to the right information at the right time is always challenging in the heat of an incident. This is something that Truelayer has found significantly easier to get right by using incident.io. The team found that the incident channel and dashboard provide stakeholders the awareness they need on the status of any incident, while workflow automations enable them to escalate to the appropriate team members.
The fact that the channel is there means that more conversations happen publicly. More people are aware when incidents happen. We've also got automations set up to do things like page execs on every P1.
